Robert Reich

• How a Few Private Health Insurers Are on the Way to Controlling Health Care

  The public option is dead, killed by a handful of senators from small states who are mostly bought off by Big Insurance and Big Pharma or intimidated by these industries' deep pockets and power to run political ads against them. Some might say it's no great loss at this point [...]
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  Posted: December 10, 2009, 6:44am EST
  

• The President's Job's Initiative Doesn't Measure Up

  Barack Obama is trying once again for balance. On the one hand, he wants enough government spending to offset the timid spending of consumers and businesses. Otherwise, the jobs and wage recession could drag on for years. On the other hand, he doesn't want to set off more alarm bells' [...]
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  Posted: December 08, 2009, 8:12am EST
  

• Worrisome Thoughts on the Way to the Jobs Summit

  Most ideas for creating more jobs assume jobs will return when the economy recovers. So the immediate goal is to accelerate the process. A second stimulus would be helpful, especially directed at state governments that are now mounting an anti-stimulus package (tax increases, job cuts, service cuts) of over $200 [...]
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  Posted: December 02, 2009, 9:14am EST
  

• The Housing Crisis and Wall Street Shame

  One out of four homeowners is now under water, owing more on their homes than the homes are worth. Why? The biggest single factor behind the housing crisis is rising unemployment. According to the latest ABC-Washington Post poll, one out of every three Americans has either lost their job or [...]
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  Posted: November 29, 2009, 9:25am EST
  

• Harry Reid, and What Happened to the Public Option

  First there was Medicare for all 300 million of us. But that was a non-starter because private insurers and Big Pharma wouldn't hear of it, and Republicans and "centrists" thought it was too much like what they have up in Canada -- which, by the way, cost Canadians only 10' [...]
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  Posted: November 19, 2009, 7:58am EST
  

• The Great Disconnect Between Stocks and Jobs

  How can the stock market hit new highs at the same time unemployment is hitting new highs? Simple. The market is up because corporate earnings are up. Corporate earnings are up because companies are cutting costs. And the biggest single cost they’re cutting is their payrolls. So they let people [...]
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  Posted: November 18, 2009, 7:42am EST
  

• Obama, China, and Wishful Thinking About American Jobs

  President Obama says he wants to "rebalance" the economic relationship between China and the U.S. as part of his plan to restart the American jobs machine. "We cannot go back," he said in September, "to an era where the Chinese . . . just are selling everything to us, we're'" [...]
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  Posted: November 17, 2009, 7:17am EST
  

• An Open Letter to Harry Reid on Controlling Health Care Costs

  Dear Senator,
  
  I know you're in a tough spot. It would be bad enough if you only had to get Ben Nelson, Evan Bayh, Mary Landrieu, and Blanche Lincoln on board, but anyone who has to kiss Joe Lieberman's derriere deserves a congressional medal of honor.
  
  But [...]
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  Posted: November 13, 2009, 6:16am EST
  

• How Obama Can Convince Congress to Enact a Larger Stimulus, and Why He Must

  The Administration's biggest economic mistake so far was to badly underestimate last January how bad the employment situation would become by Fall. As a result, it low-balled the stimulus -- settling for a plan that, while avoiding even worse job losses, didn't go nearly far enough.
  
  Obama has [...]
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  Posted: November 03, 2009, 4:49pm EST
  

• Health Care Reform is Critically Important, But Getting Americans Back to Work is More So

  Presidents tend to overcompensate for the errors of their predecessors in the same party and in so doing sow seeds of their own mistakes. Bill Clinton wanted above all to avoid Jimmy Carter's fate -- losing re-election because the economy was heading south on Election Day. So Clinton made a' [...]
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  Posted: November 01, 2009, 4:55pm EST
  

• Too Big to Fail: Why The Big Banks Should Be Broken Up, But Why The White House and Congress Don't Want To

  And now there are five -- five Wall Street behemoths, bigger than they were before the Great Meltdown, paying fatter salaries and bonuses to retain their so-called"talent," and raking in huge profits. The biggest difference between now and last October is these biggies didn't know then that they were too' [...]
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  Posted: October 25, 2009, 7:33am EDT
  

• Why Wall Street Reform is Stuck in Reverse

  At a conference in London, a Goldman Sachs international adviser, Brian Griffiths, praised inequality. As his company was putting aside $16.7 billion for compensation and benefits in the first nine months of 2009, up 46 percent from a year earlier, Griffiths told us not to worry. “We have to tolerate [...]
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  Posted: October 21, 2009, 8:03am EDT
  

• Why Obama Has to do What Letterman Did: Refuse to Pay Hush Money

  Last January, as I understand it, the White House promised Big Pharma, big insurance, and the American Medical Association the moral equivalent of what Joel Halderman allegedly demanded of David Letterman: hush money. The groups agreed to stay silent or even be supportive of healthcare reform, as long as they [...]
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  Posted: October 18, 2009, 7:37am EDT
  

• More Desperation from the Right

  Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity, Rush, and the right-wing blogosphere seem interested in a talk I gave in September, 2007 to students in a political science class here at Berkeley, in which I played the role of a presidential candidate so politically incorrect and tone-deaf as to pummel every sacred cow [...]

