Media

President Obama’s recent comments on universal voting have spurred a debate about how such a policy would influence elections. On the Monkey Cage blog, John Sides examines the partisan consequences and argues that turnout would generally benefit Democrats, but that the effect would be modest.

The racial wealth gap in the United States is stark.

The median white household has $111,145 in wealth holdings, compared to $7,113 for the median black household and $8,348 for the median Latino household, according to a recent study called The Racial Wealth Gap: Why Policy Matters. [...]

Last Year, Germany announced it was making its university system free. Given mounting college costs in America, ATTN: wanted to interview a higher education expert to learn whether any best practices could be applied domestically. We spoke with Mark Huelsman from the New York-based think tank Demos for answers. [...]

NEW YORK (MainStreet) — When you stepped foot in your first job out of college, you may have heeded the conventional wisdom and opened a 401(k) account. But you may not have been aware that these retirement accounts don’t come for free.(...)

Yesterday, the federal court in New York appointed Demos co-class counsel in Floyd v. the City of New York, the landmark case challenging the NYPD’s use of the stop and frisk tactic. We now represent the thousands of mostly Black and Latino pedestrians who have been or will be unlawfully stopped by the NYPD.

Today, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau released a blueprint for new regulations pertaining to payday loans and car title loans. The regulations will not include an interest rate cap, the holy grail for advocates, because industry allies watered-down the provisions (I discuss the fight over payday lending in my recent Atlantic article).

Last week, Massachusetts became the latest state to either settle or lose in litigation over complaints that it wasn’t providing adequate voter registration services at welfare offices.

The settlement is part of a broad effort by voting rights groups to reverse the decline in voter registrations at public assistance offices, which Congress intended to serve as a mechanism for signing up low-income voters. National voting rights groups argue that the decline in registrations is because of improper implementation by staff at government welfare offices. (...)