For the last year, we—Demos, Anat Shenker-Osorio (ASO Communications) and Ian Haney López (author of Dog Whistle Politics), —have partnered in an ambitious multi-phase project to build an effective new narrative on race, class, and democracy. The central question we’ve explored is how to engage simultaneously around race and class in ways that strengthen social solidarity, reduce division and scapegoating, and create a viable foundation for progressive policy victories. We crafted, empirically validated, and field-tested a range of narratives and compared these to existing frames.
Once an institution accepts the premise that all people, regardless of their background, have the potential to thrive and contribute to the success of an organization, they can begin to recognize systemic disparities and gaps as flaws to be addressed.
Public-sector jobs in Massachusetts are more likely than private-sector jobs to be good jobs that provide a family-supporting income and wealth-building benefits. They need to be preserved.
This report assesses the impact of better Motor Voter compliance on voter registration rates and shares model procedures that state motor vehicle departments should consider.
Medical debt is a leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States. This report analyzes the impact of medical debt on household finances and provides policy solutions.
The steep increase in college tuition and student debt over the past decade has led our country to engage in a serious debate about the need to reduce college costs and student borrowing. Yet many misconceptions remain about the scope or magnitude of the problem that student debt poses to our national economy and student debtors’ financial security.1,2 More than 44 million Americans, or nearly 1 in 5 adults, now carry student debt.
Americans are working longer and harder than ever, yet in recent years the gains from economic growth have gone disproportionately to the very highest income earners.1 Working people are left out in the cold, denied their fair share of pay for the work they do.
Executive Summary Today, women make up nearly half of America’s workforce, and there is little question that their success in the economy is critical to the nation’s prosperity. Yet every day across America, millions of women go to work in low paying jobs that fail to move their families out of poverty.
This report presents new research on the scope of federally-supported employment in the private economy and shows how, using our over 1.3 trillion dollars in federal purchasing, the President of the United States can place over twenty million Americans on a pathway to the middle class.
In the aftermath of the Great Recession, Americans battered by job loss, foreclosure, and plummeting home values tightened their belts and paid down debt. The Latino community, hit particularly hard by the housing crash, was no exception. Yet new research from Demos’ National Survey on Credit Card Debt of Low- and Middle-Income Households finds that even as Latinos are carrying less credit card debt, four in ten Latino households with credit card debt are relying on their cards to pay for basic living expenses.