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A study released earlier this month from the public policy group Demos states that through various forms of government funding in the private sector, nearly two million people are making $12 an hour or less. The number of workers at Wal-Mart and McDonald's together at $12 an hour or less is currently around 1.5 million, according to the report.

"The sheer number of those workers making so little is surprising," said Amy Traub, a senior policy analyst at Demos and co-author of the study.

For forty years now, it has been fighting against the forces of modernization -- including individualism, social freedom, secularism, multiculturalism, ecological consciousness, and evidence-based active government. 

Getting Americans to borrow and spend lots of money can produce a nice economic sugar high, as we saw during the Bush years. But the party can't last forever and, eventually, heavy debt servicing acts as a drag on the economy. After all, the more money that debtors are forking over to banks every month in the form of interest payments, the less they have to spend on everything else.

Big businesses, such as Wal-Mart and McDonalds, get a bad wrap for providing low-wage jobs. But, Americans may be surprised to know that they're funding a low-wage labor pool larger than both of these companies combined do, a new report by Demos, a public policy organization, shows.

On Tuesday, the House Financial Services Committee voted out six bills that would make changes to the Dodd-Frank financial reform law that could have far-reaching consequences. The bank lobbyists deserve a bonus this year.

Critics of the Affordable Care Act have long been calling it a job killer. First, they claimed, companies would cut jobs altogether because of the mandate that all full-time employees must have health coverage.

If Congress doesn't succeeed in gutting SNAP benefits through the Farm Bill, which now proposes sweeping cuts to food stamps, it seems various state legislatures will do whatever they can to get that job done.  A few weeks ago, I wrote about North Carolina's proposed background checks for SNAP applicants.

The banks have systematically figured out how to rip off the government,” Lerner says. 

Part of that ripoff was the LIBOR scandal, which had a “massive consequence on everything,” according to Wallace Turbeville, a former Goldman Sachs employee and current senior fellow at nonpartisan think tank Demos.

Even with a freeze on basic pay rates and unpaid leave days and repeated attacks on the federal workforce, being a federal employee means you have a good, though as of late, a less-lucrative job.

That can’t be said by everyone in the federal workplace.