Media

NEW YORK – National public policy organization Demos announces experts available for commentary on and around President Obama’s State of the Union address. 

As Saturday’s “technical release” from our chums at the Department of Labor reminds us, Obamacare will require all companies, small businesses excluded, to provide health insurance to those working 30 hours per week or more in 2014. Along with some noise the IRS is making about how universities pay their faculty, this is causing some serious anxiety in higher education. 

Demos has produced a very important document about our austerity crisis. I don't think its conclusions will surprise many of you, but it certainly should be eye-opening to general public. It discusses the well-known fact that austerity is counter-productive in an economic down turn and that unemployment remains our greatest barrier to a full recovery. And it lays out the time-line of the politicians' obsessive focus on deficits at exactly the wrong moment. 

Heather McGhee discusses the racist strategy behind austerity economics.

The blizzard that pounded the Northeast on Friday was no Hurricane Sandy, but it has left thousands of people without power throughout the region. For some households, losing power may be no big deal. But if you're old or disabled, this can be a dangerous situation.

The problem is that it's hard in most communities to know which residents may badly need help. After Sandy, hastily organized volunteers knocked on doors in buildings in Rockaway and other places to identify the old and frail.

High unemployment and underemployment forced one in four Americans to pull money out of a retirement plan to make ends meet.

A separate study on credit-card debt done by Demos, which surveyed some 997 households, warns that middle-income households of those nearing retirement are running up huge credit-card bills.

According to the study, “Older Americans now have higher overall credit-card debt than younger people — a reversal of the trend Demos found in its 2008 survey.”

Deficit reduction is supposedly a huge priority in Washington, especially among Republicans who apparently skipped economics classes in college and don't understand that reducing spending -- and demand -- is the last thing you want to do in a weak economy.

But here's a question: Given all the focus on deficits, including by the media, wouldn't you think that it would be big news if the CBO revised its budget deficit projection for the next decade upward by $4.6 trillion? 

"I served in the military for 30 years and received the highest level security clearances," said Brooklyn resident and war veteran Emmett Pinkston.  "Yet I was turned down for a job as a TSA baggage screener, because of a bogus charge on my credit report.  I found myself stuck at a low paying job."

Councilman Brad Lander speaks at a February 2013 rally to ban employment credit checks

Here’s another reason why income inequality is so destructive—it’s ruining our planet and increasing the severity of climate change. A new paper from the Center on Economic and Policy Research looks at a novel way to slow climate change: reduce the hours that we work. For reasons that are not entirely understood, shorter work hours are linked with lower greenhouse gas emissions.