Media

The Wall Street Journal’s opinion page is often an exercise in how to completely misinterpret policy and/or data. Monday’s attack on Hillary Clinton’s speech on the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County is no exception.

Many Americans in these cash strapped times can relate to incurring an overdraft fee or bouncing a check. Ii's happened to nearly all of us and, mostly, we don’t expect it to impact our financial choices for the next five years to seven years.

Raising the pay of low-wage workers is becoming one of the top priorities of the progressive movement -- and a crucial test of that movement's strength. If Occupy Wall Street was a sprawling, diffuse howl against the new Gilded Age, the push to raise wages for retail and restaurant workers is a super focused manifestation of the same outrage at how skewed U.S. prosperity (and political power) has become. Occupy spotlighted the problem; the low-wage strikes are offering the solution, or at least one solution. 

College graduates with student loans accumulate less lifetime wealth than their debt-free classmates, according to a study released this month.

About two-thirds of the 20 million people who attend college every year borrow money to do so. We’ve heard a lot about how growing educational debt loads — the average student borrower now graduates owing $26,600 — can be a detriment to someone just starting out in life, and to the health of the broader American economy. Student debt loads are crowding out other things that young people historically spend money on, forcing them to delay marriage, home ownership, auto and other big-ticket purchases, investments in start-up businesses, and retirement savings.

The controversy over an unpaid intern listing at LeanIn.org, the new nonprofit created by Sheryl Sandberg, has been welcome, because it spotlights a growing consensus that unpaid internships are bad. All sorts of organizations will think twice after this episode about paying people nothing to do work. 

Verizon, AT&T and Sprint are facing heat for handing over their customers’ call records to the government. But it isn’t the only way that these phone companies are frustrating their customers – they also waste time and money by extending their prerecorded voicemail instructions.

“Whatever executive authority I have to help the middle class, I’ll use it,” announced President Obama in last month’s landmark economic address in Galesburg Illinois. Now consensus seems to be building around one thing President Obama can indeed use his executive powers to do to boost hundreds of thousands of workers into the middle class: raise their wages.