The early 2020s have brought some disturbing headlines, including 6.1. million deaths worldwide from the COVID-19 pandemic (according to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore), Ukraine suffering Europe's worst military crisis since World War 2, and an increasingly radicalized Republican Party that has more in common with Hungary's Viktor Orbán and Russia's Vladimir Putin than it does with traditional Reagan/Goldwater conservatism. But there is some good news as well: unemployment in the United States, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), fell to 3.6% in March — which is the lowest U.S. unemployment in more than half a century.
Liberal economist Robert Reich, in an op-ed/listicle published by The Guardian on April 10, notes that "the American economy is rebounding nicely from recession." However, Reich warns that the U.S. is also seeing a "growing imbalance of economic power" that is "is bad for most Americans and for the economy as a whole." And Reich, who served as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton during the 1990s, argues that President Joe Biden will pay a price politically if he doesn't address this "imbalance."
