Media

For decades, free high-school education helped strengthen the middle class and generate prosperity. So isn’t it time to extend the same thinking to college?

Deportations reached another record high last year. This is a striking development in light of the fact that illegal immigration and Border Patrol apprehensions have been falling for over a decade, and when — despite intransigence among some House Republicans — for several years there has been broad support for a fundamental restructuring of deportation policies.

Despite Friday’s unemployment rate dropping to 5.9 percent nationally, New York City is still home to the dead-end kids.

Half of the city’s 600,000 recent college graduates are either underemployed or out of work, according to New York Fed researchers.

Most of this 50 percent are working in jobs they are overqualified for — no college degree required — and that are often low-pay, part-time and without benefits. It’s a vast jobs wasteland out there for this Millennial generation. [...]

On Tuesday, Montgomery County Council unanimously enacted a public financing bill that will both encourage participation from small donors in the county and allow civic-minded individuals to run for county office without needing big contributions. Starting in 2015, the county will match small donations from in-county donors for candidates who opt in to the program, demonstrate local public support, and agree to accept only individual donations between $5 and $150.

When people like me write about the middle class, it has nothing to do with envy or class warfare—two shopworn epithets that should be retired from the political lexicon. The condition of the middle class—its size, income and self-confidence—reveals the extent to which economic growth increases opportunity. When the middle class is shrinking, when incomes of middle-class families are stagnating and when the heart of American society is losing hope in a better future, then the U.S. economy is in trouble. And so is the political system. [...]

Public colleges and universities took in $62 billion in tuition in 2013. These are schools that educate three of four American college students, and eliminating that entirely could be done just by rearranging what we already spend on student financial aid.

This American Life’s broadcast of recordings made by a former New York Fed employee has generated a wave of interest in the issue of regulatory capture of the Fed, a sort of “Stockholm Syndrome” that affects regulators who identify with the businesses that they regulate, in this case the big banks. Regulatory capture affects many agencies and is particularly concerning in light of the power of big banks, the potential for harm if oversight fails and the physical location of supervisors in the offices of the banks.

How bad a problem is inequality? Are working-class people getting screwed? Should we raise taxes on the rich? Is the United States, in short, a fundamentally unfair place? These are the questions that keep awake policy analysts and fuel endless dinner-party debates. But there's one group that is not losing very much sleep over them: rich folks.

Discrimination has no place in New York City.