Steve Klingaman
- Location
- Minneapolis, Minnesota,
- Birthday
- January 01
- Title
- Consultant/Writer
- Bio
- Steve Klingaman is a nonprofit development consultant and nonfiction writer specializing in personal finance and public policy. He writes a monthly column for Nikki Stern's wonderful site, doesthismakesense.com, and his music reviews can be found at minor7th.com.
MY RECENT POSTS
- Health Care Reform Comes to
Comics
January 31, 2012 05:07PM - Let’s Not Kid Ourselves
About Manufacturing Jobs
January 25, 2012 11:47AM - Online Piracy’s Cure is
Worse Than the Curse
January 18, 2012 11:44AM - Sorry! The lifestyle you
ordered is currently out of
stock
January 11, 2012 12:41PM - Reality AWOL in the Politics
of 2011
December 21, 2011 12:14PM
MY RECENT COMMENTS
- “"2 coils around its own
head, for good measure, to
deter
anyone from
prying…”
February 03, 2012 01:29PM - “That was one amazing
letter.”
February 03, 2012 01:27PM - “And here I was certain
that the young Ginsey looked
just like
James Franco.
Now,…”
January 31, 2012 12:40PM - “I know nothing about
Burmese pythons except a
presumably bad
number of how
many o…”
January 31, 2012 12:31PM - “Congrats on some baddass
silly science, the humor, the
Town
Car, much better
than…”
January 31, 2012 11:14AM
Steve Klingaman's Links
- Top Eleven Most-Read Posts
- Finally! Student Loan Debt Relief Arrives for Many
- We Can't Afford the War on Terror
- Islam is Not the Problem. Try Hopelessness, Fundamentalism
- The End of Mountaintop Removal Mining? It’s Complicated.
- David Brooks Fakes It in Center
- Double Dip: Will We Repeat 1937?
- Here’s My Vote for an Investigative Journalism Pulitzer
- “Raising the Floor” Study: U.S. Lags in Workplace Conditions
- Hated Roosevelt, Hate Obama: Paleoconservative Persuasions
- The Message and Murder of a Pistol-Packing Soccer Mom
- Want Health Care Reform? Follow the Germans
- Other Writing
- rootspeak
- Minor 7th - Independent Music Reviews
escapistcomics.com
Jonathan Gruber is a policy wonk after my own heart. Detailed, relentless, fact-based, and possessed of a sly sense of humor as evidenced by his new oeuvre: Health Care Reform: the comic book. Gruber, an MIT economist, was a chief architect of/… Read full post »
State of the Union: “The U.S. manufacturing sector is about this big.”
Image: nytimes.com
Last year President Obama was out in Silicon Valley for a fund raiser with leaders from the technology sector. At a meet and greet with Steve Jobs, President Oba/… Read full post »

Image: deadline.com
Wikipedia’s White-Out is probably one of the most effective PR moves we have witnessed in a long time. It’s Hollywood versus Silicon Valley writ large, with a side order of Homeland Security and First Amendment concerns. Intellectual property has h/… Read full post »
Image: urbancomfort.de
I saw it in L.A., during a holiday vacation in Los Angeles a couple weeks ago, just a fleeting verbal image: “Sorry! The lifestyle you ordered is currently out of stock.” Hanging out with some members of the twentysomething artistic community out… Read full post »
Two facts should have guided political activity in 2011. Both stem from our recession of a lifetime, the Great Economic Meltdown. They are:
- The economy cannot recover without demand.
and
- Our shrunken, beaten-up, beaten-down middle/ … Read full post »

Romney to world: “We will we will cut you.”
Image: Boston Globe
Who is Mitt Romney? He’s a cost-cutter—and a cheapskate. He never met a cost he didn’t want to cut—unless it involved real estate for his wife Ann. When he talked this/… Read full post »
Clay Mullins in West Virginia:
“It was an act of murder. They murdered 29 men...”
Image: www.newstimes.com
Two hundred ten million dollars. It sounds like a lot of money. It’s blood money of course, and on one level it represents business as usual/… Read full post »
Health Insurance for the Self-Employed: Not Yet
Image: www.corporatewellnessmagazine.com
Quietly and with little fanfare, health insurance exchanges are in development under the Affordable Care Act. Barring a Supreme Court fiasco they are scheduled to debut in 2014. On Tuesday, 12 more states completed their fi/… Read full post »

The Supercommittee: candidates for the dustbin of history
Image: somewhereinthemiddle.blogspot.com
One point two over ten. It’s that simple. One point two trillion dollars over 10 years was the goal they faced, the goal at which they failed. The failure was a s/… Read full post »
“Free Markets?” Look There’s a Unicorn!

