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.
Dramatic new public policy initiatives are needed to accomplish two broad interrelated goals: to ensure that all Americans have a chance to move into the middle class and, second, to ensure greater security for those in the middle class.
On March 15, 2013, the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations held hearings on the London Whale scandal. The indomitable and indefatigable Chairman Carl Levin, ably supported by the brilliant committee chief of staff, Elise Bean, took on six JP Morgan Chase (“JPMC”) current and former executives for four hours and three regulators for two, with support from other Committee members.
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.
Demos conducted a nationwide survey of low- and middle-income households in early 2012. The findings in this brief summarize the relationship between college costs and credit card debt, and its impact on students and their parents.
In February and March 2012, Demos surveyed a nationally representative sample of 997 low- and middle-income American households who carried credit card debt for three months or more.
Climate change poses a tremendous threat to Florida. Sea level rise, more intense precipitation, and stronger hurricanes increase the risk of natural disaster and imperil the state’s economy and its citizens’ safety.
For decades, GDP has enjoyed supreme status as the predominant benchmark of our economic and social progress. In reality, GDP obscures or ignores essential aspects of Americans’ economic and social welfare, as well as important social and environmental dimensions of our national welfare and future well-being.