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Leonhardt points out that public workers receive lower salaries and higher benefits than private workers. They are being paid in the wrong ways. For example with health insurance coverage that require little or no co-payment, which lead to overuse of healthcare services that don't necessarily improve health. Politicians and unions appear to have accepted this practice over the years. Public sector unions have blocked efforts to improve efficiency and find better ways of doing things from the classroom to work in government offices. Reforms in states such as Indiana have produced some results. But even these improvements do not address the magnitude of the problems facing the U.S. which stem from the public's desire to have it all- from large defense spending, public services, low taxes and no changes to Social Security and Medicare. Polls show Americans want to reduce deficit spending, but the same polls show Americans unwilling to make some difficult choices.

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Brazil's economy is forecast to contract by 2% in 2015, the currency has lost about one third its value and the stock market is down 22% in the last year. This follows the decline in demand for Brazil's commodities exports as China growth slows down. Experts say Brazil is now seeing another boom bust cycle similiar to boom-bust cycles in the past, such as the 1966-73 boom followed by years of hyperinflation and stagnation. Brazil's exports to China declined 17% in the first 7 months of 2015. The crisis is in many ways similiar to crises in other emerging markets dependent on commodities exports. The resources boom leads to overvaluation of the currency, and decline in development of manufacturing away from dependence on commodities exports. Other errors rise from complacency and politics prevalent in such periods. These errors include mismanagement of resources with poor resource allocation decisions such as spending on soccer stadiums in cities in the northeast while basic bus services remained underfinanced in large urban areas, large overspending by the government using state owned bank BNDES to offer rates at below market rates, a credit fueled boom and credit card binge for households, and a reversal of capital flows from the U.S. and Europe with the sharp decline in investment climate. There is a severe loss of confidence in the government of Dilma Rousseff with her approval rating as low as 8%. Corruption scandals at Petrobras show close links between the Workers Party of Rousseff and executives, with about $2 billion in misused funds. Brazil, like other emerging markets such as Russia and India, have taken some lessons from the 1997 financial crisis by setting aside large foreign exchange reserves for a crisis. Brazil's reserves of $397 billion help it cushion the effects with funding of the safety net and support to industries to avoid large layoffs. Other problems not tackled as in Mexico, India, and other emerging markets, are the weak educational system, and poor infrastructure, that create bottlenecks for growth. Brazil could face a lost decade after the debt overhang, decline in foreign investment and commodity export generated revenues. ...

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Inflation is about too much money chasing too few goods or services. Paul Krugman, economic expert, says in the NYT that this inflation episode in 2021 is still he thinks transitory, as does the Fed's Jerome Powell. It is Krugman says a demand pull situation in which higher demand is  a result of the lockdowns easing and pent up consumer demand being released, just when the productive capacity of the country is affected by about 4 million fewer workers in factories and other places. The supply is crimped also by supply chain bottlenecks with covid affecting supply from countries in Asia also with fewer factories operating. Added to this is the whole logistics chain near Long Beach California moving ever so slowly because of fewer workers, and ships lined up all the way out to sea. The Fed chairman Powell thinks this is what is happening. Krugman says this reminds him of the 1946-48 episode of inflation after the war, when the disaster of war was followed by peace time 1946 and the release of pent up demand like today. At the same time in 1946 factories were still not fully operational for consumer goods after bombing in Europe and war time conversion in the US. The result too much money chasing too few goods available. In this situation Krugman says a calibrated effort that is based on new information is needed with moderate action, very small rate increases in 2022 so that inflation signals are sent out by Fed but not in a way that would disturb the long term trajectory of the economy for growth. After the pandemic has hit so many Americans so hard. Action that would preserve the long term strength and productive capacity, and technological competitiveness of America during this period of renewal. ...

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About 5.7 million Americans fewer Americans were on payrolls in July 2021 even as the unemployment rate drops each month and job openings increase. There is a mismatch between job seekers goals and job openings. The service sector, especially in hospitality and leisure industry, is not seen as a favored goal by some job seekers because of its precarious nature and uncertainty of income security, health risks, during the pandemic. Job seekers were looking for stability in income, health and other goals. The US added 943,000 jobs in July 2021, yet this gives an incomplete picture of the health of the jobs part of the economy.

