Retirement Security Program

Democratic presidential candidate Bill Bradley last week added his proposal to reduce child poverty to his earlier and bolder proposal to help the nation's 44 million uninsured gain access to affordable health-care coverage. Both plans relied heavily on a funding concept -- tax credits -- that may be the most politically viable way to help low-wage workers afford necessities such as health care, child care and retirement security.

Critics already are complaining that projected federal budget surpluses are not certain enough… more

Conventional wisdom says that Congress will return from vacation next week, tanned, rested and ready for a game of budgetary "chicken" with President Clinton. The game will begin when the president vetoes Republicans' 10-year, $792 billion tax cut and will proceed torturously toward a compromise cut half that size.

Don't bet on it. Many moderate Republicans grudgingly agreed to vote for the tax bill only because the president promised to veto it. Even if the budget surplus was real, the last… more

When Congress convened its National Summit on High Technology in June, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan reiterated his view that the nation's current economic nirvana -- low unemployment, rising real wages and negligible inflation -- results in large part from productivity gains related to dramatic improvements in information technologies. Because productivity growth has averaged 2% annually over the past four years -- doubling its pace over the previous two decades -- firms have been able to raise wages at a… more

Many investors are scratching their heads this week over competing bids by two start-up telecommunications firms eager to pay upward of $32 billion to buy both baby-bell U S West Inc. and Frontier Corp. They are wondering where these new companies came from?

The upstarts -- Global Crossing Ltd. and Qwest Communications International -- went public less than two years ago. Yet they are already in a position to leverage their fiber-optic networks -- and rich stock valuations -- to swallow… more

Years after Tom Paine helped spark the American Revolution with his essay Common Sense, he advised the revolutionary government of France to cement its newly won political equality with economic citizenship. The means to true commonwealth, he wrote, was universal stakeholding. Paine's plan: Grant every youth turning 21 a cash grant of 15 pounds sterling to get started in life; later, at age 50, every surviving worker would receive an annual retirement allowance.

No less revolutionary is the proposal today by… more

Social Security reform -- and with it any large tax cut -- now appears dead until after the 2000 election ushers in a new president and Congress. The combination of Kosovo and Littleton have pushed these longer-term issues into the background. Without intense public and media interest, the ideological divide in Congress over turning Social Security into a system of private accounts is probably unbridgeable in the short time before the campaign supercedes responsible legislating.

The new politics of prosperity are… more

Last week, the GOP-led Congress passed a new-millennium budget resolution that is remarkably similar to President Clinton's proposed budget in one unfortunate respect: Neither party is proposing to reverse the steady decline in public investment that is critical to continued improvements in national innovation, productivity and living standards.

It is widely accepted that American economic competitiveness in a global economy is dependent on technological innovation and a skilled workforce. Yet the United States could lose its status as the world's… more

The 1967 film classic "The Graduate" opens with some unwelcome career advice for the newly minted college grad played by Dustin Hoffman. "Plastics," the older man counsels. "There's a great future in plastics." These days "plastics" has been replaced by computers and the Internet. As a result, the career paths for high-end salesmen and brokers will be transformed for some and become a dead end for others.

Thanks to the Internet, highly compensated sales positions may soon fall victim to the… more