Sec. Hillary Clinton correctly noted the importance of the next president’s power to appoint Supreme Court justices. On no issue is this more true than on money in politics.
Bernie Sanders rang in the New Year with a rally in downtown Manhattan renewing his call to break up the big banks and jail executives who break laws. He also distilled the damage done by a predatory unconstrained economy into a single theme: for a long time, the rich have been getting richer as everyone else is mired in wage and wealth stagnation or worse.
Robert Hiltonsmith, a researcher at the think tank Demos, has estimated that the average household loses $155,000 in potential gains as a result of unnecessary fees.
Last month, President Obama inaugurated yet another way to encourage Americans to save for retirement. In the new myRA accounts, workers can save up to $15,000 in a low-fee investment plan that, like a government savings bond, guarantees the principal. The accounts are a small step toward helping households save, but they are not an effective solution to the coming retirement crisis.
Starting in 2020, the numbers of very low-income elderly will rise sharply as the retired population soars to almost 56 million.
Now that’s a holiday gift! On Tuesday, NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that approximately 20,000 employees of New York City would be guaranteed paid parental leave—giving mothers and fathers critical time off to bond with a new baby, adoptee, or foster child without giving up a paycheck.
Federal Reserve Board Chair Janet Yellen is living in a bubble because the Fed just doesn’t see that. Perhaps the Fed wants to put the brakes on an economy already struggling up a hill on low fuel? Amy Traub, a senior policy analyst at Demos, believes the Fed’s interest-rate hike is a “small step toward slowing down the economy.”
Although the Paris Climate Deal certainly represents a step forward for the international community, there are still many potential pitfalls to addressing climate change. New data suggest that the overwhelmingly white donor class may be one such obstacle.
As the Republican presidential candidates gather tonight, it’s worth noting where they’re debating. Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, the biggest outside spenders in the 2012 election, own the casino where CNN will host the debate, and have been meeting with several of the candidates to decide who to endorse. They’ll certainly be watching tonight.
Unfortunately, more and more retirees are falling into debt at the exact point in their lives when they should be free from financial worries. Whereas older people paid off their mortgages in generations past, now nearly half of all senior citizens still owe a house note.
But for many, even landing a job was not enough to make ends meet: of those 5 million job openings, nearly half paid less than $15 per hour, leaving only 2.7 million that paid $15 or more per hour. And for workers able to secure only part-time employment, wages were even more inadequate: in 2014, more than one in five part-time workers wanted full-time employment but were unable to find it.
The core finding: there are not enough living wage jobs to go around. And women and people of color are especially impacted by low wages and part-time work.
In my latest at Salon I explore a new working paper by political scientists Stephen Ansolabehere and Brian Schaffner, the most comprehensive examination of voters and nonvoters that has ever been performed. As I note my piece, studies of non-voters have been difficult because of small samples and because people often misrepresent whether they voted.
Last Wednesday a mass shooting in San Bernardino, the 355th this year, prompted a debate about the need for gun control. In an incredibly rare decision, the New York Times ran a front-page editorial calling for gun control.
What’s up with working-class whites? It’s a question that’s been asked for decades, and has been raised again recently in the discussion surrounding an Alec MacGillis piece examining Matt Bevin’s recent election gubernatorial win in Kentucky, which could leave many in Kentucky without Medicaid.
As Black Friday approaches, retailers nationwide are waiting anxiously to see whether the nation’s busiest shopping day will deliver a boost in profits. But perhaps no company has more at stake than Walmart, the shopping behemoth that was the world’s largest retailer until Amazon supplanted it in that role this summer.
However generous paid leave benefits are, whether employees actually use those benefits will depend a lot on the culture they work in and the social pressures they face.
Amazon, for instance, is "notorious for its competitive work environment, and simply having access to leave may not be enough if workers feel they will be penalized in their careers for taking it," said Amy Traub, a senior policy analyst at Demos.
This is doubly true for fathers, who are especially unlikely to take leave no matter where they wo
All in, 401(k) fees can range from 50 basis points up to 3 percent, said David Walters, a CPA and certified financial planner with Palisades Hudson Financial Group. Any plan charging more than 1 percent, Walters insisted, should be seen as suspect.
"Taken over an employee's lifetime, that can make a huge difference in what [workers] get to spend in retirement," Walters said.