Among the new voting requirements recently contested in courts are state-issued photo IDs and tight restrictions on voting registration drives. Proponents of such requirements tend to be conservative white Republicans who argue that tighter rules are essential for preventing voter fraud. However, critics say such laws will unfairly impact the poor, the elderly, the disabled, and college-age students, all of whom tend to vote more for the Democrats.
Trouble with electronic voting machines and confusion over identification rules frustrated voters across the country Tuesday, creating delays in Florida, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Colorado.
A public policy group is warning that voters - especially among minorities - may face attempts at intimidation and suppression in an effort to sway the election.
A study released Friday by the National Voting Rights Institute and Demos points to several incidents during the 2004 election and warns that voters nationwide may face similar problems on Tuesday.
"We think it's a serious problem," said Brenda Wright, managing attorney at the National Voting Rights Institute, who co-authored the report.
The language contained in some credit card agreements is written at a 27th-grade level, according to a new report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. And many cardholder agreements today contain language requiring a minimum of a 15th-grade education, the equivalent of three years of college.
Yet with only about half of U.S. adults reading above an eighth-grade level, the report said, credit card disclosures may be meaningless to millions of Americans.
Apart from our Republican-dominated federal government, no single entity boasts more lawsuits against it than Wal-Mart. Class action suits in motion at the moment read like a pamphlet from the nascent worker's rights movements of the early 20th century. They include: gender discrimination, racial discrimination, unpaid wages, exploitation of undocumented workers, pressure to work overtime or off the clock, and denied lunch breaks. And those are just the class action suits.
Gen Y is the first generation to really bear the weight of college expenses through loans instead of grants and other financial aid. This, combined with credit card debt, is leaving cash-strapped college grads in bleak financial situations ... often ending in bankruptcy.
Americans in their 20s - those broadly defined as ‘Generation Y' - are supposed to be more concerned about weighty issues like world affairs, local politics, and the environment than their ‘Gen X' predecessors. But they've also distinguished themselves another way: They're the most leveraged generation in American history, and they have, for the most part, the cost of their college education to thank for that distinction.
Many college graduates worry about their finances as they begin their professional careers in the red - a place where if they don't get a hold of their debt they may stay for years to come.
Draut is one of the experts who claims the problem has reached "epidemic" proportions - yet the issue continues to worsen as more and more graduates and young people find themselves drowning in debt.
As more and more young people get in too deep, students, parents, educators and lawmakers are proposing solutions. The seeds of a grassroots activist movement against debt are being sown. But is it too little, too late?
For too many grads, though, "the 'debt for diploma' system" makes starting-out responsibility, financially speaking, very difficult, says Draut. The shift from free grants to loans since the early '90s has more than doubled the debt burden of grads who borrow to go to school. That's why it's important to learn to calculate for the real world so you can fulfill the high expectations that motivated you to go to college in the first place.
Draut estimates 25 cents out of every dollar earned by indebted graduates goes to pay off credit cards or loans, for a total debt load of about $20,000 per person.
A recent study by Demos, a public policy group, broke down the budget of a sample college graduate. With a monthly after-tax income of $2,058, $797 goes to rent and utilities, $456 to food and groceries, $464 to transportation, and $307 to school and card debt payments.
The report notes: "What distinguishes low- and middle-income households with relatively high levels of credit card debt from those with lower levels of debt is chance and misfortune."
"Elections are the backbone of democracy, and New Yorkers should be able to have faith that the people who run our elections are able to fairly and fully apply the law," said Scott Novakowski, program associate in the Democracy Program at Demos. "This report proves that voters are not only misinformed about their eligibility, they are subject to unnecessary, burdensome and illegal documentation requirements for voter registration.
The problem, according to all three books, is that for today's young adults, those lean early years -- the Top Ramen phase -- may never give way to the stability and prosperity enjoyed by their boomer parents. A number of factors are blamed, chief among them student loans, credit cards, wage stagnation, the rising costs of health care and home ownership, the disappearance of pensions and the likely collapse of Social Security under the weight of all those retiring boomers.