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This WSJ podcast looks at the influx of 3 million refugees into Poland from war torn Ukraine. During the last two decades many people from Poland left the country to find jobs in the European Union and Britain. As a result there were more elderly in many parts of Poland and acute shortage of workers. In the long run Polish officials see the refugees as assimilating easily and welcomed by the people in Warsaw and other cities. The influx of new people is seen as a positive for Poland in the long run. Yet in the current situation there are concerns about the ability of Poland to cope with social services needed for the elderly and traumatized refugees.  About one million of the three million refugees now in Poland from Ukraine are children and there is a dire need for school teachers and other help. Many are women and elderly with young men remaining in Ukraine. Poland has asked the US and Canada for help with dealing with the huge influx of refugees in a period of 2 weeks. ...

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This report in The Times shows how Africa is tackling malaria by using modern methods such as drones. Drones are used in Ghana to send medicine to remote parts of the country. The rollout of the world's first malaria vaccine is taking place in Malawi, Ghana and Kenya. The Glaxo developed vaccine requires 4 doses over 18 months. Gavi is a partnership that brings UNICEF and WHO in partnership with private companies to  buy vaccines in bulk and distribute them where it is not affordable. Gavi supported 66 million vaccines in 2018 for children, yet about 20 million children in Nigeria, Congo and other parts of Africa lacked routine immunizations in 2018. UPS and health service workers are joining in the effort for administering this vaccine correctly.  Software that tracks the taking of the vaccines by children is essential for success and this is being implemented with Ghanian authorites. This report shows how it is done in Dateng, Ghana, a town of 800 people 3 hour drive from Accra.  ...

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Suggestions are not to take Fridays off but instead take Mondays off and sometimes break the week with Wednesday off. Fridays off are seen as a drawback because one is seen cramming five days work into four that week. Here a Unilever manager manages her 15 days off and another week that she gets after 18 years service to somehow add the weekends to get 9 days off for a break using 5 vacation days. Taking vacations for less than a week are seen as not productive for reducing stress at work and for getting better sleep. Procrastinating vacations to when work gets slower is not recommended as the answer for many is work never gets slower and you could end up overworking. Planning ahead lets this Unilever manager plan trips that act as rejuvenating experiences up and down the Eastern seaboard after getting her vacation life in order following some misssteps. She shows how with 20 days she could create 50 days vacation during the year adding in public holidays.

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Potential Treasury nominee Kevin Warsh is given the possible role at Treasury plus appointment as Fed chairman after 2026 when Jerome Powell retires. At 35 years Kevin Warsh was the youngest governor of the Federal Reserve, America's central bank, appointed in 2006 by George Bush. At the time his appointment was criticized for lack of experience- Warsh comes from upstate New York and went to school at Shaker School in Latham, then Stanford, in economics and a JD at Harvard, followed by 7 years at Morgan Stanley. He was executive secretary of the National Economic Council in 2002. During the bank financial crisis of 2009 the lack of macro regulation led to failure of investment banks. Warsh was able top save Morgan Stanley and he acted as an avenue of information from banks to the Fed.

Warsh left the Fed in 2011 and returned to public service in 2016 when Trump made his first run for president as an adviser to DJT. 

