The media shouldn't be scaring students away from going to college, because the alternative of not going is worse. Unfortunately, our move to a debt-for-diploma system is doing a good enough job of that itself.
President Obama's big speech at West Point today on America's role in the world is getting lots of attention from foreign policy wonks, but anyone interested in domestic policy should also be paying keen attention. Why? Because how the U.S.
It was certainly a nice theory that the Founders had: make Congress more responsive to the people by putting members of the House up for re-election every two years. With so many state elected offices also up for the grabs, and the staggering of Senate terms, midterm elections became even more consequential over time than the Founder probably ever imagined.
The left and right will never agree on many economic questions -- like how government can best stimulate growth -- but when you get down in the weeds there are places for a real conversation. At least with a smart guy like Michael Strain, who's a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of a chapter on reducing unemployment in the new conservative manifesto, Room to Grow.
In recent days the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, often working through independent contractors, has started cutting off service to up to 120,000 delinquent citizens, while giving a pass to major corporate laggards. The Great Recession has crushed the people of Detroit, with unemployment rates soaring as high as 35 percent in this period. At the end of 2013, 47 percent of the mortgages were still under water. They simply cannot pay. How could such draconian measures be justified?
Times are tough for creative people in the entertainment industry -- even as big profits roll in for corporations like Viacom and Disney. It's a familiar story, only in this case its film editors, make-up artists, and musicians who are getting creamed.
Proxy season is the magical time of year when shareholders cast their votes on corporate governance. Since 2011, the ‘Say on Pay’ provision of Dodd-Frank ensured those votes would include an up-or-down non-binding voice in executive compensation packages. If that sounds toothless, well, hardly anyone is even getting gummed. According to Equilar’s say on pay tracker, most companies’ executive compensation plans passed with 90-plus percentage majorities.
Income and wealth disparity has emerged as a critical economic and political issue for the US. At its core, it is a discussion of how we measure whether the economy is increasing or decreasing the well-being of Americans as a whole. Traditional measures like GDP growth, the stock market and even unemployment rates do not capture the circumstances of today’s economy.
President Obama is expected to announce an Executive Order that would extend the protections of Income-Based Repayment (or more specifically, Pay As You Earn) to student borrowers who took out loans before 2007 or stopped borrowing by 2011.
The recent Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page paper finding that ordinary citizens have, “little or no independent influence on policy at all.” While the paper was covered extensively in the popular press, few bothered to even read the paper which notes, “ the preferences of average citizens are positively and fairly highly correlated, across issues, with the preferences of economic elites.” Gilens’s data look at only tho
It has been less than two months since the Supreme Court issued its plurality decision in McCutcheon v. FEC and already two district courts have voiced strong concerns with the decision.
Commenting on the recent spate of mass shootings, President Obama said, “If public opinion does not demand change in Congress, it will not change.” He added, “Most members of Congress—I have to say to some degree this is bipartisan—are terrified of the NRA.” Obama is partially wrong to claim that the public needs to “demand change in Congress,” given the large li
In the wake of the Supreme Court's recent decisions in Citizens United v. FEC and McCutcheon v. FEC, this amendment is a necessary counterbalance to the deluge of money that wealthy individuals, corporations and special interests have flooded into our elections.
Brookings Institution researchers Beth Akers and Matt Chingos set the internet in a tizzy today with some “counterintuitive” research on student debt, with the takeaway for some being that student debt is not, in fact, the burden that the media (and policymakers) would have you believe. There are some pretty big caveats to their findings.
Yesterday, Senators Sheldon Whitehouse, Charles E. Schumer, Michael Bennet, Richard Blumenthal and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts re-introduced the DISCLOSE Act, a comprehensive disclosure legislation that came within one vote of overcoming a party line filibuster and adopting comprehensive disclosure legislation. This time, Congress should pass the DISCLOSE Act and require disclosure of contributions to organizations engaged in political spending.