In our previous blog, we discussed job security and the absence of national legislation in the US ensuring it. In Europe and many other nations, as we saw, there is national legislation. However, the US does not have nation-wide laws that mandate paid time off for workers – sick leave, vacation time and holidays, and […]
Health care and our healthcare system are always major issues for Americans, and they have been especially front-and-center in the past few months – in almost the worst possible way. The issue is complicated, but the short version is that, over decades, Republican and other right-wing legislators and power brokers have refused to seriously entertain […]
The site VERIFYthis.com, whose mission is to “provide trustworthy, transparent information to prove or disprove” stories or claims, gives us the bad news for American families regarding the Child Tax Credit: “The American Rescue Plan only expanded the child tax credit for the 2021 tax year. That means the credit has returned to its pre-pandemic […]
It is advisable and instructive to periodically take stock of where we as a nation stand when it comes to quality-of-life issues. We have done this off and on over the past five years. Comparing ourselves and how we are doing to our sister nations can and should prompt us to do some self-reflection, to […]
Earlier posts have looked at quality-of-life statistics of the United States compared to other advanced democracies, especially in the European Union. As we have noted, a number of European nations have far higher standards of living than the US. By many measures, Finland consistently ranks as having one of the best education systems in the […]
Periodically we hear another story about what women want in the workplace. I’ve been thinking about that issue a bit lately, as well as the slams we hear against so-called “political correctness.” I found a very good treatment about both issues in a March 2016 article by Cord Himelstein, Vice president of Marketing and Communications at […]
The United States consistently ranks among the most “generous” countries in the world – we citizens routinely rank very high in the categories of helping someone we don’t know, donating money to charity, or volunteering our time to an organization. A Marketwatch article from December 2019 cites results from the World Giving Index, an instrument […]
Often when the issue of European social safety net practices is broached among Americans the argument eventually turns to the question of our racial and ethnic diversity and our large size versus other countries’ relative homogeneity and small size. The argument asserts that the US cannot (and should not) implement European social practices because our […]
How many articles have you read over the years giving advice to help you deal with your daily stress? Five? Ten? Thirty? How much of this advice has actually worked over the long term? What if the daily stress that millions of Americans experience does not result so much from individual decisions and lifestyles but […]
In our previous Making Millions post, we examined a number of areas of American life that are negatively impacted by large corporations and their leaders. These entities and individuals have successfully pressured Congress for decades to pass legislation that favors them; whatever their individual psychological make-up or motives, many very wealthy Americans frequently make exponentially more money […]