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15th Civil Servants Day in a country of 1.2 billion people where the role of civil servants is critical for development. This is what the prime minister Mr. Modi had to say to civil servants-"Taking the dreams of the common man to level of resolve is the responsibility of the system. The Sankalp or resolve should be taken to siddhi or completion and that should be the goal for all of us. We should be there to handhold at every stage in this journey of sapna or dream to sankalp to siddhi." In addition it is imperative "that the schemes and governance models be developed in the global context and be updated regularly," says prime minister Modi. He also emphasized the importance of sharing the experiences of the award winners with others on weekly basis. Also important experimentation where one scheme is chosen for implementation in a few districts and the experience discussed in next year's Civil Service Day. In this way enlarging on successful experiments that has proved invaluable for electricity supplies and renewable energy. This kind of culture being important to make progress. The Hindu provides this list for winners of the PM's Awards for Excellence in Public Administration in categories below Innovation- Gujarat Education Department, Agriculture Department Ladakh, Department of Land Resources West Champaran Bihar, Bongaigon Assam Seamless end to end service delivery without human intervention- Karnataka, New Delhi Municipal Council PM Svanidhi Yojana- Varanasi UP, Anantnag Jammu and Kashmir One district-One product -Darbhanga Bihar, Siddharthnagar UP Poshan Abhiyaan -  Kumuram Bheem Asifabad Telngana, Datia Madhya Pradesh Khelo India-  Churu Rajashthan, Bishnupur Manipur   ...

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In August 2023 the Ukraine war is reduced to small unit tactics after a stalled Ukraine offensive. The results of the war over the last 2 years is a broadened NATO with Sweden and Finland inside NATO increasing the borders of NATO with Russia. On the Russian side some of eastern Ukraine on the Black Sea and the Dnieper river are now part of Russia in addition to the Crimea. The Ukraine offensive is stalled. Russia's economy has shifted from its western European orientation for energy exports and auto other imports to a Chinese orientation.  These changes are likely to remain with a shift of supply chains back from China and its suppliers to the US and the EU. This acts to restore the factory bases in the US and EU and revive communities built around factories in small towns across the region. This will bring back regions in the EU and the US that suffered from the loss of factory jobs and public services they supported. Overall this is a healthier situation for the people of Europe and the US. For China also the situation reverses to better quality yet slower growth, and a pause to take stock of the immense changes that happened with explosive growth in trade- the damage to the environment, floods and heat waves from climate change, the explosion in debt to three time its GDP, higher unemployment, rural poverty, and devise solutions to these problems. The war has accelerated the unraveling of the existing economic, social and trade arrangements that had stopped working for many years. ...

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Can Christian evangelical therapists exercise free speech rights to counsel religious teens dealing with their sexual orientation and identity true to the Biblical teachings. The US Supreme Court Justices support Christian therapists in this situation.  The issue of prayer in America's schools which was a tradition that lasted for the first 300 years of the settlement of the Nation since 1600, only to gradually disappear after 1962-1963 when Justices of the US Supreme Court simply took upon themselves the power to alter the fundamental character of the Nation with 2 decisions. This has not yet come before the Court to restore the basic driving energy for over three centuries of settlement of this continent of North America. Already the Court has found it is against the law to prevent athletic coaches from praying on a school field. It found in 2024 that Washington State infringed on freedom of expression when it allowed a coach to be disciplined for making such a prayer. There is a sense in America that prayer is part of the fundamental fabric of the Nation. In the deepest hour of crisis in the 20th century Chuchill and FDR met on a battleship near Newfoundland, August 10, 1941, when a prayer service was conducted to restore freedom and democracy to the world at war, it sustained America and Britain and Europe through these years, why should it not be in everyday life today is a question the Supreme Court has to ask itself when confronted with the new challenges of the 21st Century. As Justice Potter Stewart says to use metaphors such as "the wall of separation" that is nowhere in our Constitution, and to reject prayer in schools is to reject the deeply entrenched and widely cherished spiritual traditions of our Nation." Traditions that have come down from the time of George Washington whose miraculous survival that winter of 1754 through the hand of a Divine Providence ensured the survival of the Nation. ...

