Media

Academic research backs up what most Americans already suspect: collectively, policymakers are playing hard for Team 1%.

The Wall Street Journal’s opinion page is often an exercise in how to completely misinterpret policy and/or data. Monday’s attack on Hillary Clinton’s speech on the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County is no exception.

Many Americans in these cash strapped times can relate to incurring an overdraft fee or bouncing a check. Ii's happened to nearly all of us and, mostly, we don’t expect it to impact our financial choices for the next five years to seven years.

College graduates with student loans accumulate less lifetime wealth than their debt-free classmates, according to a study released this month.

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.

Raising the pay of low-wage workers is becoming one of the top priorities of the progressive movement -- and a crucial test of that movement's strength. If Occupy Wall Street was a sprawling, diffuse howl against the new Gilded Age, the push to raise wages for retail and restaurant workers is a super focused manifestation of the same outrage at how skewed U.S. prosperity (and political power) has become. Occupy spotlighted the problem; the low-wage strikes are offering the solution, or at least one solution. 

“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.

For decades, the dictators of the Middle East basically gave the following rap to any westerner who questioned their tyrannical rule:

You may not like us, but we're better than the alternatives. We're better than a democratic government that will inevitably be hijacked by Islamists. And we're better than the sectarian or tribal civil war that will erupt if we don't keep a lid on things.