All Robert Reich

Americans are starting to feel the pain from the sequester's $85 billion in federal spending cuts between March and September 30, Reich writes. They just don’t know it yet.

Companies won’t hire if consumers aren’t buying enough to justify the new hires, Reich writes. And consumers don’t have enough money, or credit, or confidence to buy enough.

Using a chained consumer price index to adjust Social Security benefits for inflation would make it even harder for seniors to keep up with the cost of health care. So why are Democrats proposing it? 

Immigration reform is part of organized labor's long-term strategy, Reich writes.

Why are politicians so sensitive to public opinion on equal marriage rights, immigration, and guns – Reich asks – and so tone deaf to what most Americans want on the economy?

Social Security and Medicare are the most popular programs ever devised by the federal government, Reich writes. If average Americans have trusted the Democrats to do one thing it has been to guard these programs from the depredations of the GOP. 

The biggest economic problems we face are unemployment, stagnant wages, slow growth, and widening inequality, Reich writes, not deficits.

The White House’s and the Democrat’s continuing failure to reshape that debate has lead directly and logically to Paul Ryan’s budget plan this week, Reich writes, which is a more regressive version of the same plan American voters resoundingly rejected last November. 

Reich offers four reasons why the stock market is doing so well, while most Americans are doing so poorly.

With the sequester enacted, President Barack Obama must reframe the public debate around the future of the country and the investments we must make together in that future, rather than austerity economics, Reich writes.

The austerity economics on which we’ve embarked is a cruel hoax – Reich writes – cruel because it hurts those who are already hurt the most; a hoax because it doesn’t work.

President Obama must demonstrate why the Republicans’ austerity economics and trickle-down economics are dangerous, bald-faced lies, Reich writes.

It used to be that when consumers spent less, government stepped into the breach and spent more in order to keep people employed, Reich writes. No longer is that the case, he adds.

One logical way to help deal with the crisis of funding Social Security and Medicare is to have more workers per retiree, Reich writes, and the simplest way to do that is to allow more immigrants into the United States. 

Gun control, healthcare, and countless other issues inevitably require us to define what we mean by a decent society, Reich writes.

The Republican’s biggest economic lie is that the budget deficit is, in Sen. Mitch McConnell's words, “the transcendent issue of our time,” Reich writes. The transcendent issue is jobs and wages, he adds.

A rational federal budget would allow additional borrowing for public investments whenever the expected return on those investments is higher than the cost of the borrowing.

President Obama's State of the Union address should center on the joblessness, falling real wages, economic insecurity, and widening inequality that continue to dog the nation, Reich writes.

Right now the central challenge is to reignite the economy, Reich writes, getting jobs back, improving wages, and restoring growth. 

Immigration is just one part of the conversation over US citizenship, Reich writes. The immigration debate is also a question of who we want to join us.