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How the reconstruction effort in Iraq never had the clear policy goals and objectives, the technical capacity, and the organization structure, to deliver the basic services like electricity, clean water, phone connections and other infrastructure services which crumbled by 70% or broke down totally after the war. And still does not have these elements, as well as one agency or authority responsible and accountable for delivery and results. This are some of the findings of a detailed audit and investigation in a 513 page history of the American reconstruction effort in Iraq, prepared by the Office of Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction , led by Stuart Bowen, Jr. The reconstruction effort has already cost by mid 2008 $117 billion with $50 billion in US taxpayer money, but the results show that all they have achieved is at best a restoration of services to what they were before the war, when Iraq was under severe sanctions and had an outdated infrastructure. One of the biggest problems was that the war effort was not prepared for such a total breakdown of the infrastructure, and never grasped the critical role the continued delivery of basic services would have in winning or losing the support of the people of Iraq, who would blame whoever was in power if things were worse than under the previous regime which is exactly what happened. The whole reconstruction effort was botched because the will was not there, the direction was not there, and no clear policy on how to go about doing this, and lacking the organization structure for its execution. Bowen concludes that the US government was not adequately prepared to take on the reconstruction mission it took on in mid 2003. When Jay Garner presented plans on rebuilding to Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of Defense, before the invasion, the conversation shows Rumsfeld asking Garner how much they would cost. Upon being told that it would cost billions of dollars Rumsfeld responded saying, my friend if you think we're going to spend a billion dollars of our money over there you are sadly mistaken. All this becomes important in the light of another reconstruction effort underway in Afghanistan which aslo has struggled with severe problems and poor results. And as the struggle with militants in Afghanistan is growing the reconstruction effort in Afghanistan and its ability to win the support of ordinary people will be critical to winning support of the Afghan people. ...

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Questions remain about how well Mehmet Oz, who had a popular television health show Dr Oz, can deliver on reducing obesity levels, handle the cuts in Medicaid, and tackle the overspending on Medicare Advantage, as head of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, With it's $1.5 trillion budget it is the largest agency in the US government other than Defense. It is also not delivering health results as American health for the dollars spent is failing to deliver, many nations in Asia and Europe have better health with a small fraction of the US cost.

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The way Mr. Partovi's idea of mixing keyword search with ads met with resistance at Microsoft, after Microsoft spent $265 million to acquire his company LinkExchage. Some of Partovi's bosses warmed to his idea of auctioning keywords but their eyes were glued to the prospects of display banner ads and did not think much of the search and ads combined together, like searching for a term and seeing the vendors of all kinds of related services who pay a fee every time someone clicks on their name. Bosses changed and the Keywords group was shifted to other parts of the Microsoft business ending up in software. A small trial was made but price of auctioning keywords was not set appropriately. Partovi's insistence was seen as resistance to the ordered way of doing things at Microsoft, and Ballmer in 2003 talked about "discordant and dissident directions" in the company, tendencies which he derided. Partovi's passion was seen as insubordination and finally in May 2000 with $1 million in revenue from Keywords comparing poorly with Microsoft's other online ad revenue, Keywords was shutdown. Partovi left Microsoft in July 2000. He shopped his idea around. Yahoo said it did not fit in with its plans, later buying Overture for $1.8 billion in summer 2003. Google talked to Partovi but declined, instead quietly building its own service. And Google launched its own service AdWords combining search and ads in October 2000. It was under pressure to come up with arevenue generating method.By 2002 Google was stealing advertisers from Goto.com that had pioneered the business of ads and search but lacked the advantage of having its own search engine. Microsoft also faced the same problem. In May 2002 AOL dropped Goto.com and teamed up with Google for paid search. By late 2002 Microsoft executive Yusuf Mehdi was visiting Goto.com and launched an effort to buy Overture the new name for Goto.com. But when in Spring 2003 Mehdi pitched buying Overture for $1 billion to Gates and Ballmer, both tore into the proposal saying that they could do it for less than the $1-2 billion price tag by doing it inhouse. By this time Google was already the dominant company in search ads and Overture was losing out. But even with hundreds of programmers Microsoft did not get its search engine ready till late 2004 and the search ad system in May 2006, about 3 years from the meeting with Mehdi. The resistance of founders to development of new products, is seen at HP for the personal computer which was later embraced, and at Honda where a new kind of engine had to be developed secretly without Soichiro Honda's knowledge. In both cases the product was developed successfully after initial resistance, but in the case of Microsoft the new ideas and people may have been smothered and development done to Microsoft's founders own inclinations for order, and treated the same way as its other products till it was too late. A factor not present to the same degree in HP and Honda's situation was the speed with which the internet developed and search engines like Google developed. So that in 8 years since its launch Google is firmly entrenched, and has 73% of search ad spending, with Yahoo at 13.3% and Microsoft a distant third. Google generated $5 billion in profits from this in 2008. By 2009 search ad spending is estimated to reach $12.3 billion....

