California legislators approved a landmark bill on Tuesday that requires companies like Uber and Lyft to treat contract workers as employees, a move that could reshape the gig economy and that adds fuel to a yearslong debate over whether the nature of work has become too insecure.

Although President Trump touts the current economy as an unprecedented success, the benefits are not being felt for most Americans. Most of the wealth lost during the 2007 to 2009 economic crisis has not recovered. Many pundits and analysts have been praising the current economy, even if they are against President Trump. The economy has repeatedly been called 'strong,' with fears of a recession diminishing. However, could it just be that our expectations have completely plummeted? By any estimate, the economy today is anemic, producing little benefits for the vast majority of Americans.

Americans are working harder these days, but it’s not paying off like it used to. In the first three months of 2019, employees got so much more work done that they smashed productivity forecasts. Labor productivity in the non-farm business sector (the biggest part of the US economy) grew 2.4 percent compared to the same period last year, according to new estimates from the US Department of Labor.

Online shopping and the gig economy haven't just disrupted traditional brick-and-mortar business, they're disrupting the way U.S. job growth, wage data and inflation are tracked, asserts a new paper from the Dallas Federal Reserve. What it means: There has been an increase in the number of workers in the gig economy who are either working as contractors or are self-employed, but report themselves as employed. These workers often have less bargaining power and lower wages than full-time employees.

For all the changes of the last fifty years, the conservative classics have held their place surprisingly well. Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom and Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom are still featured on Breitbart’s online bookstore. Rush Limbaugh tells his listeners that “Milton Friedman should be the Bible for young people, or anybody, trying to understand capitalism and free markets.” Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, celebrates Hayek and Friedman in his book, while Ben Shapiro holds up Friedman as a conservative icon in National Review.

U.S. personal income fell for the first time in more than three years in January as dividends and interest payments dropped, pointing to moderate growth in consumer spending after it fell by the most since 2009 in December.

“If Millennials are different, it’s not because we’re more or less evolved than our parents or grandparents, it’s because they’ve changed the world in ways that have produced people like us.” That’s how Malcolm Harris, an editor at the online magazine the New Inquiry, begins his book Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials. It’s a smart, contrarian look at the social and economic problems plaguing millennials — defined as people born between 1980 and 2000.

With a net worth of $97 billion, capitalism has been good to Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, and he thinks it's a good system. Still, "There's no free lunch here. You'd have to collect more money," Gates told CNN's Fareed Zakaria on Sunday.That money should come from rich people in the form of higher taxes, he said. "As you go about doing this additional collection, of course you want to be progressive. You want the portion that comes from the top 1 percent or top 20 percent to be much higher," Gates said.

Of course this has been happening for years, but as you will see below the numbers have dramatically escalated during the early portion of 2019. Our landscape is already littered with countless numbers of hollowed out stores and abandoned malls, and it is about to get a whole lot worse. Retailers were hoping that a strong holiday season would turn things around, but that didn’t happen. In fact, we just learned that retail sales in the United States suffered “their biggest drop in more than nine years” during the month...

When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York first unveiled a plan to hike taxes for the superrich, the outrage was harsh and swift. The proposal — which calls for the marginal tax rate on income above $10 million to be increased significantly, to 70% — faced immediate opposition from high-ranking Republican officials. Other pundits on social media used intense rhetoric in an attempt to discredit her proposition.

“Millions of middle-class Americans are just one missed paycheck away from poverty,” reports Aimee Picchi for CBS News. Picchi adds that four in ten are considered “liquid-asset poor,” which is defined as lacking “enough savings to make ends meet at the poverty level for three months.” For a family of four to live at a poverty-line income for three months would cost $6,275. Again, four in ten households have cash savings that fall below this amount.

Washington has been drowning in red ink for years and it’s only going to get a lot worse over the next decade, a fresh government estimate shows. The U.S. is likely to add $12 trillion in public debt from 2020 to 2029 through a combination of higher government spending and slower economic growth, according to the Congressional Budget Office. That’s on top of the $16.6 trillion the government is expected to owe to the public at the end of 2019.

India may have reduced extreme poverty far more effectively than most of us are aware of. The last official data is eight years old. In 2011, 268 million people were surviving on less than $1.90 a day, the World Bank measure for extreme poverty. The next round of data on household consumption is likely to come out in June, and it may well show a drastic drop in the number of poor. India’s chief statistician Pravin Srivastava told TOI that the household consumption data will be published in June. Poverty estimates are derived from household consumption data.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said a society that "allows billionaires to exist" while some Americans live in abject poverty is "immoral." "I'm not saying that Bill Gates or Warren Buffett are immoral, but a system that allows billionaires to exist when there are parts of Alabama where people are still getting ringworm because they don't have access to public health is wrong," Ocasio-Cortez said during an event honoring the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. on Monday.

People in the United States and other developed countries are losing faith in the capitalist system to improve their lives, according to a new global poll commissioned by the World Economic Forum, published on the eve of its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

A measure of U.S. consumer confidence posted its sharpest decline in more than three years in December, rattling investors already nervous about the prospect that a global economic slowdown was spilling over into the United States. In a sign households were growing more worried about the economy, the Conference Board on Thursday said its consumer confidence index fell this month by 8.3 points to a reading of 136.4, the largest one-month drop since July 2015.

It’s a fact: poverty and obesity are intimately connected. But this relationship is only about 30 years old, according to a new study coauthored by UT researchers and published in Palgrave Communications, an open-access, online journal. “We found that the relationship between low income and high rates of adult obesity in the U.S. is not observable until the early 1990s,” said Alex Bentley, head of UT Department of Anthropology and coauthor of the study. “As recently as 1990, this was not a detectable problem,”

Consumer goods companies, emboldened by a strong U.S. economy, are rolling out price increases on everyday products and groceries after several years of haggling with big retailers that needed cheaper products to attract customers.

Despite progress in reducing extreme poverty, nearly half the world's population lives on less than $5.50 a day, with a rising share of the poor in wealthier economies, the World Bank said Wednesday. In a twice-yearly report, the bank took a broader look at poverty to see where countries were lagging, even though the share of those living in extreme poverty—defined as earning less than $1.90 a day—has continued to come down in recent years.

Ten years ago, it was too-easy credit that brought financial markets to their knees. Today, it could be a global debt of $247 trillion that causes the next crash. After a decade of escalating US household debt brought on by low wages and the national debt more than doubling over the same time frame, to $21 trillion, debt could soon put the brakes on this economic recovery, analysts warn.