Media

This morning saw a big victory for Pennsylvania’s voters when a judge partially enjoined Pennsylvania’s strict new voter ID law in advance of next month’s elections.  Pennsylvania’s voters will not have to show a photo ID in order to vote a regular ballot this November. This victory will remove an unnecessary burden that threatened the freedom to vote for tens of thousands of voters this fall.

How would the 2012 election be different if many more young, poor and minority citizens paricipated? We would find out if we were to modernize our elections system. In most parts of the country, our elections system is stuck in the 19th century. Often intentionally, the patchwork of laws at the state and local level makes it difficult for voters to know how, when, and where to register.

If there are any truths to hang your hat on in the ongoing debate about the future of American healthcare, it’s this one: Medicare is really expensive.

Perhaps the volume hasn't been quite as loud as it was in 2008, perhaps a lot of the discussion has been subsumed into coded language, but the 2012 presidential election is still very much about redistribution: when it's fair, when it isn't, and, perhaps most importantly from a political perspective, whether Americans like it.

One of the few thin­gs that President Obama and Mitt Romney are likely to agree on when they debate next week is the need for tax reform. Both candidates have backed streamlining America’s crazy-quilt tax code, and both have said that reforms could boost economic growth. Meanwhile, two key congressional committees held a rare bipartisan hearing last week – with lawmakers from both parties saying that tax reform is needed to rev up the economy.

For years, many thoughtful people -- progressive thinkers, anti-hunger advocates, and business executives at the mercy of energy and food prices -- have appealed for relief from rampant speculation that distorts the commodities markets. Such speculation makes traders rich, but burdens American households, hurts businesses, and leads to empty bellies in areas throughout the world that are dependent on food imports.

It is always nice when a major newspaper points out one of the most obvious facts in Washington today: Which is that the main stumbling block to deficit reduction lies on the right, where ideologues won't give an inch on taxes and thus doom any realistic compromise to reduce the deficit -- compromise that must include a combination of spending cuts and additional revenue. 

In other words, it is precisely the people who complain loudest about rising debt who most obstruct any solution to this problem. 

As part of an event celebrating the National Employment Law Project, I participated in a panel moderated by Bob Herbert, former oped writer for the NYT (an extremely compelling one at that, whose themes were race, poverty, inequality, and justice) and now a senior fellow at Demos (the other panelists were Dorian Warren and Lynn Rhinehart).

It appears that the German Bundestag is ready to impose meaningful limits on high-frequency trading, or ”HFT.”

This is a very big deal.