When Congress narrowly missed another government shutdown in December by passing the “cromnibus” bill, much of the press coverage focused on Capitol Hill’s ongoing dysfunction. However, buried inside the bill was yet another blow to campaign finance regulations, dramatically increasing the amount of money donors can give to political parties. A single couple can now give up to $3.1 million to a political party over a two-year election cycle, a six-fold increase.
For about a month now, New England has been pummeled with massive winter storms, leaving large swaths of the region with feet of snow and frequently making travel impossible.
The U.S. economy has finally slugged its way out of the ditches.
The Wall Street Journalreports that Department of Labor job numbers indicate that the labor market improved in all 50 states, Puerto Rico and Washington D.C. in 2014.
Most people want to believe that their place in the world is something they earned, either through hard work, preparation, or both. I understand this sentiment. As a native of a country that reveres Horatio Alger-inspired tales of upward mobility, the idea that our status might be attributed to something we can’t control seems unfathomable.
Warren Buffett warned investors that bankers were still up to their old tricks in his recent investor letter. Vanguard founder Jack Bogle is writing about how high fee mutual funds are ripping off investors and endangering retirement security. And Fed Chair Janet Yellen is touting new, tougher capital rules for “Too Big to Fail” banks.
Fifty years after Bloody Sunday, I marched to the top of the Edmund Pettus Bridge with Mrs. Amelia Boynton Robinson, Congressman John Lewis, President Barack Obama, and many others.
In America, there is a strongly held conviction that with hard work, anyone can make it into the middle class. Pew recently found that Americans are far more likely than people in other countries to believe that work determines success, as opposed to other factors beyond an individual’s control. But this positivity comes with a negative side — a tendency to pathologize those living in poverty.
Maybe no economic statistic captures the continuing impact of the nation’s history of inequality better than the racial wealth gap. It has left a yawning gulf that separates whites from blacks and Hispanics. And it persists across income and educational levels in ways that have left whites who are high school dropouts with a higher median new worth greater than blacks and Hispanics who are college graduates.
If black families had the same opportunitites that white families have to increase their incomes through investments, retirement plans, and other asset-building measures, it would reduce the wealth gap between the two groups by nearly $45,000, or 43 percent, according to a report out Tuesday. For Latino families, it would reduce the gap by more than almost $52,000, or 50 percent.
The yawning racial wealth gap in the United States is no accident, but rather, driven by unjust public policy decisions—from the re-segregation of education to the redlining of home ownership to poverty wages, according to a new analysis by Brandeis University and the public policy organization Demos.
Latonya Suggs is one of 15 former students of Corinthian-owned schools called "the Corinthian 15" who are engaging in what they say is the nation's first student debt strike. They're refusing to pay back both their private and their federal student loans.
Strike Debt is helping provide legal support for the students for the consequences of the strike, which will be harsh if the group isn't relieved of its debts.
When New York State Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman announced that his office had cut a deal with the three big credit bureaus—Experian, Equifax and TransUnion—to improve the customer experience, the news shook the financial-services world into a frenzy.
“In today’s world, the consumer’s input is less important than the bank or collector’s input,” John Ulzheimer, an expert at CreditSesame, told the New York Times.
Owning a home, then equal pay for equal work, and then having a college degree are the three factors that can make the biggest difference in closing the racial wealth gap, which is how non-whites in America are vastly less wealthy than most whites.
If blacks and Latinos owned homes as widely as whites, then median black household wealth would grow by $32,113, and median Latino wealth would grow by $29,213, a new study by Demos, a progressive think tank, and the Institute for Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University has found.
In preparation for the 2016 presidential election, Democrats appear united around one candidate, while the Republican contest remains far from secured. Many on the left, who view Hillary Clinton’s stances as a tame brand of liberalism, have attempted to draft Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., to run. But the progressives do not need a charismatic leader. Instead, they need to invest in unleashing the disgruntled progressive majority.
Owning a home, then equal pay for equal work, and then having a college degree are the three factors that can make the biggest difference in closing the racial wealth gap, which is how non-whites in America are vastly less wealthy than most whites.
If blacks and Latinos owned homes as widely as whites, then median black household wealth would grow by $32,113, and median Latino wealth would grow by $29,213, a new study by Demos, a progressive think tank, and the Institute for Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University has found.
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The Massachusetts Department of Transitional Assistance has settled a 2012 lawsuit with voting rights organizations by agreeing to distribute voter registration forms to people applying for public assistance, to help people complete the forms and to provide oversight to ensure that public assistance workers abide by the requirements of a federal voting rights law.
The Department of Transitional Assistance will also pay $675,000 in attorneys' fees to the voting rights organizations.