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Over the past few years, many observers of America's housing market have been documenting a remarkable rebound in demand for walkable housing and office space in urban areas, driven by Millennials and empty-nester Baby Boomers.

If you follow the stock market, you'll notice that big public companies are paying out all sorts of special dividends early to avoid a dreaded tax hike on such earnings. If the Bush tax cuts lapse, the top dividend tax rate will rise from 15 percent today to 39.6 percent on January 1. Or, if President Obama gets his way, dividend tax rates will go up only for the top 2 percent of earners, while remaining unchanged for everyone else.

In other words, dividends may once more be taxed as regular income -- and that's how it should be. 

From Burger King to Walmart, the low-wage workers we depend on to staff America’s consumption-driven economy are tired of being overworked and underpaid, and they are letting their bosses know. 

As deficit talks continue to make little progress, we should revisit how a carbon tax would not only help raise badly needed revenue but could also be essential to fighting the climate crisis. A recent Congressional Research Service report found that a tax of $20 per metric ton of carbon dioxide would generate enough revenue to cut the 10-year budget deficit in half.

With fast food and Walmart workers striking for living wages and decent benefits, the corporations they enrich have never fared better. Catherine Rampbell analyzes the 3rd quarter GDP report for 2012.

Lewis Powell wanted executives selling tires or aspirin to take on an additional job: selling capitalism itself. Today, the disparate strands of the progressive movement must learn the same lesson, advocating not just for people but for the very idea of the people. Ours is the world’s greatest experiment in democracy: to create one, mutually supporting community of interest out of ancestral strangers—geographically distant, multi-origin, multi-ethnic, multiracial. Our inability to do that has been the Achilles’ heel of liberalism. It’s why we are not yet the 99 percent.

It is really terrific to see retailers here giving critical attention to the Demos study. As a former business owner in the health services industry, I do realize that these problems are more than just abstract theory. That's one of the reasons why Demos and I thought it would be useful to evaluate the possibilities for adopting this business model across the retail sector, especially as the importance of retail to the US economy continues to grow.

At least one form of rampant speculation has been closed down. Mary Schapiro will step down from the Chairmanship of the SEC by the end of the year. One of her fellow Democratic Commissioners, Elise Walter will take over, leaving a vacancy on the five-member Commission and an even split between Democrats and Republicans. Commissioner Walter is extremely close to Schapiro, virtually an alter ego.

Exit polls taken on election day leave little doubt that Americans care much more fixing the economy than lowering the defict. Nearly 60 percent of voters said the economy was the most important issue facing the country; just 15 percent named the deficit.