Media

How Citizens Union decision has given an even greater voice to the wealthy who do not always have the same priorities as the rest of America.

The progressive policy world does a great job of spotlighting the economic hardships of low- and moderate-income Americans, but I've long noticed a big gap in all this work: An appreciation of how much the volatility in energy prices impacts these struggling households.

The opening sentence of "Reducing the Deficit by Increasing Individual Income Tax Rates", a paper [pdf] jointly authored by the Pew Charitable Trust and Tax Policy Center, is worth noting: "Current federal budget policies are unsustainable." (A month before publication, the US debt-to-GDP ratio broke 100 percent.)

Okay, let’s make this clear one more time. The way to lower gas prices is to stop oil speculation, ratchet down Iran war talk, and make real investments in alternative fuel supplies. And the way to be less negatively affected by price hikes is to decrease our oil-intensive and car-centric lifestyle so that we spend less time fretting at the gas pump. These are not catchy or easy fixes, but they are the only ones that will work.

We should stop rewarding giants like Bank of America with our public deposits.

Corporations are not inherently bad, but they have strong incentives to behave badly to increase their profits and stock value. The free market, which tends to push companies to behave positively when it comes to innovation, price, and customer service, often offers few counter-weights to the strong incentives which exist to cut corners ethically and take huge risks.

One of the GOP’s recent favorite tactics is to take an issue that is fundamentally non-controversial and non-partisan and make it into a partisan issue. They did it with raising the debt ceiling, which has been raised under every president except for Truman. The latest target was public transportation, which enjoys strong bi-partisan and public support.

This amendment was supposedly created by the legislature to fix the brazenly partisan redistricting process in New York State. But the proposed language is, in the end, mostly toothless.

It's hard to believe now, but not a year ago the government nearly shut down over the princely sum of $75 million -- the amount of federal funding given to Planned Parenthood. To be sure, much of the opposition towards the funding was (and is) due to a willful misunderstanding of how the organization allocates its resources, but some lawmakers such as Rep.