Media

Voter ID isn’t the only law unjustly limiting citizen's voting rights. In an excellent piece for Salon, Erik Nielson illuminates the widespread disenfranchisement of convicted felons. Although state laws vary in severity, all but two have some sort of restrictions preventing convicted felons from voting.

It is time to answer two questions:

Washington is finally moving to better regulate the real estate appraisal industry, with regulators yesterday proposing new rules to strengthen appraiser independence.

It's about time.

An interesting proposal will be on the ballot this fall in Michigan. The measure, put forth by Michigan Energy, Michigan Jobs, would increase the state’s renewable energy requirement to 25 percent by 2025, more than double what it is today. The ballot measure would place this requirement in the state’s constitution, which would make it less susceptible to being overturned and also allow citizen’s to dictate the state’s energy future.

Today, the last state enrolled in a federal program designed to keep unemployment checks flowing, Idaho, lost its eligibility.

In 2010, Federal-State Extended Benefits program enrolled over a million people. Why stop the benefits while the national unemployment rate remains over 8%? The Wall Street Journal reports on the reason for its demise:

A Georgetown Public Policy Institute report shows the degree to which the Great Recession has exacerbated the education gap. Not only did workers without a college degree lose “nearly four out of five jobs during the recession,” but the least-educated workers, those without high school degrees, have continued to lose jobs during the recovery.

It's well known that seniors are easy prey for scam artists of every kind. What is less well-known is how big this problem is and how many of the scam artists wear suits and work for major financial service firms. Seniors were major targets of mortgage brokers seeking to push homeowners into subprime loans and win higher commissions. Seniors also get exploited by investment advisors pushing lousy annuity policies and other dubious financial products.

There’s a common misconception that unemployment insurance uniformly lasts 99 weeks. Not so! From a new Center on Budget Policy Priorities report:

Sixteen years ago, when Bill Clinton signed a harsh welfare reform law, one upside seemed to be that U.S. society could move past the endless, polarizing debate about welfare dependency.