Media

In the past week, both a senior editor at Fortune magazine and the liberal think tank Demos have made similar proposals for how Walmart could greatly increase worker wages without harming its business prospects.

A new brief by the national public policy organization Demos analyzes one way Walmart can raise worker pay to meet employees’ $25,000 benchmark target. A Higher Wage is Possible: How Walmart Can Invest in Its Workforce Without Costing Customers a Dime details how Walmart can give workers a raise by redirecting the funds spent annually on buying back shares of Walmart’s own company stock.

There are few better ways to uncover fraud in an industry than to incentivize insiders to blow the whistle on wrongdoing. And a little known part of Dodd-Frank did just that for the securities industry, creating a new whistleblower program run by the SEC that can bestow huge rewards on anyone who brings to light evidence of fraud that results in a settlement. 

Credit card fees can be expensive and annoying, there’s no doubt about it. But many of them can be avoided if you’re careful and others may be worth paying if you get something worthwhile. For example, many of the best rewards credit cards charge annual fees, but people who use them frequently are able to earn additional rewards that outweigh the extra cost.

In today's global economy, a victory for workers anywhere is a victory everywhere. Why? Because capital's advantage over labor in recent decades has rested on its ability to play workers -- and governments -- off against each other, moving production to wherever wages are lowest. That advantage will endure as long as poor countries with huge populations lack strong labor standards, and offer a hospitable home to sweatshops. 

You can explain the current plight of the American middle class in three sentences. Timothy Egan did in the New York Times this week:

Progressives have typically attacked economic inequality on fairness grounds, arguing that it's just not right that so much national wealth is funneled to the top even as millions struggle to get by. 

By some measures, public trust of government is now at its lowest point ever recorded. To be sure, this partly reflects a concerted thirty year assault on government by conservatives. But it also reflect legitimate public doubts about the ability of government to solve problems -- doubts that are being reinforced by the calamitous rollout of the Affordable Care Act.

Most people think of sequestration as imposing across-the-board cuts of 5 to 7 percent, a figure that doesn't sound all that alarming. While that's technically correct, what's now becoming clear is how the cuts have ramifications far larger than the 5 to 7 percent figure would suggest. This is the finding a big new study on sequestration by NDD United, a coalition that works to protect non-defense domestic spending.