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If it were up to you, how would you split up income between the top 10% and the other 90%? How should a country's wealth be distributed, and why? And, if more Americans truly understood the impacts and extent of income inequality, would they be moved to do anything about it?
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously warned in 1996 that welfare reform was a huge gamble and that the result could be extraordinary human suffering.
Those predictions came to seem extreme as the years passed. The boom of the late 1990s and then the credit fueled prosperity of the Bush years ensured a steady supply of low-wage jobs and, for a long time, it seemed that TANF was not the disaster many predicted.
Can some types of debt cause the blues? Why are people approaching retirement age carrying credit card debt? This column shares results from recent research about credit card debt among older Americans. [...]
When employers check credit as part of their hiring it creates a vicious cycle: out-of-work Americans can’t pay down their debts because they don’t have a job, but they can’t get a job because would-be employers hold their consumer credit history against them.
Today the Supreme Court put another nail in the coffin of the withering body of consumer rights. In the Italian Colors case, the Court held that a plaintiff cannot bring a class action to a court or arbitration when it has agreed to a boilerplate contract waiving its right to litigation or class arbitration, even where the cost of bringing the case as an individual is so prohibitive as to preclude the vindication of important statutory rights.
NEW YORK -- At a gathering of state leaders in Baltimore, Maryland, last week, Maryland GovernorMartin O’Malley made a strong case in support of the growing movement to rethink and re-orient how we measure economic performance and social progress, which he argues is a crucial step forward in meeting twenty-first century economic challenges. The “GPI in the States Summit” was organized by Demos and brought together public officials, researchers, and advocates representing twenty states from Maine to Hawaii.
In a keynote address last Friday in Baltimore, Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley broke down the reasons behind his administration’s decision to make Maryland the first state in the union to employ a Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), a quantitative assessment that integrates both the costs and the benefits of economic development into a monetary measure of whether growth is truly enhancing the welfare of individuals and communities.
One of the most pernicious myths of the past half century is that guaranteeing healthcare for all Americans would strike a mortal blow against this country's system of free enterprise.
Investment negotiators from Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) countries met secretly last week in Vancouver for their 18th round of talks regarding the expansive agreement. Frantic protestors, who caught wind of the conference through the Peruvian media, tried unsuccessfully to locate the talks and instead decided to hold a demonstration outside of the offices of Pacific Rim — a Canadian mining corporation.