Public Employee Press

Dollars and Sense magazine makes sensible economic reading

In the first three months of 2008, the United States lost a quarter of a million jobs, driving the unemployment rate over 5 percent for March. Real wages, adjusted for inflation, have been falling throughout the Bush years.

As we try to make sense of our vanishing dollars and cents, one magazine takes aim at the issues and solutions that are important to working Americans. Dollars and Sense magazine is written to be understandable to those who feel the pain of an economy run wild.

The March/April issue deals mainly with jobs and the current economic crisis .In an article on “The Employer of Last Resort Proposal,” Ryan Dodd compares Argentina’s recent actions to provide jobs to unemployed workers with U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration in the 1930s.

Dodd revives the idea that governments should guarantee full employment by taking over where the private sector has failed and bringing together the nation’s critical unmet needs and people who need work.

Other articles in this issue focus on the economic proposals of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. An article by Professor William Black examines how deregulation let banks and major lending institutions use risky and often criminal business practices that produced huge profits and astronomical salaries for top executives but led to the massive losses that created the current worldwide financial calamity.

The economic crisis is growing fast but Dollars and Sense keeps us up-to-date with new information on its Web site, www.dollarsandsense.org, along with most articles from the print edition, which is available to members in the DC 37 Education Fund Library in Room 211.

— Ken Nash,
DC 37 Ed Fund Library