In the latest unfortunate news at the intersection of motherhood and politics, stay-at-home moms are doing worse emotionally than their working counterparts.
Every single working day of the year, American women pay a 22.6 percent gender tax on their income. By gender tax, I mean a negative transfer imposed upon women’s wages which reduces the wealth they control and increases the amount of time they work. Feminists know the gender tax as the pay gap (in 2010, the median full-time, year-round woman earned $10,784 less than her male counterpart) as well as Equal Pay Day (to earn his income of $47,715, she had to work until April 17, 2011—an extra 15 weeks on the job).
Last summer, on her final day as the Chairman of the FDIC, Shelia Bair decried the short-termism that has overtaken both Wall Street and Washington, where “[o]ur financial markets remain too focused on quick profits, and our political process is driven by a two-year election cycle and its relentless demands for fundraising.” This short-termism has taken hold of the reins of our larger political system and increasingly characterizes policy initiatives at every level of government.
Say you’ve got a booming industry, one that already employs 2 million workers in the U.S. and is poised to add 1.3 million additional jobs by 2020. Imagine that the jobs cannot be off-shored, that the work helps decrease federal deficits, and millions of Americans depend on the industry just to get through their daily lives.
While the attention of Connecticut's legislature has been occupied by the recent budget battles, an even larger crisis has been brewing: retirement security.
We are seeing the results of a radical shift in employer-provided retirement benefits. In the past decade, the percentage of private-sector Connecticut workers whose employer offers a retirement plan has fallen from 68 percent in 2001 to 58 percent today, effectively shutting nearly 650,000 workers out of any workplace retirement plan to supplement Social Security.
And while the quantity of benefits was declining, the quality of those benefits was deteriorating as well.
Some youngsters want to grow up to become artists or athletes or firefighters. Some want to be doctors or dancers. Charles Walker wanted to own a supermarket.
“Ever since I can remember, I wanted my own grocery store,” he said over lunch on a quiet afternoon in snowbound Detroit last year. To Walker, “grocery store” meant a gleaming, well-run supermarket, not necessarily huge but well stocked and scrupulously clean, with fresh meats and produce and first-class customer service.
State government should offer a retirement plan to the increasing number of people whose companies don't provide a pension or a 401(k) savings program, labor groups and other advocates this week told a legislative panel.
The Labor and Public Employees Committee has raised a bill that would create a task force to study that concept and report back when the 2013 General Assembly session convenes next January.
“It’s a disgrace that this is happening in a country as rich as ours,” former New York Times op-ed columnist Bob Herbert said, describing what he called a “massive employment crisis” in the U.S.
Herbert, a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the economic equality think tank Demos, delivered his lecture on “A Call to Civic Engagement” as part of SIPA’s Weston lecture series.
How long do working mothers stay home after having their first child? If you guessed the answer might be 12 weeks (not an unreasonable assumption, since that’s the amount of time allotted by our national family leave law), you’d be sadly mistaken. According to recently released census numbers, a majority of mothers who worked during pregnancy go back before that, some way before. More than a quarter are at work within two months of giving birth and one in 10—more than half a million women each year—go back to their jobs in four weeks or less.
When someone from another country goes through the difficult process of becoming a naturalized American citizen, he or she should be entitled to full participation in our nation's democracy.
The existence of the U.S. middle class is in peril. Young people between the ages of 18 and 34 are living in a more fragile economic environment than 30 years ago. If something isn't done to help them lead more economically stable lives, they'll never make it into the middle class.
That's the conclusion of a new report "The State of Young America" from Demos, a combination think-tank and advocacy organization based in New York.
Demos just released new comprehensive polling about the opinion of young adults. Politically the most interesting data point that stuck out for me is their finding that an overwhelmingly 68 percent of young people say it is harder for them to make ends meet now than it was four years ago. From the poll results:
Their employment prospects are dim, their debt is high, their lives are on hold and a stunning number are living with their parents, even into their 30s.
The jobs crisis and rising healthcare costs have left millions of young Americans without healthcare coverage but the health reform law is turning things around, according to a new report from the liberal groups Demos and Young Invincibles.
White youths are more pessimistic about their economic future than young minorities, though black and Hispanic youth are more likely to be in a worse financial position right now.
As President Obama dusts off his 2008 theme of “hope” in anticipation of his reelection campaign, he has a problem to get around: Among young voters, one of his most crucial constituencies, hope is, like, so yesterday.