In the New Deal era, the Democrats owned the white working class. In the Civil Rights era, they lost them. Not all, of course, but enough to give Republicans win after big win.
This year, with economic challenges front and center again, the math could change. But in West Virginia and North Carolina, in Kentucky and [...]

Nan Mooney is thirtysomething, well-educated, the child of baby boomers who herself grew up with all the accoutrements of what was very recently thought to be a regular middle-class American life. Nothing fancy, but the full basics: a nice little home with steady income, housing, health insurance, and a summer vacation somewhere.
Now, Nan Mooney and [...]

Hillary Clinton and John McCain say they want to drop federal gas taxes for the summer. Barack Obama says no.
If you’re strapped for cash and struggling with higher food and energy prices, it can sound like a good idea. But step back just half an inch from presidential campaign follies, and the idea can look [...]

We’ve heard it again and again, but seldom laid out with the clarity Steven Greenhouse brings. The American worker is getting crunched. Corporate profits are up. Productivity is up. CEO pay is way up. But the American worker is getting squeezed.
Greenhouse is labor and workplace reporter for The New York Times. He’s brought home the [...]

For a long time, American well-being has been measured by GDP. By personal income. By cold, hard numbers. Not anymore.
Now, a field of economic study — the measurement of happiness — is coming of age. It’s providing new insights into who we are, and the roots of what really makes us happy. Money, politics, family, [...]

It’s a jungle out there in the U.S. economy these days. Wall Street all over the place, mainly down. Investment banks writing off billions in losses. Housing still tumbling.
Everybody’s got a band-aid or a bail-out to propose, but they all cost money — and some may do more harm than good.
We’re sitting down this hour [...]

The language out of Wall Street today is enough to scare you silly. Crisis. Fire sale. Brink of collapse. Titanic mess.
Late last night the news spread that JPMorgan Chase and the Fed have engineered a takeover of floundering Wall Street bad boy Bear Stearns.
A year ago, when the bonuses and bull were flying high, Bear [...]

A big sister’s nailpolish and eyeshadow. Mom’s high heels. Rites of passage–and good fun–for many young girls.
But these days, girls are digging deep into their piggybanks and hitting the malls. Glitter products, pedicures, mini-makeovers.
These tweens, as they’re called, are now spending $51 billion of their own pocket money. And marketers, sponsoring birthday parties and sleepovers, [...]

Here’s a little something to chew on while you get your income tax files together this season. Median income in the USA is $48,000. Average annual income of the top four hundred taxpayers? Two hundred and fourteen million dollars. Yep. Two hundred and fourteen million.
Their share of the nation’s income has doubled since 1995. And [...]

Despite all evidence, for a lot of Americans, the world — or their sense of it — and the American place in it seems frozen in about 1999. The Soviet Union — vanquished. The American economy — number one, of course. American might and influence — unchallenged. The USA — a master superpower.
Scholar Parag Khanna [...]

If you want to see the madness and the grisly aftermath of the U.S. housing boom and bust, look at Florida. It’s not alone. Vegas, Phoenix, San Diego, Detroit — they’ve all got horror-story numbers now. But the biggest home price drops in the country were in Miami last year.
Empty condos, collapsing values. The heart [...]

It is scary out there in the world of economic indicators.
Inflation is at its highest rate in a quarter century. Home prices are getting low and lower. Factory orders are lousy. The U.S. dollar is plummeting.
It’s no wonder consumer confidence is on the rocks. Never mind recession — some days it sounds like we should [...]

In China, pork has become so expensive they’re stealing pigs by the truckload. In Kansas, it’s wheat. In Mexico, they’ve got tortilla riots over the cost of corn. In American supermarkets, the price of milk and eggs has soared.
All over the world, the price of food is headed up. Sometimes way up. And an era [...]

In 1758, Benjamin Franklin published a collection of homey aphorisms that Americans may soon be re-reading around their 2008 kitchen tables.
“A penny saved is a penny earned,” wrote Franklin. And “the Borrower is the slave to the Lender.” And “be frugal and be free.”
Truth is, old Ben knew how to live high on the hog, [...]

The travel posters from Kenya are all “Out of Africa” beauty, safari paradise shots and handsome Masai tribesmen with their red robes and spears. And for decades, Kenya was held up as East Africa’s great hope for democracy and development.
But in the last month, after a disputed — observers say stolen — presidential election, the [...]

From the misty, half-attuned, still-in-the-American-Century shores of the United States, China and India can look like peas in a pod: two rising Asian giants with screaming growth rates and lots of what used to be American jobs.
Look closer, and these are very different cats. China is the factory floor and India the back-office, software shop. [...]

If you were off planet the past few days and returned to Wall Street this morning, you might be forgiven for thinking that all was well this week. The market tanked just a few days ago but by yesterday it had all but recovered.
So what happened? That’s among the big stories under our microscope today.
Also, [...]

In the world’s hyper-ventilating global stock markets, the bleeding has slowed, for the moment.
After two days of outright panic on markets in Bombay and Hong Kong and across Europe, the US Federal Reserve Bank jammed through a huge rate cut. President Bush and Henry Paulson and Congressional leaders hustled to a big photo op, talked [...]

