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    Bonnie Kavoussi

    Bonnie Kavoussi

    Economics writer

  • 9 Middle-Class Jobs That Are On The Decline

    It is getting harder to find a job that can support a middle-class lifestyle. The economic downturn has quickened this hollowing out of the middle class. Three-fifths of all jobs lost during the recession paid middle-income wages, and three-fifths of all jobs gained during the economic recovery pay low wages, according to a 2012 study.

  • 17 Companies Pressuring Congress To Cut Corporate Tax Rates

    The top leaders of 19 companies, along with two trade groups, signed a letter sent to Congressional leaders on Monday claiming that the top U.S. corporate tax rate of 35 percent -- which is now the highest rate in the industrialized world -- has made American business "less competitive" and investment in the U.S. "less attractive." The signatories asked Congress to cut corporate tax rates by a "significant" amount. The Huffington Post reached out to every company that signed the letter asking for verification of reported effective tax rates. Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today.

  • America's Most Common Job Pays Less Than $26,000 Per Year

    Roughly 4.3 million Americans worked as retail salespeople as of last May, according to data released by the Labor Department Friday. On average, those working the country's most common job make just $25,310 per year, far less than the national average wage of $45,790 and not enough to keep a family of five out of poverty, according to federal standards. America's second most common occupation, also in retail, is low-paying as well: The U.S. had around 3.3 million cashiers last May, who on average made just $20,370 per year, according to the Labor Department.

  • Fast Food Chain's Odd Reasoning On Obamacare

    Popeyes and Wendy's aren't too worried about Obamacare's impact on their bottom lines, but the reason for their calm may rest on a faulty assumption. The two fast food chains expect a significant number of their employees to pay Obamacare's penalty rather than enroll in the company-sponsored plans mandated by the health care law, since the cost of health insurance premiums would be higher. The 2010 Affordable Care Act will both require all Americans to purchase health insurance, or else pay a penalty, and require all employers with at least 50 full-time employees -- those working at least 30 hours per week -- to offer affordable health insurance to their full-time workers, or else pay penalties.

  • Workers Fired Over Offensive Ford Ads

    The ad agency responsible for the Ford ad mock-ups that caused an uproar last week has fired some of the employees involved. The website Ads of the World reportedly posted several Ford ad mock-ups online last week, including one depicting former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi with three bound women and another depicting Paris Hilton kidnapping the Kardashian sisters, who were also tied up. Ad agency J. Walter Thompson (JWT), the ad agency responsible for the ad mock-ups, told The Huffington Post in a statement Wednesday that it has fired some of its employees in response.

  • Paul Krugman: 'Cyprus Should Leave The Euro. Now.'

    Paul Krugman says Cyprus needs the abandon the euro immediately in order to save its economy. "Cyprus should leave the euro. The New York Times columnist wrote that starting a new, cheaper currency would allow Cyprus' economy to recover more quickly.

  • Companies To Employees: Get Healthier Or There'll Be 'Consequences'

    Most companies plan to create policies in line with an Obamacare provision that will let companies charge employees more in penalties if they don't participate in company wellness programs, a new study has found. Altogether, 58 percent of companies "plan to impose consequences" on employees "who do not take appropriate actions for improving their health," according to the survey by Aon Hewitt, a human resources consulting firm. Aon Hewitt surveyed nearly 800 big and mid-sized U.S. companies with more than 7 million employees in total.

  • Ikea's Reputation Takes Big Hit

    The old adage that any publicity is good publicity may not quite hold true for Ikea. According to a new analysis, the furniture maker has seen its reputation take a serious hit since recalling Swedish meatballs and wiener sausages from most of its European stores after discovering that some of the products contained horse meat. The YouGov BrandIndex, which tracks companies' reputations on a daily basis, found that Ikea's "Buzz score" plunged from 14 to 4 after the horse meat controversy erupted.

  • Study Reveals Sad Truth About Income Inequality

    The study, released Thursday by the Brookings Institution, found that the spike in U.S. income inequality between 1987 and 2009 was mostly due to long-lasting changes in household incomes. "It's not that the rich will stay rich and the poor will stay poor, but that they are relatively less likely to switch positions than they were before," Bradley Heim, a co-author of the paper and an economics professor at Indiana University, wrote in an email to The Huffington Post on Friday. Income inequality in the U.S. has skyrocketed over the past few decades, and this study suggests that this recent increase is not going away soon. The incomes of the top 1 percent of households by income spiked 241 percent between 1979 and 2007, while the incomes of the middle fifth grew just 19 percent, when adjusted for inflation, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

  • Krugman: Conservatives Hate The Idea Of Policy That Helps The Economy

    Paul Krugman says that Republican ideology is holding the economy back. "People of conservative politics hate hate hate the idea of any kind of activist government policy to help the economy," the Nobel Prize-winning economist wrote in a blog post for the New York Times on Wednesday. Krugman, like many other economists, has long advocated for increases in government spending to boost the economy.

