Media

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.

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.

Some of the hardest-working people in America aren’t covered by overtime or minimum wage protections. It’s crazy, but true: U.S. labor law was updated in 1974 to specifically exclude babysitters and companions. Since then, the lucrative and fast-growing home care industry has taken up residence in that loophole. The home care sector, currently valued at between $70 and $84 billion, is creating great wealth for agency owners.

The thing about data is that if you pick and choose, it can say exactly what you want it to. The Heritage Foundation did just that when they took a recently released CBO report and claimed that the tax code no longer favors fossil fuels.

College students today take on more debt than ever with fewer prospects of paying that money back. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported that 27 percent of education borrowers have past due balances.