Politicians across the country are using heaping doses of the politics of envy to try to arouse the anger of workers. However, their targets are not the corporate CEOs pulling down tens of millions of dollars a year in pay and bonuses. Nor is it the Wall Street crew that got incredibly rich inflating the housing bubble and then took government handouts to stay alive through the bust. The targets of these politicians’ wrath are school teachers, firefighters and other public sector workers.

They are outraged that many of these workers still earn enough to support a middle-class family. Even more outrageous, many of these workers have traditionally defined benefit pensions that assure them of a modicum of comfort in retirement. Having managed to ensure that most workers in the private sector did not benefit much from economic growth over the last three decades, the same upward redistributionist crew is turning their guns on public sector workers.

There are two major deceptions in their story. First, after working to eliminate traditional pensions in the private sector, they now tell us that getting a pension in the form of a guaranteed benefit is hugely more valuable than having the same money placed in a 401(k) type defined contribution account. Second, after shoving stock down everyone’s throat in the bubble years, they now tell us we cannot expect a very good return from investing pension funds in the market.

Starting with the pension story, it is really touching to hear conservatives singing the virtues of defined benefit pensions. They argue that if a state or local government puts $1,000 a year in a defined benefit pension and guarantees the market return for its workers, this is hugely more valuable than if it takes the same $1,000 a year and puts it into a 401(k) type account.

Since most public sector workers still have defined benefit pensions, this is a central part of their story about public sector workers being ...

One of the most pernicious falsehoods you’ll hear during the next seven months of political campaigning is there’s a necessary tradeoff between fairness and economic growth. By this view, if we raise taxes on the wealthy the economy can’t grow as fast.

Wrong. Taxes were far higher on top incomes in the three decades after World War II than they’ve been since. And the distribution of income was far more equal. Yet the American economy grew faster in those years than it’s grown since tax rates on the top were slashed in 1981.

This wasn’t a post-war aberration. Bill Clinton raised taxes on the wealthy in the 1990s, and the economy produced faster job growth and higher wages than it did after George W. Bush slashed taxes on the rich in his first term.

If you need more evidence, consider modern Germany, where taxes on the wealthy are much higher than they are here and the distribution of income is far more equal. But Germany’s average annual growth has been faster than that in the United States.

You see, higher taxes on the wealthy can finance more investments in infrastructure, education, and health care – which are vital to a productive workforce and to the economic prospects of the middle class.

Higher taxes on the wealthy also allow for lower taxes on the middle – potentially restoring enough middle-class purchasing power to keep the economy growing. As we’ve seen in recent years, when disposable income is concentrated at the top, the middle class doesn’t have enough money to boost the economy.

Finally, concentrated wealth can lead to speculative bubbles as the rich in the same limited class of assets – whether gold, dotcoms, or real estate. And when these bubbles pop the entire economy suffers.

What we should have learned over the last half century is that growth doesn’t trickle down from the top. It percolates upward from working people who ...

Slower-than-expected employment growth in March 2012 has brought the halting pace of economic recovery into sharp focus again. Nearly three years since the recession officially ended in June of 2009, 12.7 million people are still out of work and unable to find a job—a figure that rises to 22.8 million if workers who have given up looking but still want to work and those employed part-time because of the poor economy are included. Demand for goods and services has been slow to recover—consumer spending has been hampered by a loss of housing wealth, continued high unemployment, and economic insecurity while government spending has been hamstrung by political infighting in Washington. The job growth that has occurred has been largely concentrated in very low wage occupations. Economic theory—and common sense—tells us that high unemployment will persist until demand picks up. Businesses are not going to increase the pace at which they hire workers until the pace of spending increases.

Despite the obvious employment gap that results from the shortfall in spending, some observers contend that it is a mismatch between the skills of unemployed workers and the skills employers require that is responsible for the continuing high unemployment. Many of the ills of the labor market have been attributed to a supposed hollowing out of the job distribution—to "job polarization." Indeed, the claim that middle-skill/middle-income jobs in the United States are disappearing while jobs at the top and bottom of the occupational ladder are growing has been put forward as the explanation for four decades of wage stagnation for men. Today, the claim that employers have good jobs but can't find workers with the right skills to fill them has gained currency in the popular press. Yet such an imbalance between supply and demand would cause wages to rise in ...

Conservatives have loved hitting the Obama family for their lifestyle, whether they’re criticizing the price of Michelle Obama’s or running with phony stories about her lingerie shopping. So there was something entertaining about seeing National Review criticize President Obama for an act of personal frugality—it turns out the President and his family haven’t owned or leased a car since 2007.

That’s an entirely sensible decision: when you’re famous enough to need Secret Service protection, you’re famous enough not to be driving yourself. And given the level of racist insanity Obama’s candidacy and presidency unleashed, Obama needs protection more than most candidates. If you’re not going to be driving yourself, and you don’t particularly like driving, there’s no particular reason to keep a car you’re not going to use. Obama’s decision is actually in line with a broad trend in America—car ownership fell for the first time ever in 2009, mostly because the economy encouraged people to cut down on redundant cars. But as conservatives look for ways to pin rising gas prices on Obama, it’s not particularly surprising that someone would make a weak attempt to paint Obama as out of touch because he’s following security protocol and making a reasonable financial decision.

Mitt Romney, meanwhile, has been emphasizing his bona fides as a car owner as a way of proving he’s something of a regular Joe—or at least committed to the American auto industry—particularly in advance of the Michigan primary. He attended the Daytona 500 on Sunday, where he was photographed with Lenny Kravitz.

On the campaign ...

“Man has an insatiable longing for justice. In his soul he rebels against a social order which denies it to him and whatever the world he lives in, he accuses either that social order or the entire material universe of injustice . . . And in addition he carries within himself the wish to have what he cannot have — if only in the form of a fairy tale.” 

— Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits (1981)

In the late 1950s, a handful of peaceniks protested mandatory ROTC on a major U.S. university campus by carrying signs and wearing green buttons. Back when The Adventures of Robin Hood was a giant hit on television, most everybody knew that green was Robin Hood’s color and that Robin could not side with the king’s soldiers or future soldiers of any empire. Five decades later, the lead protagonist of a cult favorite American cable ...