Like the unicorn, the “free market” is an animal that exists only in the imagination. In the case of “free markets,” that would be the imagination of economists. Strange as that may seem—that economists have imaginations—we should note t/… Read full post »
Noted Forecaster Calls It for a Recession
This guy says we’re toast—and he’s never wrong.
Image: cnbc.com
Lakshman Achuthan must be Barack Obama’s worst nightmare. Obama, a numbers guy to his core, has got to know that Achuthan’s firm, Economic Cycle Research Institute has called for a doub/… Read full post »
U.S. Health Care: Welfare for a Bloated Medical Bureaucracy

Image: imedexchange.com
Eight thousand dollars a head—for every man, woman and child in the U.S.—that’s what we spent on health care last year. It adds up to 2.6 trillion dollars, more than the entire GDP of France. As Ezekial J. Emanuel, professor of medic/… Read full post »
Behind that slo-mo smile? Big Tobacco.
Who would have guessed that even the stake to the heart of the tobacco industry would be at-risk of being removed in our rightward surge? And yet, there he is: Herman Cain, lackey to Big Tobacco, standing poised and ready to/… Read full post »

Dennis Kucinich: Leftwing drift at work?
A strange new truism has crept into mainstream political coverage. It is a statement I have encountered as often as several times a day in my news consumption. The assertion is that governance is harder because left and right ha/… Read full post »
The best way to grow jobs is to dismantle government as we know it.
Trust us.
Image: abcnews.com
To hear the Republican primary candidates tell it, all will be well if we just gut government regulations. All of ‘em. Miraculously, the jobs will start to flow like honey… Read full post »
The Rev. James Garlow knows how you should vote.
Image: churchexecutive.com
More than 100 conservative pastors took to the pulpit for Pulpit Freedom Sunday last weekend, where they issued fire and brimstone exhortations sparked by politics. In a move designed to provoke the Internal R… Read full post »
CBO director Douglas Elmendorf addressing the Supercommittee,
"There's this thing called logic, see..."
Image: J. Scott Applewhite, Associated Press
Listening to CBO director Douglas Elmendorf tell the so-called Supercommittee about the realities of budget repair in grown-up lan/… Read full post »
The Sweet Inefficiencies of Small Business
Market Day in France
Image: UCLA
Lets face it: no one on the right or the left knows how to create jobs. The Dems are jousting at windmills with a series of lip service speeches and the Repubs are spreading that ol’ voodoo magic. But nearly anyone w/… Read full post »
Romney in Iowa: “And pigs can fly, too, my friend.”
Image: abcnews.com / AP
It was an evil day at the conservative think tank when an unnamed researcher looked up from his Adam Smith concordance, slammed his palm to his temple and shouted, “I’ve… Read full post »
Perry takes aim at Big Government, shoots economy in the face.
The bulk of Republican proposals to kick-start the economy seem to revolve around dismantling the federal government. Mitt Romney said Tuesday he’ll cut the corporate income tax to 25 percent, curtail labor/… Read full post »
Michele Bachmann’s Last Laugh

Image: commentarista.com
That Michele Bachmann thing seems to be so over for the religious right. Her skin is too perfect and her eyes don’t focus? I dunno. But that good-lookin’ rascal, Rick Perry, has done stole all her thunder.

Image: Flickr / deanmeyersnet
In our hollowed-out economy it is important to recognize that roughly 85 percent of the ready and able working population is working. The jobs may not be that great for many. Forty percent of those jobs are in the service sector and many of thos/… Read full post »
Gasland Aftermath—We have No Laws

Image: Gasland
The second most amazing thing about Josh Fox’s 2010 documentary “Gasland” is that it got made at all. The approach can only be described as amateur-verité. The financing, the everything, really—DIY. He deserves a world of k/… Read full post »
What’s Your Story?
A comment on my blog post of last week, “Gridlock Stalls Recovery,” referred to my propensity to use metaphor to build a narrative. “Maybe it is time to speak in plain English rather than in metaphors,” wrote commenter and fellow Open Salon writer Alan Milner.&nb… Read full post »
Image: NPR
As the Dow falls 500 points in a day we find gridlock has consequences after all. That would be news to the obstructionist Republicans, who have used political paralysis as an end in itself and as their primary strategy of governance. Few will admit it. … Read full post »
Salon.com