Media

If you consider yourself part of the middle class, you could be forgiven for not standing at the ready after President Obama called for you to be reignited.

In the wake of President Obama's proposal to raise the minimum wage to $9 an hour, critics of the proposal are repeating the familiar point that it is mainly teenagers and part-time workers who earn the minimum wage -- groups that supposedly don't need much of a boost in their wages. 

Is that true? A succinct answer comes from a recent blog post by Doug Hall and Natalie Sabadish of the Economic Policy Institute. Here's what they wrote:

Gretchen Morgenson’s New York Times article on the New York Fed’s ongoing bailout of Bank of America is a much needed reminder of the tar baby embraced by the government in 2008 when it decided to save the banks in their current form rather than changing the system fundamentally.

Homeless families in New York City seeking relief from the extreme cold used to be supported by the city’s Code Blue policy, which requires homeless shelters to admit anyone who comes to their doors in below freezing temperatures. Since late 2011 however, the Bloomberg Administration has quietly changed the policy to a version in which only those who can prove they have no other alternatives are allowed admittance into shelters.

On Wednesday, the New York City Council passed a law banning discrimination against the unemployed by a huge, and veto-proof, margin -- 44 to 4.

Easthampton, MA – Today, more than 200 civil rights, voting rights and criminal justice organizations sent a letter calling on the U.S. Census Bureau to seize a timely opportunity to research alternative ways to count incarcerated people in the decennial Census.

President Obama's proposal last night to raise the Federal Minimum Wage to $9 (from $7.25) is sure to rekindle the perennial debate about whether such an increase will stall hiring for low-skilled workers, or whether small businesses will be able to sustain their payrolls with higher wage requirements. 

President Obama came out strongly for tax reform in his State of the Union address, casting this challenge as crucial for raising for new revenue and avoiding harsh cuts. Obama argued that the U.S. could:

save hundreds of billions of dollars by getting rid of tax loopholes and deductions for the well-off and well-connected. After all, why would we choose to make deeper cuts to education and Medicare just to protect special interest tax breaks? How is that fair? How does that promote growth?

We’ve highlighted how the U.S. media leads the world in the amount of time given to climate deniers, even though nearly 80 percent of Americans believe in climate change.