The Questioning Librarian

A lot of the official story of the economy in the past few years has been about the ending of an unprecedented increase in home-ownership in a wave of foreclosures. Owning your own home is not just part of the American Dream but is also considered a marker of how well the larger economy is doing, with home purchases and construction of new homes routinely tallied and announced as part of the monthly economic news. Yet this focus solely on home ownership leaves out a very large number of people from the calculus, namely those who rent. The number of people who rent may not be something we tout, but that number is growing. Over a third of people in the United States rent rather than own their own homes. While the percentage of renters was 31% in 2004, the percentage has grown to 35% as of 2012. In numerical terms, it means that around 43 million households are renting . That translates to over 100 million people who live in rental units. While discussion often ignores this vast...

If there was any doubt as to who Congress works for, it should have evaporated after the passage of the so-called "Cromnibus" spending bill last week. Included in the funding bill were provisions so odious to good sense that more representatives in Congress should have stood up in protest. One of these, a provision repealing certain regulations on derivatives trading, is so outrageous an act that every single member of Congress who voted for the bill should be ashamed to return to their home districts for Christmas. To make it even worse, the provision was drafted by Citigroup , one of the rogues whose reckless gambling through derivatives trading helped wreck the economy in 2008. Adding insult to injury, the same bill contained a provision raising the maximum allowable political donation so that a couple can now contribute a maximum of $3.1 million to a political party of their choice, as though our system of government was not already awash in money.  It is fitting th...