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The economy plummets. You lose your job. Soon, you start to find it hard to make ends meet. You start putting things on your credit card. Then you fall behind in your card payments. All the while you’ve been desperately looking for a new job. Little do you know that being behind on credit card payments may stand between you and a job – the very thing that could get you back on the road to financial health.

Increasingly, states and municipalities are stepping in to fill the federal void on regulating and banning fracking. California has at least eight bills looking to regulate and/or tax fracking operations. Vermont became the first state to ban the practice.

This morning the Senate Banking Committee will hold a hearing on the nomination of Richard Corday  to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. On the merits, Cordray should breeze through.  The politics, however, are destined to be thornier.

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.

Opponents of income redistribution often argue that taking from the haves and giving to the have-nots is at odds with individual rights. 

But here's a simple fact: There is no surer way to lose all your individual rights than to be dead.

And evidence keeps mounting that people with lower incomes die earlier. In effect, one result of inequality that the all-important right of living is enjoyed more by some members of a society than others. 

Opponents of income redistribution often argue that taking from the haves and giving to the have-nots is at odds with individual rights. 

But here's a simple fact: There is no surer way to lose all your individual rights than to be dead. And evidence keeps mounting that people with lower incomes die earlier. In effect, one result of inequality is that the all-important right of living is enjoyed more by some members of our society than others.