Posts tagged “Money”

Full employment

After years of hibernation, will the US economy rouse itself for a big comeback over the next couple of years? With an incoming Republican administration hellbent on reflating an economy already near full employment, and with promised trade restrictions driving up the price of import-competing goods, and with central-bank independence likely to come under attack, higher inflation […]

What’s a grad student worth?

I have a post up today on Tenure, She Wrote about structural financial barriers in academia for chronically ill graduate students. If a worker is less productive, should they be paid less? This is not an abstract question for me. As a sick graduate student, I take longer to produce academic products like papers and […]

Retirement: probably not going to happen

Retirement calculators suggest I need to be saving 75% of my current annual income to be prepared for retirement. That’s not remotely possible at my income level. A minimum wage worker with full time hours in my situation would need to save 42% of their income. Someone making the living wage for my area would […]

Freebies

What if instead of burning 4 to 6 trillion dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we’d given every poor person in America $85,000 – 128,000? Or every person period $12,000 – 18,000? Or added 4-7 years of funding to the Social Security pool? Or paid off everyone’s (non-mortgage) debt? Or gave every homeless person a nice […]

Class jumping

I used to think cheese meant pre-wrapped slices of American cheese. Now I’m torn over whether to have oka or smoked havarti on my veggie sandwich.

More than this

Every August my mother took my siblings and me to the Goodwill for new school clothes. She chose a few pairs of pants for each of us and a new set of church clothes, but we got to pick our own t-shirts. I loved this and could spend hours browsing the racks. It wasn’t the […]