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WASHINGTON -- A bipartisan cadre of House lawmakers will move on legislation to deregulate Wall Street derivatives Wednesday, less than a week after Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) released adevastating report on the multibillion-dollar derivatives debacle at JPMorgan Chase.
For most young Americans, obtaining a secure place in society depends upon going to college. Three out of every four college students depends upon public colleges and universities. Yet the dream of achieving a rung on the college-educated ladder is slipping away as states reduce their commitments to higher education.
It’s not getting better. That’s the key finding of a new survey of low-wage workers out yesterday from the Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Chicago. Eighty-one percent of low-wage employees surveyed said their family’s financial situation was the same or worse than it had been four years ago, while 64 percent reported that their wages have been stagnant or declined over the past five years.
When Vernardo and Claire Simmons-Valenzuela married, they imagined all the trappings of a middle-class life. Soon enough, they had kids. Claire finished a master's degree. They held jobs as an Army medic and a physician's assistant. They dreamed of next steps: owning a home, taking their first vacation in years. Vernardo would return to school for a bachelor’s in nursing. But when payments for the couple's $187,000 in combined student loan debt came due, most of it accrued during Claire’s graduate education, they put those dreams on hold.
Imagine you’re a finance lobbyist and want to move deregulation and other industry-friendly policies through Congress. While you might think the House Financial Services Committee would be the logical place to do it — since it has jurisdiction over financial issues, naturally — what if there were a sneaky way to maneuver it through a far less scrutinized committee, so most people would have no idea what you were doing?
This is the story of how the world’s largest banks came to love the House Agriculture Committee.
With over twenty million Americans still unable to find full-time work, Washington can't take its eye off job creation for a minute. That's certainly the feeling of voters, who overwhelmingly told exit pollsters on Election Day last November that fixing the economy should be Congress's number one priority -- far more than said reducing the deficit.
Paul Ryan is known for his devotion to cutting spending, but even compared to his previous attempts, his latest plan, with its promise to balance the budget by 2023, is remarkable for its severity. It's also notable for how blantantly it renegs on the core principle of the Simpson-Bowles Commission agreements which promised that deficit reduction should not come at the expense of the poor or increase economic inequality.