Rethinking the Economy

One of the questions I’ve been struggling with is, who do I want to talk to? When I’m putting together my framework, who’s the audience I want to imagine?
It’s tempting to spend my time banging heads with Professional Right – Raging Republicans and Democratic “deficit hawks” who only seem to get excited about actually doing [...]

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For seniors looking for an alternative to nursing homes, a fresh new take on the “granny flat”: MedCottage.
it’s basically a mini mobile home that rents for about $2,000 a month. You park one in the backyard, hook it up to your water and electricity, and it becomes a free-standing spare room for [...]

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I’m taking this week off — to rest my hands and my brain, and to get some relief from the soup-like humidity of DC’s dog days of August. See ya next week!

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This is what happens when you don’t read those pesky messaging memos. From Center for American Progress’ Wonk Room:
In his interview with the Wonk Room, [American Petroleum Institute Chief Economist] Felmy recognized that the [Center for American Progress] report concluded that you would get four times as many clean energy jobs as oil jobs [...]

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On the heels of San Francisco’s new parking meters that automatically adjust parking rates based on up-to-the-minute market supply & demand, Tyler Cowen wrote a nice NYT piece on the problems with the fact that here in the US of A, Big Government regulations mandate that real estate developers create lots [...]

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An exchange a few weeks ago between Kevin Drum and Matt Yglesias got me thinking about a trap many liberals fall into when talking about the economy.
Kevin was arguing we need to stop a nasty practice businesses are increasingly using whem hiring — using folks’ credit scores as part of screening them. Matt [...]

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Corporate America has been complaining that Obama is antibusiness and that because they don’t know what evil, job killing plans he’s going to unleash next, the economy isn’t reviving because of this “uncertainty.” Stan Collender blows away this silly argument:
The more you hear about the business community being worried about the future because it [...]

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[Here's one last framework brain dump. I think I've gotten as far as I can for now, so I'm going to let this simmer on a back burner for a while.]
Right now, the economy isn’t working for most of us. It isn’t surprising, because right now our society is shaping our economy [...]

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This week, the Livable Communities Act, designed to help support and coordinate efforts to encourage walkable development and other smart growth initiatives — passed the Senate Banking Committee, one small but important step on the way to passage. According to DC Streets Blog, seniors are a driving force behind the bill:
Some of the [...]

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A few weeks ago, BusinessWeek ran a piece by Intel founder Andy Grove about how to create more jobs in the US. I held off reading it; I wasn’t interested in another diatribe about how we need to cut taxes on big business, create more “labor flexibility” by destroying unions, and general give Corporate [...]

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