The Government By the People Act increases the power of the small contributions that ordinary citizens can afford to give, providing incentives for congressional candidates to reach out to average constituents, not just dial for dollars from wealthy donors.
In August 2011, Congress passed a strange piece of legislation intended to bind itself into the future. In spite of persistently high unemployment and an unremarkable deficit-to-GDP ratio, and in spite of public polling that consistently showed that creating jobs was the American public’s top priority, politicians inside the infamous Washington “Beltway” had spent months locked in a debate over ways to cut deficits and balance the federal budget—policies that would not create jobs and by some estimates would put millions out of work.
Our data sets were provided and cleaned by Public Campaign. For the purposes of this report, Public Campaign used federal campaign contribution data made public by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and then refined and augmented by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP).
Fast food companies keep employees at poverty-level wages while reaping billions of dollars in profits. It drives inequality, slows growth, and lowers living standards.
Connecticut has offered a voluntary public financing system for state-wide constitutional and General Assembly offices since 2008. Through financing from the Citizens' Election Fund, candidates that obtain the required number of small donations can receive a lump sum to fund their campaign. The program is very popular and in 2012, 77 percent of successful candidates were publicly financed.
This Explainer explores how the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is used in measuring our economic growth and whether alternative measures are also needed to provide a more comprehensive outlook of economic progress.
The extent of the money in politics problem, how we got here (from a legal perspective), and what we can do to create a democracy in which the strength of a citizen’s voice does not depend on the size of her wallet.
This report makes the case that we should create jobs for the unemployed directly and immediately in public employment programs that produce useful goods and services for the public’s benefit.
A picture of the current state of the private retirement system, why this picture bodes ill for the future of retirement in the country, and why that system needs reform.