Media

If you ask Cato's Michael Tanner, inequality is a non-issue for a bunch of reasons, including because it has nothing to do with unfairness. Tanner writes:

most wealthy Americans earned their wealth through talent and hard work. Roughly 80 percent of millionaires in America are the first generation of their family to be worth that much — they didn’t inherit their money.

Could Massachusetts become the next state to enact Election Day Registration? If today’s passage by the Commonwealth’s Senate chamber of omnibus voting bill S.1975 serves as indication, it very well could.

Here’s some welcome news. At his meeting with Democratic Senators last night, President Obama indicated that he is giving serious consideration to executive action designed to raise the minimum wage for employees of federal contractors, according to one Senator who was present.

One day after a top Obama administration official deflected a congressman’s call for executive action to raise labor standards for contractors, activists Wednesday announced the filing of a new Department of Labor complaint over alleged wage theft in a government building. The complaint alleges that dozens of workers in D.C.’s government-owned Union Station are owed over $3 million in back pay and damages for rampant failure to pay minimum wage or overtime.

One line of attack on a minimum wage hike is that it's small potatoes -- and further testament to the intellectual poverty of liberalism. As Marco Rubio said recently, speaking of both the minimum wage and other Obama proposals:

As the White House prepares to launch a major economic opportunity effort, record high unemployment among black and Latino youth underscores how essential it is to create job opportunities for young people of color. 

The critical issue here is that the ages of 16 to 24 are make or break years for lifelong earning potential. With one out four blacks and one out of six Latinos under the age of 25 without work, a generation of youth of color risks falling behind.

Miles Rapoport, who led Demos through a period of extraordinary growth as President, will step down on March 10th to become the President and CEO of Common Cause, a grassroots organization dedicated to restoring the core values of American democracy.

"Demos has never been a job. It has been a mission, a family, and an organization that has grown to have national reach." 

Staging imaginary competitions between cities and their elected leaders certainly makes for catchy headlines: “Step Aside, New York City. Los Angeles's Populism Is for Real” asserts the title of Nancy L. Cohen’s recent piece in the New Republic.

Today's progressive coalition -- the one that elected Obama twice and just put Bill de Blasio in power -- looks a bit like a barbell: Lots of poorer voters on one side and lots of highly educated professionals on the other. Obama won the high school dropout vote by a landslide and also won post-grads by 13 points -- but lost to Romney among voters with a college degree. Likewise, de Blasio commands strong support among the upper middle class and the poor alike.