Media

Shaun McCutcheon doesn’t like that there is a cap on the total amount of money that one person is permitted to contribute to federal candidates, parties, and political-action committees. And he is hoping that, someday soon, the Supreme Court will grant his wish by striking these limits when it rules on his case, McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission.

Should moral judgment be stripped out of social policy? Eduardo Porter argues yes today in the New York Times, calling for an end to the demonization of deadbeat dads -- a stance he says hasn't worked and shifts attention away from the economic reasons that low-skilled men find it so hard to be effective breadwinners these days. 

The Detroit Emergency Manager, Kevyn Orr, has announced the third iteration of a settlement of a massive derivatives deal gone wrong, a key element of the largest municipal bankruptcy in history. On the surface, it appears to be a significant improvement over the prior versions. But appearances can be deceiving.

"Obamacare." The right loves to hammer the Affordable Care Act with this tagline, and even the rest of us tend to us it. But we should not, for the label works at least partly as a racial provocation.

The credit reporting industry has a profound and growing impact on Americans' economic lives—from whether you can rent an apartment to how much your car loan costs to whether you get hired for a job—yet the entire system falls dangerously short on basic goals of fairness and accuracy. That was the conclusion of Demos’ 2011 foundational study on credit reporting and we called for urgent reforms.

Like other progressives in the think tank arena, I've spent a lot of time envying how supportive conservative foundations and wealthy individuals have been of places like Cato and the Heritage Foundation. The huge impact of the conservative policy infrastructure stands as one of the greatest success stories of philanthropy in modern times -- with relatively small foundations like Bradley, Scaife, and Olin clearly moving the needle in key debates through their think tank investments. 

President Obama has taken a lot of flak for his race-neutral policies (including from me), but he deserves praise for following up on his pledge made just over a month ago during the State of the Union. Today, President Obama announced My Brother’s Keeper, an initiative aimed to make sure that young men of color are given a more equitable shot at success. It’s a moment that I’ve been waiting for for years. Since Philadelphia.

NEW YORK—Yesterday, President Barack Obama announced the launch of a public-private initiative called My Brother’s Keeper aimed at creating opportunities for boys and young men of color. Today, Demos President Miles Rapoport released the following statement praising the project:  

“All of us at Demos applaud President Obama and the partners in the philanthropic community who helped create the program launched yesterday at the White House.

There's been a lot of back and forth about how much hardship and disruption is actually being caused by the Affordable Care Act, with tales of woe being swatted down even as other supposed horror stories pop up. But a different way to see things is that, yes, disruption is inevitable as the result of any large-scale health reform and that's simply a fact of life. Indeed, you could argue that if there's not a lot of disruption happening, then there probably hasn't been enough reform.