Dave Johnson at the Campaign for America's Future does a good job explaining "fast track" trade promotion authority. "With fast track Congress agrees to give up much of its constitutional duty to define negotiating objectives, carefully deliberate and debate, and fix problems that might turn up," and fast-track also ensures that Congress would have to endure "the enormous pressure of the media blasting, 'surely they won’t just kill the whole thing over a few problems.'" He also explains pro-"free" traders' rationale behind fast-track: "The idea is that allowing Congress (democratic government) to 'meddle' will get in the way and keep other (non-democratic) countries from 'making their best offers.'" If it seems to you that a vigorous Congress, not a hamstrung one, is the only thing that would ensure "best offers," you're far from alone.
The Labor Center at UC-Berkeley reports that low wages for working families cost the public over $150 billion annually in public assistance. That's state, local, and federal money combined, of course, and they define "working families" as any family with someone working 10 hours a week more than half the year, but don't call such folks lazy -- if corporations would get off those trillions of dollars they're sitting on and start hiring like the bold entrepreneurs they always say they are, those families work more. And, as the Labor Center succinctly puts it, "(w)hen jobs don’t pay enough, workers turn to public assistance in order to meet their basic needs."
Michael Whitney writes about the growing phenomenon: the political fundraising email pitch that uses the language debt collectors use, like "final notice," "imminent cancelation," and even "payment past due" (that email's text actually referred to banksters being "past due" for what they owe America). Odd that Democrats seem to have come up with it first, and Republicans are only aping them. Anyway, it all sounds like something out of a dystopian novel, and with the vast majority of Americans fearing being foreclosed upon or having property repossessed for some debt or other, I suspect the problem will only get worse.
Some folks will scoff at this notion, but the Center for Effective Government instructs us that IRS budget cuts hurt the middle class. IRS agents do things, you know, like collect taxes from scofflaws, and those taxes pay for things that benefit us all. And anyway, the folks who scoff at such things? Well, haters gonna hate.
Bloomberg asks, "Can Rubio Make Helping the Middle Class a Republican Issue?" Short answer: not if Mr. Rubio's ideas come from the same pile of dung every other Republican economic idea has come from for as long as I can remember. I mean, block grants? Does he think we're all two years old?
Finally, the founder of the credit card-processing corporation Gravity Payments just hiked his employees' minimum wage to $70,000 a year. I bet they're swamped with applications at the moment! Mr. Price will cut his own salary from $1 million to $70,000 and -- are you listening, every big corporation in the world? -- will dedicate over 75% of his corporation's profits to raising his employees' pay. He's gambling that he can give himself a raise again if business gets even better -- which, with happier employees, I presume it will.
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