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.

Companies in the U.S. boost employment by 213,000 jobs in January, another strong reading that suggests little letdown in steadily growing economy, according to payroll processor Automatic Data Processing.

The workforce is getting Uberized. The gig economy is taking over the world. Independent contractor jobs are the new normal. In the post-recession years, this became conventional wisdom, as more and more Americans took jobs—well, “jobs”—with companies like Postmates, Fiverr, TaskRabbit, and Lyft. But the gig economy was then and is now a more marginal phenomenon than it might have seemed.

Stock buybacks are eating the world. The once illegal practice of companies purchasing their own shares is pulling money away from employee compensation, research and development, and other corporate priorities—with potentially sweeping effects on business dynamism, income and wealth inequality, working-class economic stagnation, and the country’s growth rate.

Are U.S. workers now threatened by a new and powerful form of automation that could displace tens of millions from their current jobs and dislodge them from the middle class? If so, are college-educated or professional workers at the upper range of the middle class as much threatened as those with fewer such credentials at the lower end? And can policy do much to protect the middle class status of either group?

Nearly a year after the tax cut, economic growth has accelerated. Wage growth has not. Companies are buying back stock and business investment is a mixed bag. The $1.5 trillion tax overhaul that President Trump signed into law late last year has already given the American economy a jolt, at least temporarily. It has fattened the paychecks of most American workers, padded the profits of large corporations and sped economic growth.

Those who focus on the U.S. national debt (and I’m one of them) keep wondering how long this debt levitation act can go on. The U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio is at the highest level in history (106%), with the exception of the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. At least in 1945, the U.S. had won the war and our economy dominated world output and production. Today, we have the debt without the global dominance.

A Canadian defence contractor will be selling fewer armoured vehicles to Saudi Arabia than originally planned, according to new documents obtained by CBC News. That could be a mixed blessing in light of the ongoing diplomatic dispute between the two countries, say human rights groups and a defence analyst.

A small rise in the minimum wage in Britain’s main city regions would encourage employers to deploy workers more productively and help boost local economies by more than £1bn, says a thinktank. According to the study, by the Smith Institute, employers need the spur of a higher minimum wage to shake them out of a spiral of low productivity and low growth that depresses company revenues and has trapped about 2 million workers on the current minimum wage of £7.38 an hour...

Free-trade deals are also on the cards, as President Xi Jinping tells forum Beijing wants to ‘become the keeper of peace and stability’ in the region. Beijing will also further explore the possibility of free-trade deals with each of the 22 states in the Arab League, as Xi reiterated commitments to globalisation at a time when China is locked in a trade battle with the US. China and the Arab League – a regional bloc of states in and around North Africa, the Horn of Africa and Arabia – agreed to upgrade their bilateral ties to form a “strategic partnership of comprehensive cooperation...

FOR some time Britain’s vote in June 2016 to leave the European Union appeared to be having little economic impact. Sterling slumped but GDP growth in the second half of 2016 was faster than in the first. Unemployment fell, rather than jumping, as most economists had feared. Yet the notion that the economy would escape Brexit uncertainty was always fantastical. Britain’s economy has gone from a leader to a laggard internationally, as GDP growth has slowed sharply (see chart).

Pay is rising much faster for the top 1% of earners compared with those on average salaries in the richest countries, according to a report calling on governments to do more to tackle “wageless growth” since the financial crisis. Despite more people being in work than at any time since the onset of the banking crisis a decade ago, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development said wage growth was still “missing in action” across the 35 countries represented by the Paris-based group of wealthy nations.

Machines powered by self-learning algorithms and internet connections are displacing humans from all kinds of jobs, from driving to legal discovery to acting in movies. Will there be any work left for us to do? Economics says yes. Will it be awful or will it be nice? That is up to us.

MyeongBeom Kim (previously) builds unique works by combining everyday objects whose purposes are often in stark contrast. The sculptures are created from recognizable pieces such as birthday cake candles, canes, and standard #2 pencils. These objects are reworked to drastically limit their inherent

Form builders are tools that assist the website owner in creating forms for users. Web forms are key cogs in every website. Forms are always in use on a website. Registration, sign up, survey, contact, subscription list, etc all operates via web forms.

U.S. consumers’ total credit card debt exceeded $1 trillion for the first time, according to a new study by the personal finance website WalletHub. Consumers took on an additional $92.2 billion in debt last year, the highest single-year amount since 2007. The average U.S. household owes $8,600 on credit cards, WalletHub found.

Even after eight years of economic recovery and steady private-sector job growth, wages for most Americans have hardly budged. It is tempting to think that wage stagnation is intractable, a result of long-term trends, like automation and globalization, that government is powerless to do anything about.

Nowadays, there are a lot of articles being written about the collapse of retail in the USA. Some people blame Amazon and online shopping, but that is only a trivial part of the problem. $1,355,610,000,000 of consumer spending is missing from the demand side of USA spending, and that should be kept in mind whenever you read an article about retail going through hell. The big boom in retail in the mid-20th century was thanks a strong middle class. Conversely, the collapse of income of the middle quintiles of income must lead to a contraction of retail. Consider these charts:

Maybe it will start with a failed initial public offering, followed by the revelation of widespread fraud in Silicon Valley. Perhaps energy prices will spike, sapping the finances of anyone who drives a car to work. Maybe a foreign crisis will cause a credit crunch, or President Trump will spark a global trade war. A recession might seem like a distant concern, with the latest data showing that the current, extraordinarily economic long expansion just keeps humming along.

Last Tuesday marked the 25th anniversary of the United Nations’ International Day for the Eradication of Poverty. The date intentionally coincides with the 30th anniversary of the Call to Action, which saw the French anti-poverty campaigner Father Joseph Wresinski ask the international community, in front of 100,000 Parisians, to “strive to eradicate extreme poverty”.