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Mr. Panesso was rejected for jobs at several more big national retail chains. But J. Crew, he said, was the only business to send him an adverse action letter. Did that mean the others rejected his application for other reasons? It’s impossible to know for sure.

A study released earlier this month from the public policy group Demos states that through various forms of government funding in the private sector, nearly two million people are making $12 an hour or less. The number of workers at Wal-Mart and McDonald's together at $12 an hour or less is currently around 1.5 million, according to the report.

"The sheer number of those workers making so little is surprising," said Amy Traub, a senior policy analyst at Demos and co-author of the study.

Let's say you're president of a presitigous liberal arts college with a nice endowment and you have enough money to give out a decent level of financial aid every year. How do you deploy that aid? Do you a) focus it on smart lower income kids who wouldn't be able to come to your college without aid? Or do you b) focus the money on even smarter affluent kids whose parents have plenty of money to pay full freight? Or even on rich kids who are less smart than poorer applicants? 

Regardless of the rationale behind these credit checks, this practice can be discriminatory, say Daniel Garodnick and Amy Traub in the New York Daily News. For instance, "African-American and Latino households are disproportionately likely to report poor credit, a finding some attribute to the nat

Big businesses, such as Wal-Mart and McDonalds, get a bad wrap for providing low-wage jobs. But, Americans may be surprised to know that they're funding a low-wage labor pool larger than both of these companies combined do, a new report by Demos, a public policy organization, shows.

For forty years now, it has been fighting against the forces of modernization -- including individualism, social freedom, secularism, multiculturalism, ecological consciousness, and evidence-based active government. 

Getting Americans to borrow and spend lots of money can produce a nice economic sugar high, as we saw during the Bush years. But the party can't last forever and, eventually, heavy debt servicing acts as a drag on the economy. After all, the more money that debtors are forking over to banks every month in the form of interest payments, the less they have to spend on everything else.

The banks have systematically figured out how to rip off the government,” Lerner says. 

Part of that ripoff was the LIBOR scandal, which had a “massive consequence on everything,” according to Wallace Turbeville, a former Goldman Sachs employee and current senior fellow at nonpartisan think tank Demos.

Even with a freeze on basic pay rates and unpaid leave days and repeated attacks on the federal workforce, being a federal employee means you have a good, though as of late, a less-lucrative job.

That can’t be said by everyone in the federal workplace.