FREDERICKSBURG, Va. -- There's nothing Deidre Duffy would rather do than host a backyard barbecue for a few friends.
"I don't want anything fancy," Duffy, 53, said in an interview next to her black Weber grill. "Give me some charcoal and I'm going to shoot those flames about six feet high, and when they come down -- it's my favorite thing."
This effort could be a game-changer, a way to begin reversing the dangerous concentration of wealth and political power in the U.S. Naysayers will complain that proposals like this are doomed from the start because of the current makeup of Congress, especially the House. But that’s not so. Enhancing the impact of small donors is an important component of a broad, long-term effort to reduce the toxic impact of big money in an era of super PACS, Citizens United and rising inequality. Democrats in the House should be commended for pushing this initiative along.
A recent AARP Public Policy Institute report found that average credit card balances for households over age 75 jumped 31 percent during the recession. A separate AARP report found that boomers - households over age 50 - now have higher overall credit card debt than younger people - a reversal of previous trends.
The average combined balance on all cards in 2012 was $8,278.
The shocking allegations against four more elected officials in New York are depressing — but they provide an opportunity for bold action by our state leaders. Gov. Cuomo has proposed a new, comprehensive campaign finance law, including the creation of a voluntary, small-donor public financing system and an independent enforcement unit.
Collusion — and conflicts of interest — between politicians and billionaires now operate across borders. When he was president, Nicolas Sarkozy reserved special favours for the Qataris (including a tax exemption on their highest-value property purchases). Qatar is now prepared to back him in starting a private equity fund.
The IRS is under siege for investigating conservative political groups applying for tax-exempt status. But the real problem wasn’t that the IRS was too aggressive.
In 2012, no one, it seemed, could afford to sit on the sidelines. Having decried super PACs as "a threat to democracy," Obama and his advisers flip-flopped and blessed the creation of one devoted specifically to reelecting the president. Soon, they were everywhere, at the local, state, and federal levels.
Since NVRA was passed, citizens can now register to vote when they go to public assistance offices to apply for welfare or disability benefits, or at their local DMV when they apply for a drivers license — hence the nickname “Motor Voter Act” — and also allowed for mailed-in registration forms. The result was that over 30 million people registered via the new paths opened by NVRA in its first year.
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. [...]
With a contracting retirement income system, rapidly rising health-care costs, and the prospect of long-term care expenses, one would have thought that people approaching retirement would be paying off their credit card debt and closing out their mortgages. But surveys suggest that people are entering retirement with more debt than ever before and relying on borrowing to cover expenses in retirement.
Last month Nevada joined a growing number of states and cities that are forbidding companies from using credit checks to make employment decisions. But the practice is still legal under federal law. [...]
Credit reports weren’t designed to be job-screening tools. But about half of employers now use them when making hiring decisions, according to a 2012 study by the Society for Human Resource Management. The practice cuts across all sectors of the economy, from high-level management to office assistants, home health-care aides, and people who work the counter serving frozen yogurt.
For some job seekers, repeated rejection by potential employers may be traceable to an unlikely source: their credit report.
Regulators are cracking down on some of the methods companies are using to screen candidates (two major companies this week were accused of using background checks to discriminate against black applicants.) But employers’ use of credit checks during the hiring process is legal and fairly common.
Borrowing a line from Tolstoy, Gar Alperovitz’s latest book, What Then Must We Do?: Straight Talk About the Next American Revolution, seeks to resolve a troublesome political puzzle: How do we eradicate systemic problems like inequality, climate destruction, and poverty when these problems seem to get worse and worse, year after year, despite the good efforts of social reformers, progressives, and radicals of all stripes? Good question.
A Supreme Court decision Monday that struck down an Arizona law requiring people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote was hailed by voting-rights advocates as a big win. But several legal scholars say the ruling, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, could in fact set back the voting-rights cause in cases to come.
Can some types of debt cause the blues? Why are people approaching retirement age carrying credit card debt? This column shares results from recent research about credit card debt among older Americans. [...]
Q. How would you summarize the decision in a single sentence?
A. The court effectively rolled back an important provision of the Voting Rights Act, ruling that the act’s formula requiring federal preapproval of election changes for some states but not others was outdated because it was based on data from the 1960s and ’70s.
Q. Did anything in in it — or in the justices’ votes — surprise you?
A. I was not surprised by the votes of the particular justices.