Media

At the latest count, more than 5.6 million young adults ages 18 to 34 are officially unemployed. 

Compared to the rest of the advanced world, the United States offers famously weak protections to workers. For instance, employees in every other developed country are guaranteed vacation by law, often a few weeks. Americans workers don't even get a single day under Federal labor rules. New mothers most everywhere get paid time off as a matter of course. Here less than half the work force is guaranteed unpaid time. 

We should be done by now with the idea that a corporation is a single thing. Corporations contain a multitude of conflicting interests and are much more like miniature governments with their own governance structures and election systems than is commonly recognized.  While these structures are far more hierarchical and undemocratic than we require of our public institutions, Americans should not be resigned that this is the best or the only way the private sector can be structured.

An in-depth look at the fracking boom in North Dakota reveals what fracking does for rural communities, both good and bad.

Paul Krugman noted on ABC's This Week yesterday that the GOP's problem is that their "base is old white people."

This is largely true. Exit polls show that Mitt Romney won all voters 65 and older by 12 percentage points, and white older voters by 22 points. Barack Obama won all voters under thirty by 23 points, and nonwhite young voters by 36 points. 

Encouraged by the increased diversity of the U.S. electorate, Democratic strategists have mounted a new push to make Texas a swing state. The "Battleground Texas" campaign seeks to increase voter participation in the Lone Star State and builds on the groundbreaking "50 State Strategy" that Howard Dean launched at the DNC during the Bush years.

While the IRS aims to increase EITC participation through last week's EITC Awareness Day, the agency has another, equally challenging goal: increase EITC participation without increasing fraud, which, according to a report from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, costs the IRS billions of dollars in post-refund examinations and recovering lost funds. 

Democratic lawmakers say allowing voters to register and cast ballots on the same day would increase election participation, but some county officials worry that it would further complicate the voting process.

States with same-day registration have turnout rates nearly 6 percent higher than states that don’t offer it, according to Demos, a progressive public policy research group.