July 2011

Time to take out the good ol’ fashioned paper and pen and create your budget. As George Lakoff once wrote, a budget is a value document. So enter numbers based on your values. When you’re done, scroll down to compare your budget with the one governing United States federal spending.

Directions: Enter a percentage of the budget that you would spend on each of these six broad categories.  (If you’re feeling industrious, fill in each little line item.)  Make sure read more

What if the imminent banging of Uncle Sam’s skull into the looming debt ceiling isn’t a crisis, but the very concept of debt is? The debt ceiling has been lifted numerous times without fanfare or fainting spells. All we face this week is a fabricated opportunity to gut social programs and trusts under the guise of a phony crisis and a discourse constricted to exclude taxation of the wealthy or cuts to the war machine.

But what if more deficit spending isn’t a safe answer? I read more