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  Posted: October 15, 2009, 10:01pm EDT
  

• Why the Dow Broke 10,000, and Why You Should Still Watch Your Wallet

  How did the Dow break 10,000 when the rest of the economy is in the toilet?
  
  1. Corporate earnings are up -- mainly because companies have been cutting costs. Payrolls comprise 70 percent of most companies' costs, which means companies have been slashing jobs. In the end, this is' [...]
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  Posted: October 14, 2009, 5:21pm EDT
  

• The Audacity of Greed: How Private Health Insurers Just Blew Their Cover

  The health-insurance industry has finally revealed itself for what it is.
  
  Background: The industry hates the idea that's emerged from the Senate Finance Committee of lowering penalties on younger and healthier people who don't buy insurance. Relying on an analysis by PricewaterhouseCoopers, insurers say this means new enrollees will [...]
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  Posted: October 12, 2009, 8:24pm EDT
  

• Empty Hands on the Climate, and What Obama Needs to Do

  On Friday, Denmark's climate and energy minister, Connie Hedegaard, who will be chairing U.N.-sponsored climate talks in December in Copenhagen, said President Obama needs to do more on climate. "It is hard to imagine that he will be receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo on Dec. 10 and'" [...]

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  Posted: October 12, 2009, 7:31am EDT
  

• Why Obama Should Not Have Received the Peace Prize -- Yet

  President Obama's only real diplomatic accomplishment so far has been to change the direction and tone of American foreign policy from unilateral bullying to multilateral listening and cooperating. That's important, to be sure, but not nearly enough. The Prize is really more of Booby Prize for Obama's predecessor. Had the' [...]
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  Posted: October 09, 2009, 7:18am EDT
  

• So Much Happening in Washington and So Little To Show for It, So Far

  The Senate Finance Committee is set to vote Tuesday on a healthcare bill that just got a seal of approval from the Congressional Budget Office and is very likely to garner the vote of Republican Senator Olympia Snowe -- a twofer that gives the bill preeminence over four other healthcare [...]
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  Posted: October 08, 2009, 8:02am EDT
  

• Specifically, What Should Be Done For Jobs?

  In his Saturday radio address, President Obama acknowledged the White House is exploring "additional options to promote job creation.” It's about time. This is the worst job market in seventy years -- including the longest duration of steep job losses.
  
  If anyone had any doubt that something far more'" [...]
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  Posted: October 05, 2009, 8:16am EDT
  

• Addendum: The Job Numbers for September

  This morning's job numbers are bad enough -- 263,000 more jobs lost in September, and unemployment now at 9.8 percent -- but look behind them and the news is even grimmer. The only reason the numbers don't look worse is that 571,000 workers dropped out of the labor force. Remember, [...]
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  Posted: October 02, 2009, 7:14am EDT
  

• The Truth About Jobs That No One Wants To Tell You

  Unemployment will almost certainly in double-digits next year -- and may remain there for some time. And for every person who shows up as unemployed in the Bureau of Labor Statistics' household survey, you can bet there's another either too discouraged to look for work or working part time who'd' [...]
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  Posted: October 01, 2009, 5:09pm EDT
  

• The Public Option Lives On

  Tomorrow (Tuesday) is a critical day in the saga of the public option. Democrats Charles Schumer (New York) and Jay Rockefeller (West Virginia) are introducing an amendment to include the public option in the bill to be reported out by the Senate Finance Committee -- the committee anointed by the [...]
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  Posted: September 28, 2009, 7:44am EDT
  

• Why the Dow is Hitting 10,000 Even When Consumers Can't Buy And Business Cries "Socialism"

  So how can the Dow Jones Industrial Average be flirting with 10,000 when consumers, who make up 70 percent of the economy, have had to cut way back on buying because they have no money? Jobs continue to disappear. One out of six Americans is either unemployed or underemployed. Homes [...]
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  Posted: September 22, 2009, 7:07am EDT
  

