Robert Reich

Globalization and free trade do spur economic growth, and they lead to lower prices on many goods.

Instead of worrying about who's American and who's not, here's a better idea: Create incentives for any global company to do what we'd like it to do in the United States.

The silent majority really is a liberal majority, even though the word liberal has taken a real beating over the last 20 years by radical conservatives.

If we give up on politics, we're done for. Powerlessness is a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Community colleges are great bargains. They avoid the fancy amenities four-year liberal arts colleges need in order to lure the children of the middle class.

To get back to the kind of shared prosperity and upward mobility we once considered normal will require another era of fundamental reform, of both our economy and our democracy.

When times are tough, public employees should have to make the same sacrifices as everyone else.

Radical conservatives want to police bedrooms.

Bankruptcy laws allow companies to smoothly reorganize, but not college graduates burdened by student loans.

The only way back toward a democracy and economy that work for the majority is for most of us to get politically active once again, becoming organized and mobilized.

During three decades from 1947 to 1977, the nation implemented what might be called a basic bargain with American workers. Employers paid them enough to buy what they produced.

As we segregate by income into different communities, schools in lower-income areas have fewer resources than ever.

What someone is paid has little or no relationship to what their work is worth to society.

America is one of few advanced nations that allow direct advertising of prescription drugs.

Some argue shareholder capitalism has proven more efficient. It has moved economic resources to where they're most productive, and thereby enabled the economy to grow faster.

The curious thing is Americans don't mind individual mandates when they come in the form of payroll taxes to buy mandatory public insurance. In fact, that's the system we call Social Security and Medicare, and both are so popular politicians dare not touch them.

Median wages of production workers, who comprise 80 percent of the workforce, haven't risen in 30 years, adjusted for inflation.

Most financiers, corporate lawyers, lobbyists, and management consultants are competing with other financiers, lawyers, lobbyists, and management consultants in zero-sum games that take money out of one set of pockets and put it into another.

America spends a fortune on drugs: more per person than any other nation on earth, even though Americans are no healthier than the citizens of other advanced nations.

Centrism is bogus.