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Project 2025, originating at the Heritage Foundation, most dangerous idea similar to abolishing Social Security is to consider abolishing the US Federal Reserve. Why? Because the Fed was established to avoid banking panics and setup a sound banking system, a sound economic system. It suggests unravelling solutions that were developed after one hundred years of experience gained by US that has made the period since 1950 the least crisis prone compared to prior to Fed's formation in 1913.  Mr. Trump himself said in 2022 that the Heritage Foundation will "lay the groundwork and detail the plans" for what our movement will do, according to the WSJ report." It has become a matter of huge controversy with plans for outright attacks on the civil service, a blueprint of plans to shut down important government agencies such as the Education Department, Department of Homeland Security, and affect the functioning of the government of the United States in accordance with the Constitution.  The most radical is to change the financial system of the US that evolved from the Great Depression and previous economic crises since 1900 that led to the formation of the US Federal Reserve as the central bank that monitors aspects of the economy such as inflation and unemployment. Project 2025 says consider abolishing the US Federal Reserve and replace it with 'free banking' that does not control interest rates or the supply of money. These are untested ideas but more significant is the fact that it is the US Fed that under different presidents has taken the lead in managing the economy when a crisis happened. President Woodrow Wilson signed into law the founding of the US Fed, and its regional Fed system with a. supervisory board in Washington on Dec 23, 1913. Before the Fed the US currency was printed by individual banks and inflation or the economy could not be controlled. This led to banking panics the last in 2007, with great loss to the working people and families of America. It is unthinkable today that individual banks not the central bank the US Fed would issue US currency dollar banknotes. Yet it is just this kind of radical Barry Goldwater type of idea that is being put forward in Project 2025 that is written for a future administration running the country. ...

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FactSet Research Systems shows that of 13,339 ratings of U.S. listed companies 96% were buy, hold or overweight. Only 4% were sell or underweight. Mike Mayo describes the difficulties he faced giving true ratings of banks that reflected loan and other problems- in over 2 decades as a bank analyst- in his book "Exile on Wall Street." A significant culture change is required, says Mayo, for the hundreds of analysts who do the ratings to perform their function of providing proper scrutiny of companies. The clout of banks in the American capitalism of today also works to the severe detriment of the economc system to perform the way it should. He says the U.S. should look to the Financial Services Authority in Britain for the kind of actions that are needed for the financial sector supervisory officials. He points out that the FSA fired many of its existing staff and looked for new talent, at the same time increasing the salaries and benefits so that regulatory supervisors were not looking for opportunities in the private sector....

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EU Competition Commissioner, Margarethe Vestager, on a trip to the U.S. to meet FTC and Justice Department officials, says the situation in Europe is different from that in the U.S. In Europe Google has a dominant position with over 90% market share, much more than in the U.S. where Yahoo and Microsoft are competitors in general Internet search. She said about Google following the filing of formal antitrust charges by the EU against the company- "is a successful company because they have good products. But the compliments, they stop when you get the suspicion that there may be an abuse of this very strong and dominant position." In earlier statements Vestager has said that the dominant position in all its ramifications poses "societal challenges." Complaints to the EU Commission originated with Microsoft and smaller companies affected by Google. News Corp, publisher of the WSJ, has joined a group of companies in filing new formal complaints in April 2015 with the EU Commission about Google practices. Google now has 10 weeks to respond to the charges. In the U.S. the FTC also had concerns, with FTC staffers favoring filing formal charges. In the end the FTC decided to rely on Google making voluntary changes to three practices taken up by the FTC- including complaints about "scraping" of content from rival websites, and its restrictions on the ability of advertisers to use competing platforms. Vestager sees the need to get the process moving, as it has dragged on for about 5 years, saying "it is important for us to be more speedy in getting the question out, to be able for Google, for competitors, but most of all for consumers to see our concern." The EU Commission charges about Google favoring its own comaprison shopping service are a way for Vestager to establish a broader precedent, as it looks into other ways Google's uses its dominant position to favor its own products and services....