• Why Olympia Snowe Should Vote Against the Baucus Plan

  How is it that a decision next week by a single Senator from Maine will almost certainly determine whether America's future healthcare system is still in the hands of private for-profit insurance companies and Big Pharma or enables more Americans to get better health care at lower cost? Bear with' [...]
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  Posted: September 17, 2009, 9:37am EDT
  

• The Continuing Disaster of Wall Street, One Year Later

  As he attempted to do with health care reform last week, the President is trying to breathe new life into financial reform. He's using the anniversary of the death of Lehman Brothers and the near-death experience of the rest of the Street, culminating with a $600 billion taxpayer financed bailout,' [...]
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  Posted: September 14, 2009, 11:17pm EDT
  

• The Final Sprint for Health Care Has Now Begun, and Where the White House is Placing Its Bets

  The real political race for health care has just begun. The significance of the President's speech to Washington insiders was its signal about where the White House is placing its bets and its support. More on this in a moment. First, let's be clear about who's racing and why. Think' [...]

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  Posted: September 11, 2009, 4:04am EDT
  

• The Snowe Job, and Why a "Trigger" for a Public Option is Nonsense

  I was just on the phone talking with a reporter for a national media outlet who referred to Senator Olympia Snowe's idea for a public option "trigger" as the "centrist position." Whoa. When the mainstream media start naming something as "centrist" the game is almost over because just about everyone' [...]
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  Posted: September 08, 2009, 3:00pm EDT
  

• The Lessons from History on Health Care Reform

  With Congress returning from recess to consider health care legislation and the President set to deliver a major address on the subject to both houses of Congress tomorrow, a bit of history may be in order. An excellent starting place David Blumenthal's and James Marone's "The Heart of Power," which [...]

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  Posted: September 08, 2009, 7:21am EDT
  

• The Real News About Jobs and Wages -- An Ode to Labor Day

  Why aren't we hearing more about the worst job and wage situation since the Great Depression?
  
  The latest employment figures (released this morning) show job losses continuing to grow. According to the payroll survey, job losses are increasing more slowly than in previous months. According to the household survey,' [...]
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  Posted: September 04, 2009, 10:54am EDT
  

• What Obama Must Demand from Congress on Health Care

  Congress returns next week to one of the fiercest and most important debates in recent memory -- whether and to what extent the nation will provide health care to all Americans, and how we will reign in the soaring costs of health care overall. But do not expect unusual courage [...]
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  Posted: September 03, 2009, 9:45am EDT
  

• The Guns of August, and Why the Republican Right Was So Adept at Using Them on Health Care

  What we learned in August is something we've long known but keep forgetting: The most important difference between America's Democratic left and Republican right is that the left has ideas and the right has discipline. Obama and progressive supporters of health care were outmaneuvered in August -- not because the' [...]
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  Posted: August 31, 2009, 6:53pm EDT
  

• Beware Authoritative "Inside Washington" Sources Who Say The Public Option is Dead

  Washington, D.C. is an echo chamber in which anyone who sounds authoritative repeats the conventional authoritative wisdom about the "consensus" of inside opinion, which they've heard from someone else who sounds equally authoritative, who of course has heard it from another authoritative source. Follow the trail to its start and' [...]
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  Posted: August 28, 2009, 6:57am EDT
  

• Ted Kennedy

  America has had a few precious individuals who are both passionate about social justice and also understand deep in their bones its practical meaning. And we have had a few who possess great political shrewdness and can make the clunky machinery of democratic governance actually work. But I have known [...]
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  Posted: August 26, 2009, 11:15pm EDT
  

• Don't Succumb to Deficit Hysteria

  Today, as expected, the White House announced that the deficit projections are worse than it had thought. And as expected, the same old group of deficit hystrics went ballistic. "A 10-year deficit of $9 trillion is $30,000 for each man, woman and child in the United States!" kabaam. "Public debt" [...]
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  Posted: August 25, 2009, 12:03pm EDT
  

• Why the Senate Should Confirm Bernanke But Make the Fed More Accountable, Too

  The President did the right thing in renominating Ben Bernanke to be Fed Chair, but the Senate should couple its vote to confirm him with new legislation requiring the Fed to be far more open about its doings.
  
  If you'd have asked me three months ago whether Bernanke would' [...]
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  Posted: August 25, 2009, 11:34am EDT
  

• Why the Gang of Six is Deciding Health Care for Three Hundred Million of Us

  Last night, the so-called "gang of six" -- three Republican and three Democratic senators on the Senate Finance Committee -- met by conference call and, according to Senator Max Baucus, the committee's chair, reaffirmed their commitment "toward a bipartisan health-care reform bill" (read: less coverage and no public insurance option). [...]
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  Posted: August 21, 2009, 8:40am EDT
  

• How Tough is Our President?

