The Atlantic's Derek Thompson explains it in four terse sentences: Europe has Greece. We have Mississippi. Europe uses the term "permanent bailouts." We call it "Medicaid." And he illustrates the point with a map from the Economist: Thompson again: [T]he poorest states like Mississippi, New Mexico, and West Virginia rely on ginormous transfers of federal taxes in the form of unemployment benefits and Medicaid. Like the United States, the euro zone is all on one currency. Unlike the United States, the euro zone collects a teensy share of total taxes at the EU level and has no legacy of permanent fiscal transfers from the...

26 June, 2012

In Who Killed American Unions, on the Atlantic's website, Derek Thompson speculates about a connection between technological change and the rise and fall of union membership, which has shrunk to just 12 percent of the US workforce. I was struck by this graph, comparing the rate of union membership with the middle class share of aggregare income: Writes Thompson: The apogee of the unions was also the apogee of the middle class, when it commanded more than half of total income. As the union membership rate dropped, middle class share of income fell, too....

09 June, 2012