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This exceptional account by WSJ's Shira Ovide on Microsoft Windows 10 looks at ways CEO Satya Nadella is changing Microsoft's culture and old way of doing business. Microsoft is changing its culture and strategy of charging for all its products. It will let businesses and individual buyers upgrade for free to the new Windows 10 product. This means $500 million less in sales revenues in 2015, but opens up new oppoortunities in sale of add-on apps and services on more devices, such as health sensors and smartphones. The failure to penetrate the smartphone business- with a meager 3% penetration for Windows in smartphones - is a problem facing Microsoft as it competes with Apple, Google and other companies. Terry Myerson describing the thinking behind this change at Microsoft puts it in a cultural perspective, saying that it should result in a more engaged user base. There is a sense that the space Microsoft is in stretches way beyond PC's to all the new computing devices now in place, including smartphones and other devices, with Windows taking up only 15% of these devices. Founder Bill Gates calls this "exciting" and is excited to see the reaction in the market....

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Germany faces serious problems in its vaccination drive and efforts to control the pandemic in November 2021. The rate at which people are getting vaccinated has slowed to 150,000 a day and the percentage of the population that is vaccinated is stuck at 67%. This percentage of 67% fully vaccinated in Germany as of November 3 is much lower than that in Spain, France and Italy.  Spain is at 78%, France at 69% and Italy at 72%. (Data from NYT) This report in the Guardian points out that most of the remaining one third of the population is not eager to get vaccinated as surveys show that the those who have refused to get a jab are unlikely to change their minds.There is also the problem of booster shots. Germany's 16 regions conduct the vaccination drives and with many of the vaccination centers not active since September staff has to be retrained or rehired. This makes it harder to give booster shots to everyone that was vaccinated early by the start of winter. Why is it that Germany lags behind Spain in vaccination? There is a great deal of trust in Spain and Portugal in the health service and people are 100% behind their health system. The other countries that have a low rate of fully vaccinated are the US at 58%, Brazil 57%, Russia at 33%. Even the UK with its well respected National Health Service remains at 68% fully vaccinated. Today the US, Russia, Brazil, European Union countries and India have many of the 5 million deaths from coronavirus. India's vaccination drive is approaching 1100 million vaccinated, yet there is along way to go in getting most of the population fully vaccinated because of the large population of 1.3 billion. This is why the Indian prime minister on the first day of returning from the COP26 climate summit devoted his time to meeting with leaders of different states and heads of districts with low vaccination rates to press home the idea that the effort had to be taken up vigorously in the coming months. ...

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Labor in the U.S. stood firm in its opposition to bills in Congress granting fast track trade authority and promoting the TPP trade agreement. The bill failed to clear the House of Representatives as labor unions lobbied hard against the legislation. For the first time public sector unions of teachers, firefighters, and other service workers actively worked with industrial labor unions. This is a result of a realization in labor unions that the decline of communities with the closing of plants reduces the demand for public sector workers, and reduces the revenues of cities leading to cuts in services for firefighters, teachers. The low wages in manufacturing with globalization, also reduces the support of factory workers for higher wages for teachers, firefighters and other public sector workers. Also adding to support for workers is the realization that the investment in infrastructure is now a higher priority, as experts say most of the gains in trade are already behind us. A general feeling that the decline in U.S. manufacturing is not good for the country, the difficulty of competing with countries which do not enforce rules for fair practice and treatment of workers, and a general sense that the lowering of wages in manufacturing is both hurting the middle class and increasing inequality, also have created support in the media....

