Here's a quick question about your retirement savings: When was the last time you checked the fees on your 401(k)?
If you're like most Americans, chances are you're not sure what exactly your plan is charging you. Even though employers are now required to disclose more information about 401(k) fees, only about half of workers said they actually noticed the data, while just 14 percent made changes after reviewing the information, according to a 2013 study from the Employee Benefit Research Institute.
The same day President Obama was at Al Sharpton’s National Action Network conference deriding and lambasting voter ID laws, I was on a plane with the pro-voter ID blogger J. Christian Adams. Between the two of us, you won’t find two people at farther opposing ends of the voting rights spectrum.
Michael Lewis’ new book, “Flash Boys,” relates a real-life techno thriller in which a trader who identifies and ultimately thwarts a scheme deployed by piratical “High Frequency Traders” to squeeze a relatively small amount out of many stock transactions being executed electronically. As our hero’s trade bounced around hyperspace looking for the best price, the HFTs would detect its path, use their speed to get in front of the trade, and buy up the inventory so that the price of our hero’s trade could be dictated.
Weighing in at more than $1 trillion, student loan debt is now larger than total credit card debt. Morning Editionrecently asked young adults about their biggest concerns, and more than two-thirds of respondents mentioned college debt. Many say they have put off marriage or buying a home because of the financial burden they took on as students. [...]
High-frequency trading (or “HFT”) is suddenly the financial market scandal of the day. Michael Lewis has published a book that was featured on Sunday in a 60 Minutes report and in a story in the New York Times Magazine. HFT is the use of high-powered computers, blazing fast connections with exchanges, and sophisticated trading algorithms to transact in time frames measured in milliseconds or shorter.
Despite the fact that Tennessee has one of the most restrictive photo ID requirements for voting in the nation, the state is rarely discussed when voter ID is the topic. However, Tennessee’s law will now allow college students to use their university identification cards to vote, just like in Texas and North Carolina, the poster children of voter ID. In each case, it seems, students decided they were tired of being unseen and unheard.
New York is on the cusp of adopting a campaign finance reform that would amplify small donations with matching funds, reducing the power of big special interest money over the state's politics. It would also allow New Yorkers to claim the mantle of the first state to take back their democracy in the era of Citizens United and unprecedented campaign spending.
But adopting Fair Elections would accomplish something else badly needed in our democracy: more diverse representation in our political leadership.
Currently under consideration by state legislature, SB 975 is the third attempt to legalize payday loans (PDLs) in Pennsylvania since 2010. It claims to accommodate many of the criticisms against its predecessors, but the tweaks are superficial, and the basic impasse remains: that which makes payday lending profitable also makes it dangerous.
For decades, rapid economic growth has been the norm for developed countries. An educated workforce, a large population boom, major technological advances, and abundant fossil fuels were the key components of growth, generating substantial and broadly distributed increases in standards of living in many countries. We have grown so used to such growth that we inevitably view it as a panacea for a host of economic ills, whether it's a deep recession or income inequality.
We now understand, however, that the postwar growth paradigm is not environmentally sustainable.
As the nation’s trillion-dollar student debt continues to rise, a new analysis of public higher education’s funding finds dwindling state support is the key factor driving rising tuition costs and deepening student debt. According to Demos, a public policy organization advocating economic opportunity and inclusive democracy, over the last two decades state support for higher education funding shifted to a new paradigm.
I grew up just outside Detroit and have felt an ache in my heart for this bleeding city for so many years now. It's long been one of the country's designated loser cities, beginning in the 1960s, when change hit it hard. The phrase at the time was "urban blight," a social cancer with unexamined causes that, in the ensuing years, has gotten progressively worse.
A recent ProPublica article points to a number of pending lawsuits aimed at restoring key federal protections against racial voting discrimination. Up until last summer, certain states and jurisdictions with histories of preventing African Americans from voting were forced to have all election changes cleared by the federal government before implementation.
Biola Jeje, 22, graduated Brooklyn College last May with a degree in political science and a mission: Force lawmakers to address the $1.2 trillion student debt crisis. [...]
Jeje left college with $9,500 in student loans, less than half the $29,400 national average for four-year college graduates. She and her fellow activists are mobilizing support to march on Albany, New York state’s capital, to deliver a message to legislators. [...]
A coalition of progressive groups on Thursday formally began a new campaign aimed at curbing rising student debt and reducing the price of college.
The group of think tanks, student organizations, consumer advocates, and unions is targeting the country’s “increasingly dysfunctional system of higher education,” said Anne Johnson, executive director of Generation Progress, the youth division of the Center for American Progress, which is an organizer of the campaign. [...]
Much of the rancor around why they opposed Debo Adegbile for heading the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has been about Mumia Abu-Jamal. But it seems from their line of questioning that there’s also an agenda to undermine the Civil Rights Divisions’ duties to enforce voting rights and protect Americans against discrimination.
For higher education and student debt, this year’s budget mostly includes proposals we’ve seen from the Obama administration in previous budgets, speeches, or elsewhere.
The ink is barely dry on the report from President Obama’s election administration commission and states are already disregarding its blue-ribbon recommendations, namely around early voting. The endorsement of expanding the voting period before Election Day was one of the strongest components of the bipartisan commission’s report.