Given that low-income households often don’t have the luxury of professional tax preparation, the tax system might be a particularly brutal delivery mechanism for them. Nowhere is this more apparent than how we currently subsidize the cost of college at tax time.
President Obama this week touted new ways to help students pay for college, but he also proposed stripping away a popular benefit: a significant tax advantage of college savings plans used by millions of American families.
How would you fare with President Obama’s State of the Union middle-class economics proposals to “turn the page” if you’re 50 or older? It depends. [...]
Today, President Obama announced a proposal to make two years of community college tuition-free. It’s a big deal. But it would be just as powerful a signal if we promised students a debt-free system of public higher education, one that could be financed entirely through part-time or summer work and modest savings.
Thousands of families in the United States are separated due to immigration laws that have affected hard-working immigrants who are just trying to support their families.
While Corinthian and its campuses may downsize or disappear completely, we should be concerned the students who attended its campuses and are currently in no man’s land.
On a new survey which finds that hedge funds and traders of stocks and bonds are predicted to see bonuses drop by as much as 10 percent from last year.
This past Friday, in a speech to the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, the Federal Reserve Chair, Janet Yellen, spoke out on the evils of economic inequality in the United States. She noted that the steady growth in inequality over the past several decades represents the most sustained rise since the 19th century.
For decades, free high-school education helped strengthen the middle class and generate prosperity. So isn’t it time to extend the same thinking to college?
Public colleges and universities took in $62 billion in tuition in 2013. These are schools that educate three of four American college students, and eliminating that entirely could be done just by rearranging what we already spend on student financial aid.
When people like me write about the middle class, it has nothing to do with envy or class warfare—two shopworn epithets that should be retired from the political lexicon. The condition of the middle class—its size, income and self-confidence—reveals the extent to which economic growth increases opportunity. When the middle class is shrinking, when incomes of middle-class families are stagnating and when the heart of American society is losing hope in a better future, then the U.S. economy is in trouble. And so is the political system. [...]
How bad a problem is inequality? Are working-class people getting screwed? Should we raise taxes on the rich? Is the United States, in short, a fundamentally unfair place? These are the questions that keep awake policy analysts and fuel endless dinner-party debates. But there's one group that is not losing very much sleep over them: rich folks.
The FDIC estimates there are 10 million people living in the U.S. who do not have a bank account — that’s one out of every 13 households. Nearly 33 percent of people living in Starr County, TX can’t write a check. In one census district in Savannah, GA, over 42 percent of residents are unbanked. The unbanked are usually poor, often minorities, and find themselves shunned by banks that can’t make money off them. Typically, they end up turning to predatory check cashers and payday lenders. Many also feel a great sense of social division between themselves and those who have bank accounts.
Democrats in tight races have found a new villain this election cycle: student debt.
“It totally limits your options of what you can do,” said one student in an ad from Kentucky U.S. Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes, who accuses Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of having “turned his back on the students” for blocking Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s student loan refinancing bill.
When the Senate went to college, they paid an average of just over $11,443. If they attended the exact same institutions today, they’d pay an average of $32,279.
It’s hard to make broad causal inferences about student debt and homeownership among recent graduates, because there are simply too many factors in play.
Michael was a human being. This is a simple truth, Michael’s humanity. Yet it is also implicitly a fragile insight, one that the police indifference to the dignity of his corpse and to the sentiments of his gathering neighbors suggests that many officers failed to grasp.
President Obama should sign a Good Jobs executive order to encourage contractors to improve workplace benefits and respect their employees’ rights to bargain collectively.