No matter what the official jobs numbers are going to reveal tomorrow morning at 8:30 a.m. (watch for them on www.bls.gov) it sucks to be unemployed. And, although, young people are much more likely to get fired or laid off, the older worker who loses her or his job is in for a very rough ride.

Older people losing their jobs experience skyrocketing rates of depression and more cardiac disease. Bad timing,because, guess what? At the same time their health gets worse the unemployed just lost their health insurance. (There is COBRA—the opportunity to buy at full cost your previous employer's health insurance—but it is expensive.) 

Even though the unemployment rate is lower for older people, their long-term joblessness rate is growing the fastest.

Labor economists have always known that it is harder to find a job when you are unemployed than when you are working. You can be the same...

My friend, a domestic policy maven (he is responsible for most of this post), points out that among the many virtues of the landmark health-reform bill, one is directly related to higher education. The legislation finally puts an end to subsidies paid to banks for student lending with a savings to taxpayers of $61-billion over 10 years. Years ago these subsidies were justified as promoting private "competition" with a government run program.

And the Republicans are howling in protest. They want to restore taxpayer subsidies to private banks. Just this month, former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich cited the policy change as part of his evidence that the Obama Administration is "socialist."

You might say that those billions in bank subsidies are OK if they helped students find better loans at lower prices—after all, that's the promise of privatization, right? (Though, with...

Let's say you're advising a business with varying quality and you want to improve performance. Would you ridicule the workers publicly, cut their pay and benefits, and say that they are the sole cause of the problem and that you want brighter younger replacements who will work overtime and weekends? No new CEO would adopt this as a strategy for success. Attacking your work force is not an effective way to improve quality, produce a better product, and attract top talent—a bright young replacement would notice the disrespect.

So why do people think attacking teachers is a route to education reform?

This week's Sunday New York Times Magazine's cover story by Stephen Brill attacks teacher unions for ruining public education. Brill's main belief is that good teachers are all that matters, and his main culprit is tenure protections, which he views as protecting incompetent teachers...

Most people know the Arizona immigration law lets the police stop drivers they suspect are illegal immigrants—it is also part of a political movement to deport 11 million people. This is not a sensible immigration reform. Real stories help illustrate why more repressive laws won't work, the Saturday's New York Times had two good ones.

First story—a Georgia college student whose parents brought her to the United States illegally when she was 11 years old, stopped on a minor traffic violation, no underlying crimes, weeks away from college graduation was automatically deported. Fortunately, her university's president and others intervened after outraged public response so her case is being reviewed in a discretionary bureaucratic proceeding. The current law provides for review, but no way for her to get citizenship, so we're going to automatically deport someone who wasn't responsible for ...

Immigrant rights, not the Tea Party, may be the biggest social movement of our generation. In a year when many people aren't politically motivated, one group is vocal and fighting hard for their rights and interests. They take to the streets in huge numbers, push hard for legislative changes, and promise to hold legislators accountable. Commentators debate whether their ideas are popular, but there's no denying their energy and commitment.

Tea Partiers? Nope—advocates of immigration rights and reform. 

Galvanized by Arizona's repressive new law that seemingly encourages local police to demand identity papers from anyone they think looks like an illegal immigrant (people of Swedish heritage, rest easy), immigrant-rights organizations are pushing back, hard. By some estimates, close to 500,000 people marched in dozens of U.S. cities in favor of comprehensive immigration reform....

I promise to connect the Greek crisis to the retirement problems in colleges and universities.

I promise.

But right now I want to explain what is happening in Europe.

First of all the press did their best to sum up the remedy proposed by the European finance-ministers conference this weekend. The basic premise is countries (read Spain, Greece, Portugal) will be able to borrow from a 500-billion-euro lending authority. IMF lending will be included if that borrowing occurs. 
 
This essentially is what the American Federal Reserve bank did—it is "quantitative easing"—European central banks will buy Greek and other sovereign debt from banks. That effectively shifts sovereign debt risk from the banks to the public sector. A bank-solvency crisis is averted, but as seen in the United States, monetary policies help save us from a depression, but Europe and the euro are not as fortunate as we a...

Like every first Friday of the month, the April employment report was released this morning and while there is some good news, especially in job growth, it still presents a grim picture of the depths of this recession and how long it may take us to fully recover. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the economy added 290,000 net new jobs—this is the biggest monthly gain in four years. While over 60,000 of those jobs were for temporary Census workers, that still leaves 230,000 net new private-sector jobs. The length of the average work week and hourly earnings also rose, underscoring the job growth. 

Which is great, great, great.

But it is still not time to break out the champagne.

The unemployment rate actually rose to 9.9 percent, as the people came back into the labor market looking for work. (The unemployment rate goes down when people stop looking altogether.) But perhaps ...

According to a new Gallup poll  people are delusional. Overall people who aren't yet retired most commonly say IRA's and 401(k)'s will be a major source of retirement income (45 percent), followed by Social Security (34 percent), work-sponsored pension plans (23 percent), saving accounts or CD's (22 percent), home equity (20 percent), and individual stock investments (20 percent).

The reality is that over two-thirds of Americans will get most of their retirement income from Social Security. Add in the value of Medicare, and government sources of support swamp anything that retirees will get from cashing in stocks and bonds from 401(k) plans, etc. Only the top 10 percent of households have pension wealth that is significantly larger than the wealth they have from Social Security.

The average-income household in 2009 had approximately $67,000 in 401(k)'s. The best-off group, a...

I remember the dead silence in a faculty meeting when a Notre Dame Dean said over 60 percent of the grades in English and Humanities classes were A's, the rest were A-minuses and B-pluses. It was an attempt to embarrass professors' lack of effort at identifying variations in student performance. Shaming didn't work, nothing. And, as a new report shows, Notre Dame is not alone. Grade inflation is alive and well.

Stuart Rojstaczer has just updated his scathing analysis of the increase in grade inflation.

He may be the messenger that elite colleges and their professors will want to kill but he has done yeoman's work exposing the industry practices. Using data on grades from over 210 U.S. colleges and universities, and over two million undergraduate students, Rojstaczer has found that grade inflation is increasing and private colleges are the worst offenders.

Perhaps the increase in...

Last week a British Petroleum oil rig blew up, killing 11 workers. A Massey Coal Explosion killed 29 miners three weeks ago. Obama eulogized over empty coffins today.

British Petroleum and Massey Coal are in a race for top prize on how to make profits by shaving worker safety. Both Massey and BP work sites were nonunion, and unions usually help corporations lose that prize.

In 2009, four years after a BP explosion in a Texas refinery that killed 15 workers and injured 170, the Occupational Safety and Health administration imposed the largest fine in its history—$87-million on British Petroleum. BP also paid billions in criminal charges and civil claims for the accident: $50-million in criminal fines for violating the Clean Air Act and over 4,000 claims from a $2.1-billion claims fund.

Why does this company still operate in this country? How many more workers does it have to kill?

In ...