On Tuesday, Sallie Mae reported that student debt over the past four years has been rising faster than blood alcohol levels at a beer pong tournament. Student debt shot up 44 percent over the past four years, with the average senior now carrying a $4,100 load. It only looks to be getting worse. The average freshman already has $2,000 worth of red. That's on top of the roughly $20,000 they'll have in other college-related debt.
The moral question is, who owns knowledge? Or who should own knowledge? Put another way, if most of our wealth comes from inherited knowledge — not what we do "today" — then isn't this part of our wealth, this knowledge, something which rightly should belong to everyone as a common inheritance?
Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly provide progressives with some welcome and fresh ammunition for fighting back and for justifying a redistributionist agenda in their new book, Unjust Deserts. Alperovitz and Daly are attempting nothing less than to shift the entire framework for our thinking about distributive justice.
But with so many women joining the work force, other expenses have skyrocketed for middle-class families, who have bid up prices for things like a home in a safe neighborhood with good schools. Other expenses in a dual-earner family -- including child care, an extra car for mom to go to work and rising college costs -- have gobbled up nearly all of the gains in salary, some argue.
Young adults between ages 19 and 29 make up the largest portion of uninsured in the United States, totaling about 13.2 million in 2007. That's right--young adults make up more than one-fourth of uninsured Americans.
This important cover story from the Detroit Metro Times sheds light on the predicament faced by so many young adults.
Each year, many talented students from low-income areas and families either choose not to attend college at all or drop out under the pressure to keep a job.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, brainchild of the Microsoft mogul, is out to change that. The organization recently unveiled an initiative to double the number of degrees earned by low-income students by the time they reach age 26.
As President Obama takes office, and the nation reflects on the historic moment and its significance, Demos Senior Fellows John Schwarz and Lew Daly remind us that America is more than just “common blood, or race, or ethnic background or religion.” America is about freedom, they argue, and its up to government to help establish the conditions for economic independence that have become central to the ideals of American freedom.
IF THE conservative era now collapsing around us had a reigning idea, it was best expressed by Margaret Thatcher when she declared with Bourbonesque flair that “there is no such thing as society.” In their new book Unjust Deserts: How the Rich are Taking our Common Inheritance and Why We Should Take it Back, Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly turn Thatcher’s premise on its head and with it the whole individualistic worldview that ruled our politics for the last three decades.
All over America, there were plenty of reasons to celebrate women last month: August marked the 88th anniversary of the 19th Amendment's ratification, which gave women the right to vote. Women's Equality Day, which was on August 26, commemorated that victory. There are now more women in the U.S. Congress than ever (88) and 2008 was a year when a woman came within a hair's breadth of becoming a major ticket presidential nominee.