Media

On May 21, I had the opportunity to testify before a Congressional Progressive Caucus meeting on how federal dollars drive inequality by paying contractors who pay too many of their workers too little. The hearing was driven by a study from Amy Traub and her colleagues at Demos, a New York based think tank, that issued a report exposing the many ways that federal contracting often adds to the burden of the low income, especially those who earn less than $12 an hour, or less than $25,000 a year.

According to a recent study, Gen X and late baby boomers are on track to replace only about half of their current income when they reach retirement — which means they’ll need to seriously downgrade their lifestyles. Most financial planners recommend replacing, at the very least, 70% of one’s income.

For all the talk about inequality over the past two decades, scholars have known surprisingly little about what Americans think about the growing class divide and what they'd like to do about it, if anything. 

Next month the Obama Administration will begin a nation-wide campaign to encourage low-income Americans to take advantage of the health insurance options that will come with the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion. Sounds like a great idea, right? A long overdue publicity campaign for an important piece of legislation.

The Nation has an interesting cover story this week by a young radical named Bhaskar Sunkara, an editor at In These Times and a founder of Jacobin, a new neo-Marxist magazine. 

Sunkara's basic point is hard to argue with and it boils down to this: liberalism won't get far without a radical movement that presses for more fundamental change:

It was just yesterday that I wrote about why Democrats and Republicans alike should be able to get behind bigger investments in infrastructure. One point I made is that it's cheaper to fix small problems now than big problems later.

At a time when the mere phrase “high-frequency trading” makes some investors queasy, Brazil’s stock exchange is putting out the digital welcome mat. [...]

Wallace C. Turbeville, a senior fellow at Demos, a research group in New York, said most offers made by high-frequency trading firms were “illusory”: they exist not to be executed, but to measure, distort and exploit market sentiment, increasing volatility and costs for other investors.

Today, 23 May, is the annual general meeting (AGM) of financial speculator Goldman Sachs, the archetypal villain of the global economic meltdown, bailed out by US taxpayers to the tune of $5.5bn.

Republicans and Democrats may never see eye-to-eye on certain types of government spending, such aid for the poor. But bipartisanship is more possible when it comes to other roles for the public sector. For instance, as I noted here a few weeks ago, President Obama's new federal initiative to map the human brain has received widespread support from Republican leaders, who have often backed increased science spending in the past two decades even as the GOP has made room for anti-science kooks like Senator Jim Inhofe.