Thanks to the Federal Reserve’s zero interest rates and quantitative easing policies, borrowing costs are near generational lows. The costs of funding the repair and renovation of America’s decaying infrastructure are as cheap as they have been since World War II.
But the era of cheap credit may be nearing its end. And thanks to a dysfunctional Washington, D.C., we are on the verge of missing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
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That leaves Uncle Sam, along with the states and municipalities, as the odd men out of the debt refinancing boom. Rather than waiting for bridges to collapse to do expensive emergency repairs, we should proactively be upgrading and improving the rest of our infrastructure. We should be refinancing whatever debt we can while rates are still low.
What can we do as a nation to take advantage of these interest rates before they return to normal? Choose your favorite part of America that can be upgraded:...
...During the strong labor market of the mid-1990s, only 1 in 5 minimum-wage workers was still earning minimum wage a year later.1 Today, that number is nearly 1 in 3, according to my analysis of government survey data.2 There has been a similar rise in the number of people staying in minimum-wage jobs for three years or longer. (For a more detailed explanation of how I conducted this analysis, see the footnote below.)3
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Kemp is representative of the changing minimum-wage workforce in another way as well: At 44 years old, he is one of a growing number of middle-aged minimum-wage workers. Nearly a quarter of the 3.2 million minimum-wage workers in 2014 were over 40; half were 25 or older, up from about 40 percent two decades earlier.7 The face of the minimum wage has changed significantly in recent decades. As a group, today’s minimum-wage workers are far more educated than in the 1980s or 1990s. They are also more likely to be men and more likely to have children. More than half of low-wage workers — significantly more than in past decades — are trying to support themselves, not living with their parents or supplementing a spouse’s income.
ID checks were a common response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, but they'll soon be obsolete. You won't have to show your ID, because you'll be identified automatically. A security camera will capture your face, and it'll be matched with your name and a whole lot of other information besides. Welcome to the world of automatic facial recognition. Those who have access to databases of identified photos will have the power to identify us. Yes, it'll enable some amazing personalized services; but it'll also enable whole new levels of surveillance. The underlying technologies are being developed today, and there are currently no rules limiting their use.
Walk into a store, and the salesclerks will know your name. The store's cameras and computers will have figured out your identity, and looked you up in both their store database and a commercial marketing database they've subscribed to. They'll know your name, salary, interests, what sort of sales pitches you're most vulnerable to, and how profitable a customer you are. Maybe they'll have read a profile based on your tweets and know what sort of mood you're in. Maybe they'll know your political affiliation or sexual identity, both predictable by your social media activity. And they're going to engage with you accordingly, perhaps by making sure you're well taken care of or possibly by trying to make you so uncomfortable that you'll leave.
Walk by a policeman, and she will know your name, address, criminal record, and with whom you routinely are seen. The potential for discrimination is enormous, especially in low-income communities where people are routinely harassed for things like unpaid parking tickets and other minor violations. And in a country where people are arrested for their political views, the use of this technology quickly turns into a nightmare scenario.
...We see far too few women at the top, yes, but we also see far too many women at the bottom. The statistics are equally jarring in both directions. Women hold less than 15 per cent of executive officer positions in Fortune 500 companies and 62 per cent of minimum-wage jobs. As a result, one in three adult women is living in poverty or just on the edge of poverty. For single mothers, the picture is particularly bleak. Almost two-thirds of them are working in dead-end, poorly compensated jobs without flexibility or benefits.
In looking at the stark facts of women at the top and at the bottom, a common pattern in their seemingly disparate experiences begins to emerge. The key to that pattern lies in two complementary human drives: competition, the impulse to pursue our self-interest in a world in which others are pursuing theirs, and care, the impulse to put others first.
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Yet if they are two equally valuable and necessary human drives, it is no more justifiable to value the production of income over the provision of care than it is to value white over black, straight over gay, or men over women. Competition produces money. But care produces people.
...On October 5th Mr Brown signed the bill—a strong expression of his support, since for it to pass into law the minimum that he needed to do was to decline to veto it. Next year California will thus join Oregon, Vermont, Washington and Montana in allowing doctors, with appropriate safeguards, to prescribe lethal drugs that terminally ill patients can use to end their own lives, if they so choose.
Even as anti-obesity campaigners like Mr. Nutter have failed to pass taxes, they have accomplished something larger. In the course of the fight, they have reminded people that soda is not a very healthy product. They have echoed similar messages coming from public health researchers and others — and fundamentally changed the way Americans think about soda.
Over the last 20 years, sales of full-calorie soda in the United States have plummeted by more than 25 percent. Soda consumption, which rocketed from the 1960s through 1990s, is now experiencing a serious and sustained decline.
This doesn't mean that the TPP can't have an impact. It will lock in a regulatory structure, the exact parameters of which are yet to be seen. We do know that the folks at the table came from places like General Electric and Monsanto, not the AFL-CIO and the Sierra Club. We also know that it will mean paying more for drugs and other patent and copyright protected material (forms of protection, whose negative impact is never included in growth projections), but we don't yet know how much.
We also know that the Obama administration gave up an opportunity to include currency rules. This means that the trade deficit is likely to persist long into the future. This deficit has been a persistent source of gap in demand, leading to millions of lost jobs. We filled this demand in the 1990s with the stock bubble and in the last decade with the housing bubble. It seems the latest plan from the Fed is that we simply won't fill the gap in this decade.
This is a big deal, because it directly affects all the large American Internet companies. If this stands, expect much more pressure on the NSA to stop their indiscriminate spying on everyone.
