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“I went through four interviews and everything went smoothly. I was on my way to the orientation program [for my new job] when I got a call on my cell phone: they had to cancel my orientation because there was a discrepancy in my credit report. . .”

New York State has a chance to move from the back of the class on campaign finance regulation to star pupil status by enacting a small donor match public funding system. State leaders discussed the value of such a system, and the differences it could make in the lives of New Yorkers, at a forum yesterday afternoon hosted by Governor Cuomo, the New York State Democratic Committee, the Center for American Progress, and Third Way.

Last week, I wrote about the difficulties that young people with student loans can have getting getting a mortgage -- yet one more example of how debt can make it hard to build assets.

Quick question: What happens when you step down a slope? Well, if it's a steep slope you'll start sliding, but not so fast that you can't catch yourself, avoiding serious harm.

And that's exactly the situation Washington will face early next year, if it doesn't reach a deal on expiring tax cuts and new spending reductions before January 1. The nation is headed for a fiscal slope, not a cliff.

The CBO has updated its figures for 2013, showing that if we don’t engage in reckless austerity, the economy will continue to recover next year. But if not, well, we would enter a deep, double-dip recession.

By now, regular readers know how we feel about the reliance on GDP as the main economic indicator and its inability to measure our economic and social well-being.

In a speech at the University of Kansas in February of the tumultuous year 1968, Robert F. Kennedy spoke of the plight of the poorest Americans, those struggling in devastated rural areas, and on Indian reservations and in the tenements and housing projects of the inner cities. He was blunt. “We must begin,” he said, “to end this disgrace of the other America.”

The news of looming cuts in California's education system is, an and of itself, depressing and frightening. Considered as part and parcel of a pervasive American tic -- the ability to be both aware of a problem but obstinately unwilling to do anything to solve it -- well, one can't help but be gloomy.

The Pew Research Center is out with a depressing new study today about how America's middle class has lost ground -- along with some of its famous can-do optimism, too. No big surprise there, given that we're now in year five of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.