When you think about the problems with GDP, it’s likely you don’t think about Lady Gaga. But, in fact, how her work is captured and valued by national economic indicators is relevant to the beyond GDP conversation. We’ve written continuously about how GDP is not a complete measure of our economic activity. For one, GDP is unable to distinguish between good and bad spending.
You probably haven’t seen the terms of the new Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal currently being negotiated by the Obama Administration. Unless you’re one of “600 trade ‘advisers,’ dominated by representatives of big businesses, who enjoy privileged access to draft texts and negotiators” the deal is secret and we know its terms only through select leaks, according to Lori Wallach and Ben Beachy of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch.
The fight to raise wages for fast food workers has now spread to the American West, with employees of a Seattle Taco Bell walking off the job on Wednesday night, forcing the store to close.
Workers at other fast food restaurants in the city walked off their jobs on Thursday.
In the study Robert Hiltonsmith and I recently completed, we find that taxpayers underwrite nearly 2 million poorly-paid jobs through federal contracts and other funding streams that channel our public dollars to private companies that perform work on behalf of America, but treat their employees in a very un-American way, failing to pay enough to support a family.
Americans don't like inequality and the want to do something about this problem. But they aren't crazy about using government to redistribute wealth and income. Instead, they would rather see bigger investments in education to expand opportunity and have businesses pay higher wages.
Concentrated poverty has a new address, and this time it's not in the inner city. For many Americans, moving to a house in the suburbs means they've "made it," and overcome the economic stumbling blocks that kept them in cramped city apartments.
Apple always seemed like the perfect company. Not so fast. When CEO Tim Cook testified before Congress on May 25, he didn’t come to talk about Apple’s latest amazing gadget or the need to grant more visas to computer programmers. Rather, in his maiden voyage to Capitol Hill as Steve Jobs’s successor, Cook had to defend the company’s tax-avoidance efforts. What should have been a triumph for Cook was instead an awkward encounter. [...]
Apparently Justin Bieber has nothing to do with the new Los Angeles billboard that uses his image and name to oppose raising the minimum wage, on the grounds that such a hike would keep the teenage unemployment rate high.
It used to be that many Americans entered retirement having paid off their mortgages and most of their other debts. This should have been senior citizens' Golden Years.
Nowadays, more and more people over the age of 65 are struggling with mounting debt levels, fueled primarily by mortgages and credit cards. The average debt held by senior citizens has ballooned to $50,000 in 2010, up 83% since 2001, according to Federal Reserve data crunched by the Employee Benefit Research Institute. [...]
On May 21, I had the opportunity to testify before a Congressional Progressive Caucus meeting on how federal dollars drive inequality by paying contractors who pay too many of their workers too little. The hearing was driven by a study from Amy Traub and her colleagues at Demos, a New York based think tank, that issued a report exposing the many ways that federal contracting often adds to the burden of the low income, especially those who earn less than $12 an hour, or less than $25,000 a year.
According to a recent study, Gen X and late baby boomers are on track to replace only about half of their current income when they reach retirement — which means they’ll need to seriously downgrade their lifestyles. Most financial planners recommend replacing, at the very least, 70% of one’s income.
For all the talk about inequality over the past two decades, scholars have known surprisingly little about what Americans think about the growing class divide and what they'd like to do about it, if anything.
Next month the Obama Administration will begin a nation-wide campaign to encourage low-income Americans to take advantage of the health insurance options that will come with the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion. Sounds like a great idea, right? A long overdue publicity campaign for an important piece of legislation.
The Nation has an interesting cover story this week by a young radical named Bhaskar Sunkara, an editor at In These Times and a founder of Jacobin, a new neo-Marxist magazine.
Sunkara's basic point is hard to argue with and it boils down to this: liberalism won't get far without a radical movement that presses for more fundamental change:
It was just yesterday that I wrote about why Democrats and Republicans alike should be able to get behind bigger investments in infrastructure. One point I made is that it's cheaper to fix small problems now than big problems later.
At a time when the mere phrase “high-frequency trading” makes some investors queasy, Brazil’s stock exchange is putting out the digital welcome mat. [...]
Wallace C. Turbeville, a senior fellow at Demos, a research group in New York, said most offers made by high-frequency trading firms were “illusory”: they exist not to be executed, but to measure, distort and exploit market sentiment, increasing volatility and costs for other investors.
Today, 23 May, is the annual general meeting (AGM) of financial speculator Goldman Sachs, the archetypal villain of the global economic meltdown, bailed out by US taxpayers to the tune of $5.5bn.
Republicans and Democrats may never see eye-to-eye on certain types of government spending, such aid for the poor. But bipartisanship is more possible when it comes to other roles for the public sector. For instance, as I noted here a few weeks ago, President Obama's new federal initiative to map the human brain has received widespread support from Republican leaders, who have often backed increased science spending in the past two decades even as the GOP has made room for anti-science kooks like Senator Jim Inhofe.
The latest version of immigration reform proposes a long and winding road to citizenship, including a "Registered Provisional Immigrant" status nearly 11 million immigrants will fall under should the bill pass. Many of those 11 million new almost-Americans will need access to the same kinds of social services and financial assistance programs that existing low-income Americans are elligible for, including the Earned Income Tax Credit.
In response to today’s White House announcement of intended appointees to the Presidential Commission on Election Administration, Demos President Miles Rapoport released the following statement.
