Media

Proposals to raise the minimum wage are enormously popular with the American public, but there’s a reason they are successful only on occasion.

The powerful business lobby is quite effective at getting through to lawmakers with their message that higher wage requirements will lead to less employment. That’s a particularly potent argument in today’s environment, after four years of elevated unemployment levels.

In the latest anti-HFT salvo, a 12-year veteran of Goldman Sachs Monday applied a new definition to the essence of high frequency trading, seeing it as a purposeful distortion of the flow of market information rather than just a successful trading technique. With that he also prescribed a financial transaction tax as part of a cure.

“The very rich,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, “are different from you and me.”

It turns out he was right. According to a new study by the think-tank Demos (PDF), the affluent tend to hold a different vision of a just society than the public at large, and it is that vision which tops the political agenda in Washington and in state houses across the country.

If you've got debt and die tomorrow, don't assume it will disappear. Chances are, it will eat into the assets you may be planning to leave your heirs and may even wipe out your estate.

You may have seen a big outbreak in the academic literature and business media of defenses of liquidity for liquidity’s sake, evidently prompted by increased interest in and in the EU, implementation of transaction taxes as a way to tame speculation and secondarily raise revenues.

Another monthly jobs report is in, and the results are better than most people expected: 236,000 new jobs were created last month. That's the best economic news we've heard in a while.  

While recent CBS and Gallup polls show that most Americans remain divided over whether or not the recent sequestration cuts are in fact negative, many low-income families are already bracing for their impact. SNAP benefits and the Children's Health Insurance Program may be safe, but WIC benefits and certain housing vouchers are scheduled to take a blow, leaving many families without resources to fall back on. 

New Jersey was ready when Hurricane Sandy rushed ashore the evening of October 29, 2012. Teams from FEMA and the National Guard had been activated, nuclear reactors had been shut down, and the Red Cross had prepared meals and shelters.

The carefully laid plans didn’t prevent the storm from wreaking record-setting devastation – including 37 deaths in New Jersey alone.

It is often assumed that the majority of Americans who don't vote are poor and nonwhite. Not so. While it is true that low-income Americans vote at much lower rates, the majority of nonvoters -- in raw numbers -- are white middle class Americans.