Our government has the tools to address the cost-of-living crisis. It just needs to use the right ones.
It would be irresponsible to create much higher unemployment – and the US economy could be pushed into recession. There is a strong argument for the Fed to take a break from its aggressive monetary-policy tightening.
We need to greatly expand the role of fiscal policy relative to monetary policy and address inflation while also promoting low unemployment, needed new investments, decent wages and a much fairer distribution of income and wealth.
The costs of recession are not simply limited to those workers who lose a job— they're incredibly widespread across the workforce.
New government data show that after the government terminated pandemic relief programs, millions more Americans began struggling to survive.
Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell plans to address sky-high inflation by hiking interest rates — acknowledging that doing so will suppress wages and worker power. It's a response that will force workers to bear the brunt of the inflation crisis.
The rise in inflation has not been driven by anything that looks like an overheating labor market—instead it has been driven by higher corporate profit margins and supply-chain bottlenecks.
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Why are banks no longer lending to each other? Are they afraid that collapse is imminent somewhere in the system, as with the Lehman collapse in 2008?
Thoughts that huge tax cuts to high-income households will offset a downturn in automobile sales, cuts in public spending, rising college tuition or a dismantling of the health sector are irrational. If theFed raises interests rates, it will threaten a more fragile economy than appears at the moment. The drive to be “normal” in a world that is clearly not normal, may put us in danger of a downturn that will be difficult to recover from.
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