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For a moment last week, it looked like Walmart CEOs were getting enlightened. The company promised to “ end minimum-wage pay” for its lowest-paid sales workers and touted a plan to ‘”invest in its associate base” and maybe even offer more bonus opportunities.
In the media
Michelle Chen
Today, Vice President Biden and others from the Obama administration, are meeting with human-resource executives from companies that are part of the president’s effort to address the problem of long-term unemployment, including Citigroup Inc., CVS Caremark Corp. and Boeing
Blog
Ben Peck
Six years after America sank into the deepest economic downturn since the 1930s, the jobless rate has fallen to 5.9 percent, the lowest since July 2008. But one demographic group — African-American men — seems to be stuck in a permanent recession.
In the media
Reniqua Allen
For decades, free high-school education helped strengthen the middle class and generate prosperity. So isn’t it time to extend the same thinking to college?
In the media
Rick Newman
Despite Friday’s unemployment rate dropping to 5.9 percent nationally, New York City is still home to the dead-end kids. Half of the city’s 600,000 recent college graduates are either underemployed or out of work, according to New York Fed researchers. Most of this 50 percent are working in jobs
In the media
John Aidan Byrne
When people like me write about the middle class, it has nothing to do with envy or class warfare—two shopworn epithets that should be retired from the political lexicon. The condition of the middle class—its size, income and self-confidence—reveals the extent to which economic growth increases
In the media
William Galston
Public colleges and universities took in $62 billion in tuition in 2013. These are schools that educate three of four American college students, and eliminating that entirely could be done just by rearranging what we already spend on student financial aid.
Blog
Mark Huelsman
The FDIC estimates there are 10 million people living in the U.S. who do not have a bank account — that’s one out of every 13 households. Nearly 33 percent of people living in Starr County, TX can’t write a check. In one census district in Savannah, GA, over 42 percent of residents are unbanked. The
In the media
Lynn Stuart Parramore
How bad a problem is inequality? Are working-class people getting screwed? Should we raise taxes on the rich? Is the United States, in short, a fundamentally unfair place? These are the questions that keep awake policy analysts and fuel endless dinner-party debates. But there's one group that is not
In the media
Jesse Singal
Democrats in tight races have found a new villain this election cycle: student debt. “It totally limits your options of what you can do,” said one student in an ad from Kentucky U.S. Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes, who accuses Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of having “turned his
In the media
Suzy Khimm