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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.

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. 

How financial market practices not only risk catastrophic systemic failure like 2008, they constitute a massive extraction of value from the real economy by the financial sector.

Over the past decade or two, top transnational corporations -- including Apple, GE, and Google -- have figured out how to sidestep national tax collection systems, depriving governments of billions of dollars in revenues. 

Among immigrant groups,  Asian American/Pacific Islander communities are often stereotyped as a “model minority,” and an immigration economic success story. However, this stereotype masks the wide diversity -- ethnic and economic -- that exists within the Asian and Asian-American communities.

Imagine having an African-American president who talks openly and bluntly about race in America and the experience of being black -- a president who explains what it's like to get on an elevator with a white woman or concedes the ease with which he could be shot dead in another life just because of the color of his skin. 

That's something a lot of us have been waiting to see. We've wanted to see Barack Obama address the raw realities of race in personal terms -- not deliver one of his finely crafted speeches on the topic, as did during the 2008 campaign.

Financial markets, now heavily dependent on technology, need to be safeguarded against cyberattacks, natural disasters and the more prosaic scourge of human error that can cause massive disruptions, according to experts and a federal panel.