All Robert Reich

The economy added only 120,000 jobs in March – down from the rate of more than 200,000 in each of the preceding three months. It’s way too early to conclude the jobs recovery is stalling, but there’s reason for concern.

As voters, we can let rich private equity managers take over the electoral process and further the inequality gap. Or we can do something about it.

President Obama kicked off his 2012 campaign with a hard-hitting speech centered on the House Republicans’ budget plan. We are likely to hear a lot more about social Darwinism in the months ahead.

Organized gambling is a scam. And it particularly preys upon people with lower incomes – who assume they can’t make it big any other way, who often find it hardest to assess the odds, and whose families can least afford to lose the money. Yet with new, relaxed gambling laws, America is now opening the floodgates.

For the richest Americans, the recovery is in full swing. But everyone else is losing ground.

According to the Dallas Federal Reserve, one of the nation's most conservative regional banks, taxpayers will be on the hook for another giant Wall Street bailout, and the economy won’t be mended, unless the nation’s biggest banks are broken up.

If the Supreme Court decides the individual health-care mandate is unconstitutional, Obama's plans for reform begin to unravel. But with a little political maneuvering, he can turn such a defeat into a victory.

Throughout his political career, Mitt Romney has relied on the ability to ignore past platforms and start fresh from campaign to campaign. But in the video age, the past is harder to erase.

The real contrast in Paul Ryan's budget is over what the plan does for the rich and what it does to everyone else. It reduces the top individual and corporate tax rates to 25 percent. This would give the wealthiest Americans an average tax cut of at least $150,000 a year. The money would come out of programs for the elderly, lower-middle families, and the poor.

When Republicans have nothing else to attack, they call for a tax cut. And it works.

Gas prices are rising not because of increased demand but because Wall Street is betting on higher gas prices.

The real threat to American morality is what's happening in corporate board rooms, not people's private lives.

The wealth gap in America is widening, and a surtax on the super rich would slow it from widening into a chasm.

Jobs are coming back fast enough to blunt Republican attacks against Obama on the economy and to rob Romney of the issue he’d prefer to be talking about in his primary battle against social conservatives in the GOP. But are jobs growing fast enough?

The good news is that the American economic pie is growing again. The bad news is that the share of growth going to American workers is at a record low, and that's bad news for everybody. 

America is  making it harder and harder for young people of modest means to attend college. But affordable public higher education is essential to preserving the middle class.

Job growth and spending are showing signs of life, but the biggest continuing problem for most Americans is their homes.

Even if they don't win on Election Day, the fringe right-wingers who have taken over the Repuplican party, will have a deep, negative impact on our government.

The Obama administration is proposing to lower corporate taxes from the current 35 percent to 28 percent for most companies and to 25 percent for manufacturers.  But American companies are booking higher profits than ever.

A handful of billionaires are all but funding the GOP primaries. Never before have so few spent so much to influence so many.