Media

The following is a published Letter to the Editor to the New York Times in response to their editorial "The Decline of North Carolina."

The attack on voting rights in North Carolina is a shameful attempt by the state’s politicians to curtail access to the ballot, in ways devised particularly to discourage voting by African-Americans.

The most often repeated attack on the Affordable Care Act is that the law is a "job killer" -- an anti-business spool of red tape that will strangle free enterprise from coast to coast. 

In fact, though, one of the biggest obstacles that entrepreneurs face when starting a new business is affording health insurance. Leaving a job where you have coverage to do your own thing has been very costly -- since individuals have tended to face the highest premiums in a deeply dysfunctional insurance market. 

If you think Wall Street has cleaned up its act after a global financial disaster and then sweeping reform legislation, think again. A new survey by Labaton Sucharow, a law firm that represents Wall Street whistleblowers, has revealed that the financial services industry still has profound ethical problems. 

Well, that’s embarrassing. McDonald’s sample budget for its employees lays bare the reality of trying to make it on a food service job at $7.72 an hour (mildly above the federal minimum wage of $7.25). 

We knew Congress was going to slash SNAP benefits in the latest, House version of the farm bill -- despite any number of compromise suggestions (largely misguided) to increase work requirements, impose new asset tests, and so on. 

Instead of debating such compromises, however, the House decided it was more convenient to simply remove food stamps from the farm bill altogether, and as House Speaker John Boehner said, leave SNAP benefits for "later."

Among all that has been written since the Trayvon Martin verdict, the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen may take the cake for his ability to combine factual errors with ridiculous hyperbole. Cohen opens his op-ed by saying:

Despite all the coverage of battles over the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion, one question has barely been asked: how will the expansion affect current Medicaid recipients? Will they have receive the same benefits, particularly access to preventive services and screenings that can mean the difference between a minor ailment and a major problem? 

The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB) recently issued several try-at-home remedies to aid in the struggle against unruly debt collection firms. In a blog post, they introduced:

It is easy to see how the House of Representatives could pass a farm bill jammed with goodies for agribusiness while leaving food stamps out of the equation. The wealthy have powerful friends in Washington while the poor do not. What is less understandable is why some of the biggest beneficiaries of the food stamp program in corporate America aren't leaping to SNAP's defense.