For all the talk about the need for voter-identification laws, you’d think millions of Americans were impersonating dead people to get their candidates elected, or casting multiple ballots after breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
The newest GDP release shows an increase of 1.5 percent in the second quarter of 2012, down from a 1.9 percent growth in the first quarter and three percent growth in 2011. But, as Demos continually asks in our Beyond GDP work: What exactly is GDP measuring?
One of the main reason alternative indicators are important is that they take things that we value on a visceral level, like the environment, and put them into the universal language of capital.
One of the big questions environmentalists struggle with is whether there should be a price on nature. For some things, like the cost savings that are realized through cleaner air or water, there is a rote calculation that can be done to price out environmental and health benefits. But, if you think of nature as an independent entity having a worth beyond what it can provide to humans, how do you put a price on it? How much is the Amazon River or the Himalayan mountain range worth?
A group responsible for development of the Willets Point space next to Citi Field said Walmart wouldn’t be a part of its conception.
Late last week, the Daily News reported that Walmart quietly lobbied city officials to include them in the development of the area near Citi Field that currently houses auto body shops. Regardless, according to the group responsible for the development project, Walmart’s lobbying efforts are news to them.
Wal-Mart has been the target of union campaigns for years. Why? Because Wal-Mart is the biggest fucking retailer in the world, and the most famous anti-union company in America. It makes sense for both practical and symbolic reasons. In L.A. right now, unions and worker advocates are trying to stop the construction of a new Wal-Mart in the city's Chinatown district. But Wal-Mart has an ally in the fight: the Wall Street Journal.
When I was a student, my English-major friends warned me that economists were people who didn’t have enough personality to become accountants. It seemed like a terrible accusation at the time. Today, I worry less about the personality than the efficacy of both professions.
Investors who were paying attention got a cold slap of reality this spring when the progressive think tank Demos released a study showing that the median household could expect to pay more than $150,000 in 401(k) fees over the course of a working lifetime, or about a third of potential investment returns. What's more, about two-thirds of 401(k) investors had no idea that they were paying such fees.
It seems there is little real relief on the horizon.
“If you’re coming out of college with an average number of $20,000 to $25,000 in debt and there’s no job out there, you’ve got a real problem,” said John Quinterno, a researcher who has studied the consequences of student debt.
Summertime in an election year in Colorado always has a certain excitement. Candidates marching in parades, petitioners gathering signatures at festivals ... some years we even get regular visits from the presidential candidates. Coloradans experience democracy in action well before Election Day.
Some eight years ago, I was at a presentation by Vanguard founder Jack Bogle at a business journalists' conference in Denver, and when his PowerPoint crashed, and he had to use transparencies on a vintage 20th-century overheard projector. After the presentation, he let me keep them, and they still serve as a sort of Rosetta Stone for me for enlightened investing.
Many Florida families have been paying up to 25 percent of median income for public in-state college costs — out of reach for some middle-class parents who have taken recent pay cuts or lost jobs, according to a new study.
The ugliest presidential campaign I ever hope to see was the one George H.W. Bush waged against Michael Dukakis in 1988. Poppy Bush governed like a (relative) moderate, but in 1988 he campaigned like a hard-right bigot, relentlessly attacking Dukakis over an assault-rape committed by the convicted murderer Willie Horton, a very scary-looking African American, during a prison furlough (under a program created by Dukakis's Republican predecessor as Massachusetts governor). Say what you will about 41’s son and eventual successor, George W.
Recall your last voting experience: chances are you were packed into a school cafeteria, shuttled along to a table where someone checked your name off a long list of registered voters, and you cast your ballot before rushing to work.
It’s no secret that some very rich people support the super PACs and other groups that have inundated the 2012 campaign with unlimited sums of cash. But a study to be released Thursday details the extent to which this kind of donating is the sport of the One Percent.
The United States needs to be reimagined. A recent study from the Pew Research Center tells us that in economic terms the middle class "has suffered its worst decade in modern history." It's shrinking.
With jobs scarce, wages declining and the nation's wealth concentrating ever more intensely at the top, the middle class has shrunk in size for the first time since World War II.
The November presidential election, widely expected to rest on a final blitz of advertising and furious campaigning, may also hinge nearly as much on last-minute legal battles over when and how ballots should be cast and counted, particularly if the race remains tight in battleground states.
The good folks at Demos, led by the indefatigable Liz Kennedy, released a report today about the legal underpinnings under what Demos predicts will be an epidemic of direct voter challenges at the polls themselves come November. This, alas, is neither new — challenging Hispanic voters at the polls in Arizona is how William Rehnquist got start in politics — nor is it particularly surprising. The new voter-suppression laws in several states are only half the plan.
Elisabeth Badinter is picking a fight with her book The Conflict, in which she demonizes pretty much every form of maternal bonding. And I was pleased to see Sarah Blustain give it to her in “Mère Knows Best”, rightly mocking Badinter’s attacks on social science, breast-feeding, and ecology. No writer should get away with defending the cancer-causing chemical BPA in the name of feminism, and Blustain doesn’t let her.
The right to vote is a fundamental freedom that protects the other essential freedoms that Americans hold dear. It is at the heart of what it means to be an American citizen. Elections in American should be free, fair, and accessible, and voters should not have to overcome burdensome barriers to cast their ballot.