On Monday, President Obama ordered federal agencies to stop asking most prospective employees about their criminal histories at the beginning of the application process. For too long, Americans seeking to re-enter the workforce and make an honest living have had job opportunities taken away because
Discussion about the working class, who make up the majority of American families and would benefit most from such a raise, has all but disappeared from popular conversation.
Of course, the vast majority of Americans will never come close to earning a million dollars. Perhaps more tellingly, many of the people politicians think they’re speaking to by talking about the “middle class,” don’t define themselves as such. They view themselves as working class, and basically
On a late evening this past summer and without warning, one of the oldest buildings in Atlanta caught fire. Gaines Hall — a former dormitory on the campus of Morris Brown College — had been shuttered for years, closed when the school fell on hard times. After firefighters extinguished the two-alarm
Parents and students enter into an often complicated and opaque process when trying to secure financial aid, making some kind of financial discussion essentially a requirement for anyone hoping to successfully pay for college, said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning
Clinton supports raising the federal minimum wage to $12 per hour. Despite minimum wage hikes by many state and local governments, and by high-profile employers like Walmart and Target, the federal minimum wage remains stuck at $7.25 per hour, the same rate it has been at since 2009. Many advocates
“The financial crisis and the Great Recession and its aftermath are hopefully the most significant economic calamity that this generation will experience,” said labor economist and policy analyst Catherine Ruetschlin, a visiting professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City [and Demos fellow].
Critics — and even some supporters — of the program say its designations are arbitrary, and raise questions about whether the benefit should be rethought, expanded, or even eliminated. Adding farming to the list could introduce further complexity, since farmers in the U.S. work mainly for for-profit
In America, chief executive pay is now 300 times more than the average worker. That’s a high enough ratio that presidential candidates are taking note on both sides of the aisle.
“There are political advantages to saying we’re not going to provide aid to students who aren’t putting in the effort for their education,” said Mark Huelsman, a policy analyst at Demos, a think tank that has been promoting debt-free college.