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Sabrina Tavernise writes about vaccine skeptics in the US. She sees it as a problem about gut beliefs. It is prevalent among people of different political views, not just conservatives. The misinformation on vaccines has made people who normally would be open to getting vaccinated a bit leery. Because of the flood of information spread in today's hyper sensitive news environment, including misinformation. Tavernise describes how different people in the US tackle the decision to get vaccinated or not and how this leads some to simply postpone getting vaccinated. Britain tackled this problem of spreading misinformation on vaccine effectiveness or risks early. It also helped that in Britain there is a very high regard for the National Health Service, the NHS. In Germany and also in France there was increasing skepticism in the beginning, yet this is reversible as there is growing recognition of the benefit of taking the vaccine in Germany and France. Much can and needs to be done to create public confidence and limit the spread of misinformation that leads to postponement of vaccination at a time when variants are becoming more contagious. ...

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Tom Brokaw is perplexed by the absence of the war in Afghanistan as a campaign issue in 2010 US elections. Especially because the war is in its 9th year, has caused 5000 dead, 30,000 wounded, and cost over $1 trillion dollars. He reasons that this is because the vast majority of Americans can opt out of fighting the war on the ground. The all volunteer service draws from 1% of the population, with the majority from working class or middle class backgrounds. This has an unintended effect in making the costs of the war less visible, when actually it is taking a toll in other ways. The US is short of funds to build much needed infrastructure or update infrastructure. States and local governments are laying off teachers because of budget shortfalls, and the national budget deficit makes less money available for solving pressing problems in carbon emissions, energy, and infrastructure. Only recently New Jersey Governor Christie put on hold a new tunnel into New York City because of a lack funds. Pressing infrastructure issues elsewhere will be postponed in this manner. And the outlook for the next 20 years, according to Robert Gordon of Northwestern University, is not going to be better with slower growth at an average of 1.5%, leaving less money for the kinds of projects that defined America from the Erie canal to interstate highways. Brokaw says, the country would benefit from an effort to discuss what happens next, in the continued expenditure of blood and treasure. A discussion of what happens next in this effort to deal with Islamic rage....

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Krugman says the kind of spending on helping the US economy never happened. That is relative to the size of the US economy, not much happened uder the Obama administration. As evidence, he cites the figures that total government payrolls have declined by 350,000 since January 2009. And he says government purchases of goods and services increased only by 3% in the last 2 years.

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Side work earns book royalties of $2 million for Barrett on "Listening to the Law" and Ketanji Jackson $3 million Sotomayor and Gorsuch also have books and royalty advances. This provides the public with a closer view of the Justices on the highest Court in the Nation. It also means Justices live a sheltered life away from the concerns of ordinary Americans about cost of living, cost of health care and pharmaceuticals, cost of childcare, cost of education, cost of fentanyl and other drug trafficking to American families and mothers. During the Depression only three Justices the most prominent of whom were Harlan Stone of New Hampshire and Wendell Holmes of Massachusetts supported New Deal legislation to provide government help with other Justices rejecting New Deal legislation right in the middle of the Great Depression when people were literally without food and shelter, without jobs and in despair. Today there is a permanent exhibition of Harlan Stone in the US Supreme Court for the longest service on the Court. It took till 1940 for FDR to appoint new Justices to get the Court to support the New Deal. Today Justice Barrett is a lone voice among Conservatives willing to listen to all opinions on both sides along with but more than Justice Roberts. This is heartening to both sides. Barrett like Justice Sandra O'Connor before her puts great importance on the Constitution's intent and wording, its pages are in her book. O'Connor from a rural ranch in Arizona carried the Constitution with her at all times and had her own books- the Lazy B about growing up on a ranch on the Arizona- New Mexico border in the middle of big country, big sky, so wide an expanse that she writes about it in her preface to her next book The Majesty of the Law citing Wallace Stegner. ...

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Mobile apps are making price shopping easier for consumers and affecting retail stores such as Target and Best Buy. Other industries affected by mobile apps are the videogame industry and the taxicab services.