In case you missed it, here’s the wealth of nations news on planet Earth: the biggest banks in America — the crown jewels of U.S. financial power — are being bailed out by foreigners. Billion after billion is being pumped in from China and Singapore, Kuwait and Korea and Dubai.
American bankers made a killing in [...]

OK, here’s the blue economy scenario for 2008. Housing prices keep falling. Credit stays tight. Consumers choke. In retailing, restaurants, travel and more, jobs vanish. In real estate, construction and banking, investment seizes up. Money retreats. Growth is gone. And we’ve got a recession on our hands.
For months, economists have debated whether it’s here already. [...]

Lucky you, if you rode the red-hot Chinese stock market over the last few years. Between 2003 and last fall, the Shanghai index was up 300 percent. Domestic A shares were up 500 percent in two years. We’re talking epochal money here.
Now, with money pros wondering if it’s about to go bust, super-investor Jim Rogers [...]

New York Times investigative reporter David Cay Johnston is mad as hell, and he doesn’t want you to take it anymore. Last time out, the high-dudgeon Pulitzer Prize winner was up in arms about the American tax system.
This time he’s on fire about the whole system. It’s been rigged, he’s shouting, for the rich. And [...]

Warren Bennis has made a big name for himself over the years as a business management guru. He’s been an advisor to Fortune 500 companies and to presidents. Along the way, he’s thought a lot about leadership — what makes a great CEO, general, president.
Lately he’s decided that it all comes down to judgment. Courage, [...]

With a jittery economy, many Americans may think twice these days about where they invest their money. And yet, think as they may, smart people too often make dumb financial bets: on what will bring happiness, or yield big gains in the market.
To sort out why, a new breed of researcher — neuroeconomists — are [...]

When President Bush unveiled his administration’s plan last week to help Americans — more than a million of them — struggling to pay subprime mortgages, critics immediately called it “too little, too late.”
In communities all across the country — from the inner city to well-heeled suburbs — foreclosures are rampant. And the worst of the [...]

Auden Schendler is true-blue green, a life-long environmentalist, a climate crusader, says Time magazine.
Schendler believed, with every fiber of his being, that American corporations could save the planet and reap profits at the same time. But when he put that faith to the test, he found turning green into greenbacks is harder than he thought.
Now, [...]

Economic pessimism can prove accurate and self-fulfilling. Gloomy talk chills the “animal spirits” of investors that John Maynard Keynes identified as the accelerator of booms and busts.
Investment guru Peter Schiff, who CNBC has dubbed “Dr. Doom,” has prophesied a flight from the dollar abroad and inflation, recession, even a depression at home. As the author [...]

Former Wall Street hotshot, now Treasury Secretary, Hank Paulson is orchestrating a big banks “mega-fund” to help mop up the subprime mortgage mess — and try to get some of that bad debt off the books and avoid a deeper credit crunch that could still stove in the U.S. economy.
The stakes are high, but still [...]

China looks like a giant these days — and in many, many ways it is. The Chinese boom has flooded the world with mountains of Chinese products. It has flooded China’s treasury with cash and built a red-hot economy on China’s booming coast.
But as the 17th Communist Party Congress sat down in Beijing this week [...]

Across the country, and especially in the great Midwest, the corn pickers are in the fields today, bringing in what is projected to be the biggest corn harvest in American history.
Through corn meals and corn sweeteners and corn-fed livestock and corn-brewed ethanol, Americans eat and drink — and now are beginning to drive on — [...]

As workers hit 55, 60, 65, many aren’t losing sleep over the big move to Florida, but instead over the big presentation a week away.
So much for retirement! Some can’t afford it. Others just aren’t ready.
As for their employers, there are companies that think it’s great — the AARP just named its top 50 employers [...]

Well, nobody’s talking about the almighty dollar anymore. Driven by American debt and deficits, the once-mighty US greenback is now at parity with the once-laughable Canadian dollar for the first time in three decades. It’s a pipsqueak next to the Euro.
If the fall is good or bad, it depends on where you stand, and how [...]

The big GM wobble this week over workers and wages and whether its factories will be built in this country was just one more wake-up call. The old world is gone and the new one is going to require a lot more innovation if America is going to stay at the top of the economic [...]

The last time the United Auto Workers went on strike nationally against GM, back in 1970, most Americans alive today had not been born. And that’s not all that’s changed.
The UAW had 400,000 members on strike then. Yesterday, it was a shadow of that — 73,000 — who walked off the job. In 1970, GM [...]

Death and taxes are the two sure things, they say. In the last week, the storm’s been brewing on the tax front. Former Fed chair Alan Greenspan re-emerged to say he never meant to sanction all of George W. Bush’s big tax cuts and the GOP-led spending that rolled right on.
Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson told [...]

It’s been a long time in the wilderness. But the “Made in the USA” label is packing some cachet again. After poison toys from China, job losses, and eco-disaster images of filthy smokestacks abroad, Americans are getting the itch to buy American again: toys, bikes, even t-shirts.
Some never lost the urge. But in the age [...]

With all the hullabaloo in Washington over Dubai port operators and Iraq war woes, President Bush may glad to get out of town this week - and he’s getting way out of town, to India and Pakistan.
Half a world away, booming India is emerging as a new partner and a new challenge — as a [...]