Media

Heather McGhee, a national leader, policy expert and communicator, has been named the next president of Demos.

One of the more concrete actions President Obama can take tomorrow is announcing an executive order to raise the wages of federal contractors. As my colleagues, Amy Traub and Robbie Hiltonsmith found the federal government is the nation’s leading low-wage employer, with nearly two million private sector employees paid through federal contracts, grants, loans, concession agreements and property leases were paid $12 or less per hour.

If Congress won't raise the federal minimum wage, you can. At least for people who work for companies that get federal contracts, subcontracts and grants.

So says a group of liberals in the House and Senate who want President Obama to sign an executive order requiring federal agencies to give preference in awarding contracts to companies that pay workers no less than $10.10 an hour. [...]

Pew is out with a new poll on inequality and social mobility, with the usual findings about how divided the public is about these issues -- with Republicans tending to shrug their shoulders about inequality and blame individuals or government for people's economic problems, and Democrats tending to blame larger circumstances.

"I really enjoyed my time at Oberlin and I felt like I was learning, but I wasn't progressing towards a job at the end of graduation," said Ned Lindau, a 2011 graduate from Oberlin College in Ohio. He noted that his liberal arts education focused on students exploring subjects that they were interested in learning, not the practicality of a job after college.

WASHINGTON, DC – Yesterday, in a letter to President Obama, leaders for nonprofit voting rights organizations Demos and Project Vote alerted the White House that the application process for benefits under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) currently violates the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA).

In the letter, the groups urge the Obama Administration to take immediate steps to bring federally facilitated health benefits exchanges (FFEs) into compliance with federal law.

One way to think about politics today is that we have a bunch of public servants making chump change who spend an inordinate amounts of time hanging out with rich people, their noses pushed up against the window of an affluent lifestyle that they can't afford. Bad things happen in this situation.

"Relative mobility" measures how a child’s ranking in the income distribution compares to her parents'. “Absolute mobility” measures how your income compares with your parent’s income.