The need for books as a source of knowledge was on display in a conversation between Heather McGhee, president of liberal think tank Demos, and Chris Hayes, a Brooklyn native and cable news pundit on MSNBC. [...]
"These consumer protections are important, yet they are far from sufficient to prevent credit checks from becoming a barrier to employment," said Amy Traub, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a public-policy think tank in New York City. "My research finds that poor credit is linked to economic stress. Weak credit is correlated with unemployment, lack of health coverage and the presence of children in a household.
TRANSITIONS -- Arlene Corbin Lewis has joined the D.C. office of the public policy think tank, Demos, as the director of communications. She previously was at the Case Foundation where she was the VP for communications
Even before the Equifax breach, the integrity of credit reports was murky at best. A Federal Trade Commission report found that as many as one in five consumers had a credit error from one of the top reporting agencies (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion). But the fundamental problem isn’t data integrity—it’s economic justice. According to a survey by the think tank Demos, declining credit was associated more with misfortunes and unforeseeable crises than with a lack of financial responsibility.
Another solution — though one that is often a struggle to achieve — is to unionize, which has worked before in industries like teaching, policing, and manufacturing. “If retail workers were able to organize strong unions across the country, there’s no reason retail jobs couldn’t be good jobs like manufacturing jobs,” Amy Traub, Associate Director for Policy and Research at public policy organizationDemos, tells Bustle.
That Texas' discriminatory and partisan voter ID law was allowed to continue is evidence of the Supreme Court's failed understanding of its constitutional responsibilities.
Some are heartened to see functioning-for-free college popping up in places like New York and elsewhere. Mark Huelsman senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank and the author of an influential white paper on free college, said he hopes they’ll serve as “laboratories” for policymakers to understand both the benefits and the limitations of different free college program designs.
“In our interconnected society, racism — both interpersonal and institutional — is the flaw in the machine that often stymies our democracy and our economy,” McGhee, who’s working on a book on this topic, said. “Racism and bias against full portions of the population color the policy responses of elected officials.” [...]
Heather McGhee became the president of Demos, a New York-based think tank focused on creating a democracy where all people have an equal chance in our economy, when she was just 33 years old (she turned down the job at least five times, she says, before her colleagues finally convinced her to take it).
With only the wealthy funding and communicating with the campaigns of elected officials, politicians are incentivized to make policy decisions that align with their donors’ interests, not those of their broader constituency. But the elite donor class holds views that don’t align with the general public’s, as a 2016 Demos study detailed.
Employees would likely contribute less to IRA accounts
If the proposal passes, there is a strong indication that U.S. workers will either shift their savings to Roth Individual Retirement Account (IRA) accounts, where contributions are taxed immediately or employees and employers will contribute less for retirement.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court is delaying its early November argument over Ohio's effort to purge its voter rolls because one of the lawyers for the challengers is ill.
Allie Boldt for Demos: In 2015, by a 26-point margin, Seattle voters passed an initiative that has the potential to transform Seattle elections. The initiative established a first-in-the-nation program that gives Seattle residents $100 in "democracy vouchers," which they can distribute to candidates who pledge to receive more of their funding from small-dollar sources and less from big money.
Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute, a challenge to the procedure that Ohio uses to remove inactive voters from its voter-registration lists, had been scheduled for oral argument on Wednesday, November 8, but it will be postponed to a later, as-yet-undetermined date.
The ACLU of Indiana, national ACLU and voting rights group Demos are representing Common Cause in the suit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana.
Algernon Austin is an economist at the think tank Demos and the author of the book America Is Not Post-Racial.
"I think what sometimes people miss is, what are the comparisons?"
He points out that college-educated and high-earning black folks are in many ways more likely to be better off than black people who earn less.
But Austin, who did not work on NPR's poll, adds there is overwhelming data showing that when comparing educated and high-earning blacks to their white counterparts, the gap is substantial.