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Momentum for a carbon tax is not just building on the federal level, states are looking at the idea, too.

When Vernardo and Claire Simmons-Valenzuela married, they imagined all the trappings of a middle-class life. Soon enough, they had kids. Claire finished a master's degree. They held jobs as an Army medic and a physician's assistant. They dreamed of next steps: owning a home, taking their first vacation in years. Vernardo would return to school for a bachelor’s in nursing. But when payments for the couple's $187,000 in combined student loan debt came due, most of it accrued during Claire’s graduate education, they put those dreams on hold.

With over twenty million Americans still unable to find full-time work, Washington can't take its eye off job creation for a minute. That's certainly the feeling of voters, who overwhelmingly told exit pollsters on Election Day last November that fixing the economy should be Congress's number one priority -- far more than said reducing the deficit.

Paul Ryan is known for his devotion to cutting spending, but even compared to his previous attempts, his latest plan, with its promise to balance the budget by 2023, is remarkable for its severity. It's also notable for how blantantly it renegs on the core principle of the Simpson-Bowles Commission agreements which promised that deficit reduction should not come at the expense of the poor or increase economic inequality.

The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hearing and 300-page report (plus 200 pages of exhibits) on the London Whale is now being digested by the public and spun by JP Morgan Chase. The bank lost $6.2 billion and survived easily because of its immense size.

Imagine you’re a finance lobbyist and want to move deregulation and other industry-friendly policies through Congress. While you might think the House Financial Services Committee would be the logical place to do it — since it has jurisdiction over financial issues, naturally — what if there were a sneaky way to maneuver it through a far less scrutinized committee, so most people would have no idea what you were doing?

This is the story of how the world’s largest banks came to love the House Agriculture Committee.

Governor signs HB1339, changes law that required some counties to dilute the votes of county residents who did not live adjacent to a prison

A basic principle of smart tax reform is that we should shift away from taxing good behaviors, like work and wealth creation, to taxing bad behavior, like pollution and speculation. 

A small study out of Yale School of Medicine caught the eye of some observers this week by raising an intriguing question: Do food stamp cuts lead to greater rates of HIV?