  Latest word from the White House is that the President still supports a public option but is also standing by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius's remark last weekend that a public insurance plan is "not the essential element" of health-care reform. So where, exactly, is the White House [...]
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  Posted: August 18, 2009, 11:19am EDT
  

• The Public Option's Last Stand, and the Public's

  I would have preferred a single payer system like Medicare, but became convinced earlier this year that a public, Medicare-like optional plan was just about as much as was politically possible. Now the White House is stepping back even from the public option, with the President saying it's "not" [...]

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  Posted: August 17, 2009, 8:09am EDT
  

• Obama's Second Biggest Test: Reforming Wall Street, and Why Early Indications Aren't Hopeful

  Citigroup -- the giant Wall Street bank still on life-support courtesy of $45 billion from American taxpayers -- wants to pay its twenty-five top executives an average of $10 million each this year, and award its best trader $100 million. Whaaat?
  
  Second only to healthcare reform as a test [...]
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  Posted: August 14, 2009, 9:05am EDT
  

• Sarah Palin's Death Panels

  Three years ago, my mother died after a long and painful illness. During her last months she was only partially conscious, and in her brief intervals of awareness was often distraught. At several points my father, sister, and I met with doctors to figure out how to ease her obvious [...]
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  Posted: August 13, 2009, 11:53am EDT
  

• How To Fight Heathcare Fearmongers and Demagogues

  My friend, Keith, from New Orleans, just emailed to say he attended a local "town meeting" on health care and tried to get a word in favor but was almost hounded out of the room.
  
  Why are these meetings brimming with so much anger? Because Republican Astroturfers have joined [...]
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  Posted: August 12, 2009, 9:13am EDT
  

• How the White House's Deal With Big Pharma Undermines Democracy

  I'm a strong supporter of universal health insurance, and a fan of the Obama administration. But I'm appalled by the deal the White House has made with the pharmaceutical industry's lobbying arm to buy their support.
  
  Last week, after being reported in the Los Angeles Times, the White House [...]
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  Posted: August 09, 2009, 12:16pm EDT
  

• The New Employment Numbers: Things are Worsening More Slowly

  The economy is getting worse more slowly. That's just about the only clear reading that's coming from the economic reports, including this morning's important one on employment. The pace of job losses slowed -- payrolls fell by 247,000, after a 443,000 loss in June, and the official jobless rate dropped [...]
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  Posted: August 07, 2009, 6:32am EDT
  

• Astroturf Along American Highways, and the Republican Plan

  On our drive across America, my son and I have spotted spiffy white vans emblazoned with phrases like "ObamaCare will raise your taxes" and "ObamaCare will put bureaucrats in charge of your health." Just outside Omaha we drove close enough to take a peek at the driver, who looked as [...]
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  Posted: August 05, 2009, 5:19am EDT
  

• My Road Trip

  This summer, road trips are back, mainly because most of us can't afford to fly anywhere for a vacation, let alone pay for a resort hotel or a trip abroad. But in my book, road trips are just about the best form of vacation ever invented.
  
  Tomorrow morning I'm [...]
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  Posted: July 30, 2009, 5:36pm EDT
  

• The Future of Universal Health Care, as of Now

  Every day that goes by without a vote in the House or Senate on universal health care makes it less likely that major reform will occur, because (1) opponents have more time to stir up public anxieties about it; (2) Democrats up for reelection next year come ever closer to [...]
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  Posted: July 26, 2009, 7:50pm EDT
  

• The Wall Street Rally: Watch Your Wallets

  Been Down So Long It Seems Like Up To Me, the precocious 1966 novel by the late Richard Farina, defined the late 1960s counterculture. The stock market rally that's pushed the Dow Jones Industrial Average back above 9000 for the first time since early January could be given the same [...]

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  Posted: July 23, 2009, 5:59pm EDT
  

• Obamacare Is At War With Itself Over Future Costs

  Right now, Obamacare is at war with itself. Political efforts to buy off Big Pharma, private insurers, and the AMA are all pushing up long-term costs -- one reason why Douglas Elmendorf, head of the Congressional Budget Office, told Congress late last week that "the cost curve is being raised." [...]
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  Posted: July 19, 2009, 6:19pm EDT
  

• Goldman and JPMorgan -- The Two Winners When The Rest of America is Losing

  Besides Goldman Sachs, the Street's other surviving behemoth is JPMorgan. Today it posted second-quarter earnings up a stunning 36 percent from the first quarter, to $2.7 billion.
  
  The resurgence of JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs gives both banks more financial clout than any other players on the Street -- allowing' [...]
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  Posted: July 16, 2009, 8:32am EDT