Media

The American food industry has made a killing for years by pumping their products full of unhealthy but delicious ingredients. This was documented most recently by Michael Moss in his book Salt, Sugar, Fat: How Food Giants Hooked Us, which showed how food companies manipulated levels of highly addictive, but unhealthy ingredients, to draw consumers to their products.  

Raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour would increase the price of a $16 product at Walmart, such as the typical DVD, by just a cent if all of the extra costs were passed on to consumers, according to an analysis by an economist for Bloomberg News. [...]

This week, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York offered continuing evidence of the student debt crisis. Outstanding student debt again topped $1 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2013, making it the second-largest pool of debt in the nation behind mortgages. This has tripled in just a decade, as higher-education prices increased faster than medical costs, up 500 percent since 1985.

The odds that Republican House Speaker John Boehner will allow a vote on raising the minimum wage remain as low as ever, but some large retailers are already raising the wage on their own initiative. On Wednesday, clothing chain Gap Inc. announced it would be raising its base wage from $9 to $10 per hour next year, directly benefiting as much as 72% of its hourly workforce.

Airports are doing it. Big retailers are doing it. Cities are getting in on the action too.

If you believe David Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise has a fresh and sweeping vision for saving conservatism from the dustbin of history. That's odd, because when I read the supposedly groundbreaking article in Commentary magazine by AEI's Arthur Brooks about poverty and opportunity, his vision didn't seem so radically new to me.

Detroit's Emergency Manager, Kevyn Orr, has filed a “plan of adjustment” with the court in the largest municipal bankruptcy in history. It includes some troubling news, some hopeful news and leaves out important items that should be known before a final plan for moving forward is settled.

The good folks at Demos, led by the redoubtable Liz Kennedy, have produced yet another study, this one outlining strategies to roll back the laws passed out in the country aimed at restricting the franchise of groups of people that conservatives and Republicans would rather not have voting, thank you very much.