  • JPMorgan CEO: 'You Want To Have Problems In Society'

    CORRECTION: A previous version of this post mistakenly implied Jamie Dimon advocated for inequality and problems in society. Dimon's quote should be taken to read, "You want to have problems in society? Jamie Dimon has come out against income inequality.

  • Ex-Obama Budget Director Bashes Democrats

    The public largely blames Congressional Republicans for recent automatic spending cuts, which are projected to slow the economy and eliminate hundreds of thousands of jobs. Speaking to Business Insider's Joe Weisenthal, Orszag said in a video interview published Wednesday that Democrats who oppose reforming so-called "entitlement" programs such as Medicare have made rapid budget cuts more likely. "I think the Democrats who are opposed to any longer-term entitlement reform, which would have the advantage of being phased in gradually, are doing the labor market no benefit," Orszag told Business Insider.

  • Analysis: New York's Minimum Wage Increase Would Fall Short

    New York is reportedly close to raising the state minimum wage to $9 per hour by 2016: the same minimum wage that President Barack Obama proposed introducing at the national level. While $9 per hour is substantially higher than New York's current minimum wage of $7.25 -- which is the lowest the minimum wage can be in the U.S. -- it doesn't constitute a living wage for any type of New Yorker, including New Yorkers living alone, according to the Living Wage Calculator.

  • Ex-Bailout Watchdog: JPMorgan's Actions 'Entirely Consistent With Fraud'

    Barofsky was referring to Sen. Carl Levin's (D-Mich.) questioning of top JPMorgan executives during a Friday Senate hearing in regards to the bank's 2012 loss of more than $6.2 billion dollars, often referred to as the "London Whale" scandal. The hearing, as well as a Senate report released late Thursday, are the culmination of a nine-month investigation into the loss. The Senate report found, among other things, that JPMorgan reported inaccurate information, misleading investors and regulators to cover up their growing losses.

  • Damning Email Reveals Dimon's Role In Trading Fiasco

    Jamie Dimon’s email response was direct and to the point. “I approve,” he wrote to an oversight body within his enormous bank, JPMorgan Chase, thereby giving his blessing to an increase in the amount of risk the institution could shoulder. The trading occurred in the London offices of a bank unit known as the chief investment office, which was officially tasked with hedging against losses in JPMorgan's broader positions.

  • Damning Report Slams Bank's Top Execs

    A scathing report released by a Senate panel Thursday shows the financial crisis never really abated: The forces that delivered it -- a toxic combination of reckless speculation, balance sheet manipulation and outright disdain for regulators -- remained fully at work inside the biggest bank of them all, JPMorgan Chase, as recently as last spring. This, the report concludes, explains how a bet engineered by a trader called the London Whale for his enormous, market-moving positions burgeoned into losses reaching $6.2 billion. "In contrast to JPMorgan Chase’s reputation for best-in-class risk management, the whale trades exposed a bank culture in which risk limit breaches were routinely disregarded, risk metrics were frequently criticized or downplayed, and risk evaluation models were targeted by bank personnel seeking to produce artificially lower capital requirements," the report concludes.

  • Horrifying Allegations Against McDonald's Restaurant Owner

    A franchisee who owns three McDonald's restaurants in Harrisburg, Pa., has left the company after allegations of worker exploitation. Foreign guest workers -- students from Asia and Latin America -- employed by the franchisee, Andy Cheung, allege that he forced them to work shifts of up to 25 hours and pay steep rent for living in his and his son's crowded basements, according to The Nation. The guest workers paid as much as $3,000 apiece to come to the U.S. on temporary visas as part of a State Department exchange program, according to the National Guestworker Alliance, which is representing the workers.

  • What Paul Ryan Doesn't Want You To Know About His Budget

    Republican House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan is back with a new budget plan, which he claims would help America's poor "become independent." In reality, it may do little more than make them poorer, reports indicate. The proposal, released on Tuesday, lays out plans to cut the budget by roughly $4.6 trillion over the next 10 years. The House Budget Committee did not return an emailed request for comment.

  • Paul Ryan's Budget Would Destroy 2 Million Jobs, Analysis Finds

    The budget plan that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) unveiled on Tuesday would eliminate 2 million jobs in 2014, according to a new analysis by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). If implemented, Ryan's "Path to Prosperity" plan would shrink the U.S. economy by 1.7 percent and increase the unemployment rate by 0.6 to 0.8 percentage points, EPI found. Ryan's proposal to cut the budget by $4.6 trillion over the next 10 years would depend largely on slashing domestic spending.

  • Report: GE Keeps Billions Overseas To Avoid Taxes

    The company with the most profits parked overseas is General Electric, according to a new Bloomberg analysis of 83 corporations. GE said in the filing that it reinvested most of these profits in foreign business operations and does not intend to bring those profits back to the U.S. The practice of holding profits overseas has been highlighted as a strategy to avoid paying taxes. GE paid no U.S. taxes at all in 2010, according to The New York Times -- an allegation GE spokesman Seth Martin called "untrue" in an email to The Huffington Post Monday.