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What's the best way to rebuild America's battered middle class: redistribute wealth downward from the top 1 percent? Or grow the overall economy? In fact, both strategies are crucial, but it will be interesting to see which path President Obama stresses tomorrow when he pivots back to economic issues with a major policy address. 

Location, location, location. It’s a real estate cliché, but also, according to a new study by a team of experts from Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley, one of the most important factors for predicting intergenerational economic mobility in America. When it comes to the whether a poor child born in America can climb up from the lowest rungs on the economic ladder, place matters.

A major new study on economic mobility by a team of top scholars has revealed that it's hard to move up the ladder if you're isolated from good schools and jobs. 

What a surprising finding -- or at least it was surprising forty years ago.

And you thought the government didn’t have a jobs program. It does. The problem is that the pay and benefits are lousy, and in many cases the working conditions ain’t so great either.

Employer-sponsored plans such as 401(k)s are workers' best hope for a secure retirement. Critics of the 401(k) system contend that the plans weren't designed to be the foundation of a secure retirement and should be scrapped in favor of something tailor-made, while supporters of the system say it just needs fine-tuning. While regulators, academics and the financial industry tussle over the best way to get everyone to retirement, investors have to keep saving as much as possible and, just as importantly, keep expenses low.

Ian Ayres of Yale University has the 401(k) marketplace fuming.

At Demos, we are working for an America where we all have an equal say and an equal chance. The slaying of Trayvon Martin has reminded us that we have not yet achieved an America where we all have equal chance to merely live. Trayvon Martin was denied that chance because his identity was one that our society marks, in countless ways each day, as fearsome. This fear-based animus towards young African American men is so pervasive in our society that a jury found this fear to be reasonable -- so reasonable that it was justifiable grounds for his killing.

At Demos, we are working for an America where we all have an equal say and an equal chance. The slaying of Trayvon Martin has reminded us that we have not yet achieved an America where we all have equal chance to merely live. Trayvon Martin was denied that chance because his identity was one that our society marks, in countless ways each day, as fearsome.

Thirty seven. That's how many attempts House Republicans have made to strike down the Affordable Care Act. Most of the attempts gave been focused on dismantling the law as a whole, and while the current version is not as robust as Obama's original proposals, the law has survived extensive attacks.