Today I’m continuing the Polished Politics series on YouTube. Here’s the new video:
If you prefer reading to viewing, the text version follows, complete with links to sources.
Continue reading “Inequality Under Obama: Where Did The Money Go?”
Tag: politics
13 Terrible Tory Counterarguments
A few days ago, I wrote a post called Britain: For the Love of God, Please Stop David Cameron. I didn’t expect much out of it, because my usual audience is predominately American, and many Americans take little interest in the British elections. So I was pleasantly surprised when it went semi-viral in the UK, quickly becoming the most popular post I have written. Naturally, with a larger audience comes more critical (and sometimes just aggressively hostile) comments, and my usual policy of responding to every critical or interesting comment I receive is increasingly no longer practical. So instead, I’ve decided to write this all-purpose response to the most common bad critiques I’ve seen levied at my post. If you’re one of the wonderful people who read my post and deemed it worth sharing, I hope that this post will help you deal with any Tory supporters you may run across who may try to give you grief about it. So let’s get started.
Britain: For the Love of God, Please Stop David Cameron
On May 7 (this Thursday), Britain has a general election. I care deeply about British politics–I did my BA over there and will return to do my PhD there this fall. But more importantly, David Cameron’s government has managed the country’s economy with stunning fecklessness, and I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t do my part to point this out.
Continue reading “Britain: For the Love of God, Please Stop David Cameron”
The Trouble with Unpaid Internships
These days, many young people find that the competition for entry level jobs is very fierce—so much so that to get a job, you need to already have job experience. But if you need job experience to get the job in the first place, how do you go about meeting this requirement? Increasingly, young people are finding that unpaid internships are the only solution. 60% of employers prefer to hire people who have completed internships. As a result, 55% of college seniors report having worked as interns, more than double the figure from the early 1990’s. More than one million Americans work as interns every year, and about half of those are unpaid. That’s at least 500,000 unpaid interns. If each of those interns worked 40 hours a week for 12 weeks at a minimum wage job, each one would earn $3,480. That’s almost $2 billion combined, and a lot of the work that unpaid interns do is worth more than the minimum wage. What’s going on here?
Why You Should Get a Raise
Since the global economic crisis of 2008, many of the world’s advanced economies continue to struggle to recover. In many of these countries, growth since the crisis has been much slower than it was in the years prior. Indeed, when we look closely, we see that the 2004-2007 growth average is higher than the 2010-2013 average in just about all the major advanced economies, and that in some countries this difference is very large:
What’s holding back recovery? To understand this, we need to understand what kind of economic crisis we’re trying to recover from in the first place. Continue reading “Why You Should Get a Raise”
