Stephan: The American economy is doing better, but Americans families are not. The truth is American hourly wage workers are not paid enough to keep up with inflation. The rich get richer and richer, but people paid by the hour do not. The minimum wage, in my opinion, ought to be $20 an hour.
The economy is recovering but workers are still having a hard time making ends meet.
At the end of 2021, 61% of the U.S. population was living paycheck to paycheck, down slightly from a high of 65% in 2020, according to a recent LendingClub report.
Even among those earning six figures, 42% said they were living paycheck to paycheck, the survey of more than 3,000 adults found.
“Increasing prices are impacting a lot of Americans,” said Shelly-Ann Eweka, senior director of financial planning strategy at TIAA. “Higher wages will help workers have additional cash flow to cover expenses.”
And yet, “with higher incomes, often comes higher expenses,” she added.
This year, companies expect to give their employees another 3.4% raise on average as the competition for talent intensifies — but that may not be […]
Stephan: Robert Reich and I agree about the structure of the American illness profit system. It is set up for one purpose, satisfying the greed for profit. Americans deserve better, but we are only going to get it when we rise up against what we have. Write your Representative, Write your senators. Write the President. Ask your friends to do the same. To deal with what is coming -- Covid is just the wakeup call -- we have to get universal birthright healthcare in a system designed with fostering wellbeing its first priority.
I predict it will nearly halve healthcare costs in the United States and increase societal wellbeing similarly.
Credit: Robert Reich
For many years, my right ankle has been losing cartilage that keeps my ankle bones from scraping up against each other. The result: increasing inflammation and pain. An orthopedic surgeon suggested replacing the ankle with an artificial one, but the procedure is costly, takes months to heal, and requires lots of physical therapy. So I’ve taken a different route. I cut way back on sugar, began an exercise program aimed at strengthening the muscles around my ankle, and lost twenty pounds. Now, six months later, the ankle pain is almost gone.
I share this with you because I’m testifying today before a House committee that’s considering the future of healthcare in America.
The fact is, we have too many high-priced specialists who know how to do a few complicated and costly things such as replacing a bum ankle, and too few generalists who know enough about the whole body that they’re able to avoid the complicated and costly things. The big money is in the complicated things, so that’s where the talent goes and what hospitals aim for. And […]
Stephan: We are over $4 a gallon. Conflict in Ukraine, could drive the price as high as described here. But I think there is going to be a good effect: Increased conversion to electric.
Car fueling at gas station.
Drivers best start bracing for another surge in gas prices amid the conflict between Russia and Ukraine and years of under-investment by the oil industry, warns one veteran energy strategist.
“My guess is that you are going to see $5 a gallon at any triple-digit [oil prices] … as soon as you get to $100. And you might get to $6.50 or $7. Forget about $150 a gallon, I don’t know where we will be bv then,” Energy Word founder Dan Dicker said on Yahoo Finance Live.
Dicker said oil prices could shoot higher to $150 a barrel, or in line to the “super spike” highs from 2007.
Oil prices have been red-hot lately as geopolitical tensions rise between Russia and the rest of the world.
WTI crude oil has climbed 13% in the past month to $94 a barrel. Russia produces 10 million barrels of oil a day, the equivalent of 10% of […]
Stephan: I wrote this because once you understand that consciousness is causal and fundamental as Planck, Einstein, Pauli, Schrodinger, and a host of other leading figures in physics have told us, you realize that creativity, new ways of thinking about technologies, for instance, are going to be critical to deal with climate change effectively if human civilization is going to be reshaped so that it can survive.
Leonardo da Vinci, acknowledged as one of history’s greatest geniuses
They come in the night, or unexpectedly in a walk across the park, with friends playing games or in the quiet of meditation. Such are the provenances of creative breakthroughs that have changed the course of human history; the intuitive insights of a single man or woman that leads to major social change. Nikola Tesla’s invention of the electric motor, at the end of the 19th century, came in a vision as he walked across a city park in New York.Mozart, Brahams, Beethoven, and Copeland had music come to them in an instant.Einstein “saw” Relativity as he idled away time in a canoe after an illness. He later wrote: “I believe in intuition and inspiration…. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.”[iii]
Creativity is an individual event, but it only becomes meaningful with social acceptance, and society and our […]
By the time Elizabeth Erickson was a freshman at Davidson College in 2002, she knew she wanted to become a doctor. Because she understood that the earliest health interventions are among the most important, she set herself on a pediatrics track. After four years of premed classes, she went straight to medical school at Wake Forest University, which took another four years. Then came three years of residency at Duke University, plus one final year as chief resident. In 2014, she joined the faculty of Duke’s School of Medicine. Her dream was realized at the steep price of 12 consecutive years of learning and training, plus about $400,000 of debt.
Erickson’s story would be exceptional in just about any other country. But it’s hardly unusual in the United States, which has the longest, most expensive medical-education system in the developed world, and among the lowest number of physicians per capita. “There is a huge scarcity of primary-care doctors, like pediatricians, and many of us are operating in a scarcity framework without enough resources,” Erickson told me.
