It wasn’t that long ago that debtors could face severe penalties for unpaid monies, even if they were too poor for anyone to realistically recover funds owed. They could be locked up, forced into labour, and subjected to other indignities, regardless as to how they’d accrued their debt and who really bore responsibility for it; […]
Category Archives: economy
December Bootstrapping
Holiday charity drives are in full swing as suddenly everyone seems to care about ‘the less fortunate.’ The food drive cans are dragged out to the checkstands in the supermarket, the newspaper profiles the woeful of our community, and the mail from charitable organisations stacks up in my post office box, clamouring for my funds […]
An Innovative Approach to Student Loans That Doesn’t Quite Resolve the Student Loan Crisis
I’m very intrigued by relationship lending, because it touches on a lot of economic issues that are dear to my heart. If you aren’t familiar with relationship lending, this isn’t about lending money within romantic relationships, but rather about using social networks to create a pool of borrowers and backers. The idea is that when […]
Companies Cutting Hours to Avoid Paying Benefits? Not New.
This year, I’ve seen a number of people expressing shock and surprise about companies cutting worker hours or crafting contracts to keep hours to a minimum in order to avoid paying benefits. I am not a fan of turning up my nose and saying ‘and you’re acting like this is news?,’ but I would like […]
Returning to the Charity-Based Model
When we think about social services, where do they come from? Many people seem to believe they originate with the government, and many of them are also very invested in the idea that the government is overspending on social services; that it should commit less to reducing poverty, addressing illness and disability, and creating a […]
How Accessible IS Higher Education?
All told, student loans, including a mix of loans from private and federal sources, exceed one billion dollars. Students under thirty represent the largest group of borrowers, accounting for over one third of the 37 million people with outstanding student loans. Perhaps not a major surprise since people under thirty are most likely to be […]
Walking the Corn
While cotton may have snagged the tagline ‘the fabric of our lives,’ corn might as well be the grain of our lives in the United States, given how inextricably it’s woven into the food landscape. It’s not that people eat a great deal of corn as corn, but that corn and corn components are everywhere, […]
Closing Schools to Fix Budgets is Class War
Across the United States, cities are closing schools left and right to fix budget shortfalls. In and of itself, this is an absolutely terrible idea. Those students don’t simply vanish into the ether, and need to be placed in new schools, which results in crowding and pressure on the schools left open, potentially long travel […]
Confusing A ‘Bohemian Lifestyle’ With Poverty
With poverty a growing subject of interest in the United States thanks to the growing numbers of people who live in poverty, there are some intriguing disconnects about what poverty really means and how it works, particularly among middle class people who seem to have a distorted vision of what it means to be poor […]
The Economic Gap Just Keeps Growing, and Growing, and Growing
We are, they say, experiencing signs of an economic recovery. The future of the United States is looking bright and glorious, thanks to the bailout of major corporations and promotion of banks; as a country, we are rebuilding from the ashes of the economic collapse, and all indicators suggest a sunny trajectory. This is what […]
