When Walmart broke the bad news to shareholders last week about declining same-store sales and cuts to their profit and sales projections, the company offered a glib explanation. "The retail environment was challenging," asserted Walmart Stores President and CEO Michael Duke. Company executives pointed to weather conditions and the January payroll tax increase to justify the disappointing sales, but larger questions about why consumers weren't buying were never addressed.
Here's something alarming to imagine: One day, your investment advisor at Merrill Lynch doesn't show up to his job. No warning, no nothing. He just doesn't show.
In June, five Supreme Court Justices rolled back the Voting Rights Act, widely considered the most effective tool in preventing discrimination in our nation's history. Section 5 of the act required that certain states and localities "preclear" proposed election changes with federal officials to ensure the changes were not discriminatory. The Court ruled that the formula used to determine which jurisdictions needed to get preclearance was outdated and unconstitutional. For those of us who care about voting rights, the question now is how do we respond?
While a college degree may give graduates a leg up in their careers, students who graduate with high student loan debt can find that ticket to be a costly one.
According to a study by the public policy research organization Demos, student loan debt may be more detrimental to your financial future than was previously thought.
It’s high drama and riveting politics these days as Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the nation’s most thoroughly red-state retailer, charges deep into blue-state territory in its efforts to expand beyond its comfortably established realm in rural America and suburbia by moving into the often hostile territory of inner cities.
The case for raising the pay of low-wage workers usually focuses on the here and now: The biggest low road employers have plenty of profits to spare and sharing them more equitably with their workers would do a load of good, including for the economy as a whole by stimulating more spending and growth. But cast an eye out into the future and you'll see an equally compelling case for upping pay: To avoid an unprecedented poverty crisis among tomorrow's seniors.
About two-thirds of the 20 million people who attend college every year borrow money to do so. We’ve heard a lot about how growing educational debt loads — the average student borrower now graduates owing $26,600 — can be a detriment to someone just starting out in life, and to the health of the broader American economy. Student debt loads are crowding out other things that young people historically spend money on, forcing them to delay marriage, home ownership, auto and other big-ticket purchases, investments in start-up businesses, and retirement savings.
“Whatever executive authority I have to help the middle class, I’ll use it,” announced President Obama in last month’s landmark economic address in Galesburg Illinois. Now consensus seems to be building around one thing President Obama can indeed use his executive powers to do to boost hundreds of thousands of workers into the middle class: raise their wages.
We hear a lot that college "isn't for everybody," but this phrase is typically applied to working class kids—with the suggestion that we should expand opportunities to get vocational training that leads to solid blue-collar jobs.
Of course, though, there are young people across the class spectrum who may not want to spend four years sitting in classes and doing piles of homework. And as I wrote yesterday, the financial downsides of college are higher now than ever.
On Monday, Ezra Klein argued that “conventional wisdom on Washington is that corporations win every fight and everyone else — particularly the poor — get shafted" is, wait for it, "wrong, or at least incomplete."
In 1965, in a nation torn by racial strife, President Johnson signed an executive order mandating nondiscrimination in employment by government contractors. Now, as President Obama has observed, the nation is divided by a different threat: widening income inequality.
Does America believe in second chances? In some cases, yes. Corporations get second chances all the time. For instance, nearly every major pharmaceutical company has been repeatedly fined by the Justice Department for either fraud or illegal marketing, and yet—because no individual executices are ever held accountable—most go on to break the law again. Ditto for many top financial firms.
When politics is dominated by the wealthy, the interests of the wealthy are advanced while the interests of lower income and working families are ignored.
Beth Simone Noveck and Carl Malamud are pushing the IRS to publicly disclose more data on tax-exempt groups, make it more accessible in electronic form, and to do so more promptly. Count me among the effort’s biggest cheerleaders. If this push succeeds, we'll have a better handle on a key sector in U.S. society—although we'll still be in the dark about crucial details of how nonprofits are funded.
U.S. Representative Marlin Stutzman said, "Most people will agree that if you are an able-bodied adult without any kids you should find your way off food stamps."
That depends on whether those ways can be found. If Stutzman and other members of Congress believe it's that easy to find a job with a living wage, they're either ignorant of middle-class life or they are victims of free-market delusion.
Texas didn’t discriminate against minority voters. It was only because they were Democrats. And even if it did, the racial discrimination Texas engaged in is nowhere near as bad as the stuff that happened in the 1960s.
It's no secret that sales taxes are a regressive way to raise revenues. And the heavy reliance on such taxes across the country explains why state tax systems tend to clobber the poor while asking little of the rich.
Critics of the fast-food worker strikes don't just make the mistake of relying on industry-backed research to argue that higher wages are unaffordable (see Jillian Kay Melchior's slanted and shallow piece in NRO) and ignore the real-live examples of U.S. states that have raised their minimun wage with no adverse effects (like Washington).
Once upon a time, we invested in our young people so that they could enter the world without debt. Now, we turn them into deadbeat debtors before they're old enough to legally buy a drink, left far behind their financial betters.