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New York, NY -- In his State of the Union last night, President Obama hit on four key issues where Demos is engaged and where progress is long overdue: voting reform, the minimum wage, universal pre-K, and higher education.
On the bipartisan voting commission, Brenda Wright, Vice President of Legal Strategies:
After a campaign season marked by climate silence, the President’s inaugural call for action on climate change left hope that the administration was serious about making climate a priority. And, there were parts in last night’s State of the Union that were promising, beyond the simple fact that he addressed the issue at length. First and foremost, the President tied extreme weather events to climate change.
“I’m trying to think of another industry where a 20 percent error rate would be acceptable.” says 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft, in a new exposé of the credit reporting industry. “That’s a pretty high error rate.”
NEW YORK – National public policy organization Demos announces experts available for commentary on and around President Obama’s State of the Union address.
As Saturday’s “technical release” from our chums at the Department of Labor reminds us, Obamacare will require all companies, small businesses excluded, to provide health insurance to those working 30 hours per week or more in 2014. Along with some noise the IRS is making about how universities pay their faculty, this is causing some serious anxiety in higher education.
Demos has produced a very important document about our austerity crisis. I don't think its conclusions will surprise many of you, but it certainly should be eye-opening to general public. It discusses the well-known fact that austerity is counter-productive in an economic down turn and that unemployment remains our greatest barrier to a full recovery. And it lays out the time-line of the politicians' obsessive focus on deficits at exactly the wrong moment.
The blizzard that pounded the Northeast on Friday was no Hurricane Sandy, but it has left thousands of people without power throughout the region. For some households, losing power may be no big deal. But if you're old or disabled, this can be a dangerous situation.
The problem is that it's hard in most communities to know which residents may badly need help. After Sandy, hastily organized volunteers knocked on doors in buildings in Rockaway and other places to identify the old and frail.
High unemployment and underemployment forced one in four Americans to pull money out of a retirement plan to make ends meet.
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A separate study on credit-card debt done by Demos, which surveyed some 997 households, warns that middle-income households of those nearing retirement are running up huge credit-card bills.
According to the study, “Older Americans now have higher overall credit-card debt than younger people — a reversal of the trend Demos found in its 2008 survey.”