Media

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.

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.

Last I checked, we lived in a populist moment: Americans deeply distrust large institutions such as government, corporations, and banks. The public's distrust of concentrated power also extends to the news media, with Gallup polling showing that over half of Americans have little or no trust in the media's ability to report news fairly or accurately. Trust in the media actually hit an all-time low in 2012. 

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.

Walmart currently does not support raising the federal minimum wage. However, considering the company's lackluster performance over the past few months, perhaps it's time to take a stand.

In the last four parts of this series, I have discussed the problems of our current student loan system, the potential for an income-based repayment system, and the difficulties of a graduate tax. This leaves us with another proposal: universal free undergraduate public higher education. [...]