Media

There is nobody like a mom in the low-wage service sector to demonstrate the day-to-day meaning of financial responsibility. But for the large number of households facing stagnant incomes, erratic schedules, and a rising cost of living, making a monthly budget doesn’t guarantee meeting it. When paychecks and savings don’t cover the bills, low- and middle-income households with credit cards often turn to plastic just to get by.

At The Atlantic today, Derek Thompson shows how the top 0.01 percent of income earners have seen their earnings explode over the past few years. As Thompson explains, the explosion in earnings is not from wages but from capital gains.

One of every 13 African Americans is disenfranchised due to past felony convictions compared with one of 40 adults in general.

It's tough being a progressive mayor when you don't actually have much power. Bill de Blasio's hands aren't just tied when it comes to hiking taxes on the rich or raising the city's minimum wage, both of which hinge on approval in Albany, he also has scant power over the large economic forces that shape life in New York or the generosity of the Federal safety net that keeps roughly half the city's population afloat. 

When Woody Harrelson's character got hired as a bartender on Cheers, he was so excited, he insisted on working for no more than the minimum wage. "I'd work like a slave," he said, "and, of course, I'd wash your car."

Most bar and restaurant workers would prefer to bring home a little more cash. They may be in luck.

Democrats are planning a yearlong campaign against economic inequality as the midterm elections approach, and President Obama will kick it off in earnest Wednesday when he signs an executive order raising the contracting standards for workers on federal contracts.

In the last year or two, something remarkable has happened in American politics. After decades in which future deficits, mostly caused by health care costs and conservative tax cuts, were invoked by those seeking to slash Social Security benefits for reasons of ideology or pecuniary interest, the national conversation has changed.