As public schools deteriorate, the upper-middle class and wealthy send their kids to private ones. As public pools and playgrounds decay, the better-off buy memberships in private tennis and swimming clubs. As public hospitals decline, the well-off pay premium rates for private care.

The Tea Party is but one manifestation of a widening perception that the game is rigged in favor of the rich and powerful.

The generosity of the super-rich is sometimes proffered as evidence they're contributing as much to the nation's well-being as they did decades ago when they paid a much larger share of their earnings in taxes.

No company can be expected to build a nuclear reactor, an oil well, a coal mine, or anything else that's one hundred percent safe under all circumstances. The costs would be prohibitive. It's unreasonable to expect corporations to totally guard against small chances of every potential accident.

Our young people - their capacities to think, understand, investigate, and innovate - are America's future.

I'm all in favor of supporting fancy museums and elite schools, but face it: These aren't really charities as most people understand the term.

I wish it were simply a nightmare, but I think that any reasonable person watching American politics would come to the conclusion that a second Bush administration would in fact incorporate a more radicalized version of what we've seen in the first administration.

Over the long term, the only way we're going to raise wages, grow the economy, and improve American competitiveness is by investing in our people - especially their educations.

As digital equipment replaces the jobs of routine workers and lower-level professionals, technicians are needed to install, monitor, repair, test, and upgrade all the equipment.

The monied interests are doing what they do best - making money. The rest of us need to do what we can do best - use our voices, our vigor, and our votes.

Can we please agree that in the real world, corporations exist for one purpose and one purpose only - to make as much money as possible, which means cutting costs as much as possible?

It's not government's business what people do in their private bedrooms.

So why don't nurses do home visits to Americans with acute conditions? Hospitals aren't paid for it.

Median wages of production workers, who comprise 80 percent of the workforce, haven't risen in 30 years, adjusted for inflation.

If we give up on politics, we're done for. Powerlessness is a self-fulfilling prophesy.

A leader is someone who steps back from the entire system and tries to build a more collaborative, more innovative system that will work over the long term.

Centrism is bogus.

You can't create a political movement out of pabulum.

There is a crisis of public morality. Instead of policing bedrooms, we ought to be doing a better job policing boardrooms.

Liberals are concerned about the concentration of wealth because it almost inevitably leads to a concentration of power that undermines democracy.

A lot of attention has been going to social values - abortion, gay rights, other divisive issues - but economic values are equally important.

More people are killed by stray bullets every day in America than have been killed by Ebola here. More are dying because of poverty and hunger.

Public fear isn't something to be played with.

Government subsidies to elite private universities take the form of tax deductions for people who make charitable contributions to them.

America spends a fortune on drugs: more per person than any other nation on earth, even though Americans are no healthier than the citizens of other advanced nations.

Conservatives believe the economy functions better if the rich have more money and everyone else has less. But they're wrong. It's just the opposite.

The only way to grow the economy in a way that benefits the bottom 90 percent is to change the structure of the economy. At the least, this requires stronger unions and a higher minimum wage.

You might say those who can't repay their student debts shouldn't have borrowed in the first place. But they had no way of knowing just how bad the jobs market would become.

Average working people need more fresh starts. Big corporations, banks, and Donald Trump need fewer.

Official boundaries are often hard to see. If you head north on Woodward Avenue, away from downtown Detroit, you wouldn't know exactly when you left the city and crossed over into Oakland County - except for a small sign that tells you.

Too many young people graduate laden with debts that take years, if not decades, to pay off.

Community colleges are great bargains. They avoid the fancy amenities four-year liberal arts colleges need in order to lure the children of the middle class.

What are called 'public schools' in many of America's wealthy communities aren't really 'public' at all. In effect, they're private schools, whose tuition is hidden away in the purchase price of upscale homes there, and in the corresponding property taxes.

Patagonia, a large apparel manufacturer based in Ventura, California, has organized itself as a 'B-corporation.' That's a for-profit company whose articles of incorporation require it to take into account the interests of workers, the community, and the environment, as well as shareholders.

Some argue shareholder capitalism has proven more efficient. It has moved economic resources to where they're most productive, and thereby enabled the economy to grow faster.

What someone is paid has little or no relationship to what their work is worth to society.

Most financiers, corporate lawyers, lobbyists, and management consultants are competing with other financiers, lawyers, lobbyists, and management consultants in zero-sum games that take money out of one set of pockets and put it into another.

Instead of worrying about who's American and who's not, here's a better idea: Create incentives for any global company to do what we'd like it to do in the United States.

Rather than subsidize 'American' exporters, it makes more sense to subsidize any global company - to the extent it's adding to its exports from the United States.

In reality, most of America's poor work hard, often in two or more jobs.

As income from work has become more concentrated in America, the super rich have invested in businesses, real estate, art, and other assets. The income from these assets is now concentrating even faster than income from work.

We already have an annual wealth tax on homes, the major asset of the middle class. It's called the property tax. Why not a small annual tax on the value of stocks and bonds, the major assets of the wealthy?

The 'free market' is the product of laws and rules continuously emanating from legislatures, executive departments, and courts.

America's real business leaders understand unless or until the middle class regains its footing and its faith, capitalism remains vulnerable.

It's true that redistributing income to the needy is politically easier in a growing economy than in a stagnant one.

Evidence suggests jobs are crucial not only to economic well-being but also to self-esteem.

Obviously, personal responsibility is important. But there's no evidence that people who are poor are less ambitious than anyone else. In fact, many work long hours at backbreaking jobs.

Before the rise of the nation-state, between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, the world was mostly tribal. Tribes were united by language, religion, blood, and belief. They feared other tribes and often warred against them.

Nations are becoming less relevant in a world where everyone and everything is interconnected. The connections that matter most are again becoming more personal.

To get back to the kind of shared prosperity and upward mobility we once considered normal will require another era of fundamental reform, of both our economy and our democracy.