Concentrated poverty has a new address, and this time it's not in the inner city. For many Americans, moving to a house in the suburbs means they've "made it," and overcome the economic stumbling blocks that kept them in cramped city apartments.
Apparently Justin Bieber has nothing to do with the new Los Angeles billboard that uses his image and name to oppose raising the minimum wage, on the grounds that such a hike would keep the teenage unemployment rate high.
Apple always seemed like the perfect company. Not so fast. When CEO Tim Cook testified before Congress on May 25, he didn’t come to talk about Apple’s latest amazing gadget or the need to grant more visas to computer programmers. Rather, in his maiden voyage to Capitol Hill as Steve Jobs’s successor, Cook had to defend the company’s tax-avoidance efforts. What should have been a triumph for Cook was instead an awkward encounter. [...]
For all the talk about inequality over the past two decades, scholars have known surprisingly little about what Americans think about the growing class divide and what they'd like to do about it, if anything.
Next month the Obama Administration will begin a nation-wide campaign to encourage low-income Americans to take advantage of the health insurance options that will come with the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion. Sounds like a great idea, right? A long overdue publicity campaign for an important piece of legislation.
It used to be that many Americans entered retirement having paid off their mortgages and most of their other debts. This should have been senior citizens' Golden Years.
Nowadays, more and more people over the age of 65 are struggling with mounting debt levels, fueled primarily by mortgages and credit cards. The average debt held by senior citizens has ballooned to $50,000 in 2010, up 83% since 2001, according to Federal Reserve data crunched by the Employee Benefit Research Institute. [...]
On May 21, I had the opportunity to testify before a Congressional Progressive Caucus meeting on how federal dollars drive inequality by paying contractors who pay too many of their workers too little. The hearing was driven by a study from Amy Traub and her colleagues at Demos, a New York based think tank, that issued a report exposing the many ways that federal contracting often adds to the burden of the low income, especially those who earn less than $12 an hour, or less than $25,000 a year.
According to a recent study, Gen X and late baby boomers are on track to replace only about half of their current income when they reach retirement — which means they’ll need to seriously downgrade their lifestyles. Most financial planners recommend replacing, at the very least, 70% of one’s income.
The Nation has an interesting cover story this week by a young radical named Bhaskar Sunkara, an editor at In These Times and a founder of Jacobin, a new neo-Marxist magazine.
Sunkara's basic point is hard to argue with and it boils down to this: liberalism won't get far without a radical movement that presses for more fundamental change:
It was just yesterday that I wrote about why Democrats and Republicans alike should be able to get behind bigger investments in infrastructure. One point I made is that it's cheaper to fix small problems now than big problems later.
Republicans and Democrats may never see eye-to-eye on certain types of government spending, such aid for the poor. But bipartisanship is more possible when it comes to other roles for the public sector. For instance, as I noted here a few weeks ago, President Obama's new federal initiative to map the human brain has received widespread support from Republican leaders, who have often backed increased science spending in the past two decades even as the GOP has made room for anti-science kooks like Senator Jim Inhofe.
The latest version of immigration reform proposes a long and winding road to citizenship, including a "Registered Provisional Immigrant" status nearly 11 million immigrants will fall under should the bill pass. Many of those 11 million new almost-Americans will need access to the same kinds of social services and financial assistance programs that existing low-income Americans are elligible for, including the Earned Income Tax Credit.
At a time when the mere phrase “high-frequency trading” makes some investors queasy, Brazil’s stock exchange is putting out the digital welcome mat. [...]
Wallace C. Turbeville, a senior fellow at Demos, a research group in New York, said most offers made by high-frequency trading firms were “illusory”: they exist not to be executed, but to measure, distort and exploit market sentiment, increasing volatility and costs for other investors.
Today, 23 May, is the annual general meeting (AGM) of financial speculator Goldman Sachs, the archetypal villain of the global economic meltdown, bailed out by US taxpayers to the tune of $5.5bn.
In response to today’s White House announcement of intended appointees to the Presidential Commission on Election Administration, Demos President Miles Rapoport released the following statement.
Most people don't think about them until they're gone.
They pick up your trays at the food court and empty the trash bins at the National Air and Space Museum. They make uniforms for the military and drive truckloads of federally owned goods. In other words, they quietly keep things running smoothly at federal buildings in Washington, D.C. and around the country.
But the two million or so low-wage workers who work for private companies on behalf of the federal government say they aren't recognized or compensated fairly, and they're sick of it. [...]
As the capital is engulfed in scandals, advocates of campaign finance reform are intensifying their pressure on Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, urging him to persuade the Legislature to rewrite state elections law in the hope that change in New York could have an influence nationally.
“I work at Quick Pita in the food court of the Ronald Reagan Building. I work nearly 12 hours every day serving lunch to the thousands of people who work in the building. But I am not here to tell you how hard I work. I am here to tell you that my employer does not follow the law,” testified Antonio Vanegas before a hearing of the Congressional Progressive Caucus yesterday.
Melissa Roseboro has worked at the McDonald's outlet at the Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C. for nearly a year. The 53-year-old grandmother said she just got a raise—of 8 cents.
That brings her hourly wage to $8.33 an hour and was the reason she joined 200 other federal contract workers in the nation's capital to stage a one-day walkout Tuesday, forcing several food outlets in the city to shut down for the day. [...]
A group of about 200 protestors stood outside of a Wendy’s restaurant near Union Square in New York City Saturday. They were demanding that the fast food company sign on to the Fair Food Program, an agreement not to buy agricultural products from farms that employ low wage Hispanic and Haitian farm workers.
The protest is part of a larger campaign that started in 2001 that has thus far pushed eleven retail companies including fast food companies like Taco Bell, Subway, and McDonald’s to sign on to the Fair Food Program.