Everybody loses

If the North Carolina budget released by the GOP-led House last night were to become law, everyone would suffer.
There’s been no talk about raising revenues. It seems not to matter if people would die in the streets because of these cuts — and be assured, some will.

If you are or want to be in the middl...

For most people the “American Dream” is to be in the middle class, or to raise yourself up to be in the middle class. And people used to expect that things would get better over time for all of us. But today more people are going the other way. Many people are finding it harder just to get by and stay even, and expect that things will get even worse for their kids. This is because more and more and more of the income is going to few and fewer and fewer people. This is called income inequality and it affects almost all of us in a bad way. Budget cuts just make this worse.

You have probably heard that the middle class is the engine that drives our economy. We have a consumer economy, so when more regular, middle-class people have more money to spend it is better. The money circulates to the businesses and manufacturers that provide the jobs that keep things going. So the country needs a strong middle class or things start to fall apart.

No decency

I was as the Summit on Jobs & America’s Future Thursday, so I didn’t get to hear Rep. Keith Ellison’s testimony at Rep. Peter King’s hearing on “Islamic radicalization.” Instead, I heard Ellison speak eloquently at the summit about the the “jobs and economic justice tour” of America, which the congressional Progressive Caucus will launch this summer as an alternative to the “so be it” agenda of the GOP.

In the midst of anemic job creation, an unemployment crisis that’s deeper than any one in the media wants to admit, and a jobs deficit of 28 million threatening our economic future, Ellison — along with Rep. George Miller — had to leave Capitol Hill to find people in Washington who were talking about jobs.