I wish the Americans had fought against austerity, as the Europeans are now

I wrote this for The Guardian’s Comment Is Free. We aren’t following the protests much, but Europeans are fighting to keep their safety nets. We should have, as well, but we let the damnable notion of the American Dream convince us that a net isn’t necessary, that You Can Make It Here. Onward.

The austerity zombies are eating the recovery

How much has state and federal austerity hurt our economic recovery? Quite a lot, writes Josh Bivens and Heidi Shierholz at Working Economics. They say: How many more jobs would we have if the public sector hadn’t been shedding jobs for the last three years? The simplest answer is that the public sector has shed …