Currently under consideration by state legislature, SB 975 is the third attempt to legalize payday loans (PDLs) in Pennsylvania since 2010. It claims to accommodate many of the criticisms against its predecessors, but the tweaks are superficial, and the basic impasse remains: that which makes payday lending profitable also makes it dangerous.
A new report shows that projected ten-year deficits have shrunk by nearly $5 trillion since 2010, which is pretty remarkable. It seems like just yesterday that the Simpson-Bowles Commission released it's findings amid a fierce debate over the budget deficit.
Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone is the latest rich guy to make a fool of out of himself by invoking Nazism to condemn populist attacks on inequality. Langone has apologized, but it’s worth looking beyond the Hitler analogy to more closely examine Langone’s main point that “You don’t survive as a society if you encourage and thrive on envy and jealousy.”
For decades, rapid economic growth has been the norm for developed countries. An educated workforce, a large population boom, major technological advances, and abundant fossil fuels were the key components of growth, generating substantial and broadly distributed increases in standards of living in many countries. We have grown so used to such growth that we inevitably view it as a panacea for a host of economic ills, whether it's a deep recession or income inequality.
We now understand, however, that the postwar growth paradigm is not environmentally sustainable.
It's no secret that the cost of living varies widely across different parts of the United States, and that it can be much tougher to make ends meet on a low wage job in Manhattan, New York than in Manhattan, Kansas. So here's an obvious idea: Let's improve the Earned Income Tax Credit so that its benefits track with local needs.
With President Obama proposing an increase to the EITC in his new budget, now's a good moment to look at ways this crucial lifeline for low-income households could work better.
Same Day Registration (SDR) allows eligible voters to register to vote and cast their ballots on the same day. Depending on the state, this one-stop process for registering and voting may be offered on Election Day, during the early voting period, or both.
Sometime in the next three months – perhaps as early as next week – the Supreme Court will issue its next big campaign finance decision, a ruling that reformers worry will further open floodgates of one-percenter campaign cash. The case, McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, concerns a challenge by the RNC and conservative CEO Shaun McCutcheon to the federal laws restricting how much one person can donate to candidates and party committees each cycle.
Two trends threaten to dominate government spending for decades to come -- and slowly eviscerate the public sector as a dynamic agent for solving problems.
BOSTON, MA — On Friday, the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts issued a series of rulings in Delgado v. Galvin, rejecting defendants' efforts to dismiss parts of the case, adding MassHealth as a defendant, and broadening the inquiry into the statewide failure of Massachusetts public assistance offices to provide federally required voter registration services to the Commonwealth's low-income citizens.
As the nation’s trillion-dollar student debt continues to rise, a new analysis of public higher education’s funding finds dwindling state support is the key factor driving rising tuition costs and deepening student debt. According to Demos, a public policy organization advocating economic opportunity and inclusive democracy, over the last two decades state support for higher education funding shifted to a new paradigm.
It's all well and good that President Obama announced yesterday that his administration would crack down on the repugnant practice by employers of calling all sorts of front-line workers "managers" so they can evade overtime laws. Workers are being systematically cheated out of billions of dollars in pay and it's great that we have a president who wants to do something about that, and make good on the hallowed ideal of the 40 hour work week, one of the central pillars of labor law.
Paul Ryan triggered a firestorm of recrimination this week. Speaking recently on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America radio program, the Wisconsin Republican and self-styled budget wonk linked poverty to “this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work.”
Kelli Jo Griffin will stand trial next week in Iowa for registering to vote. Unfortunately, Griffin happens to live in a state where such activity is illegal for people like her with a past felony conviction. When she registered to participate in an election last year in her small town of Montrose, she checked on the form that she was not disqualified from voting due to a felony.
Anyone wearing an "assistant manager" name tag knows that the job carries a nice title but doesn't necessarily come with commensurate pay.
One of the biggest issues for assistant managers and other white-collar workers is unpaid overtime. That's because those employees are often expected to work 60 or 70 hours a week, pushing their pay down to minimum-wage level once all their hours are included.
I grew up just outside Detroit and have felt an ache in my heart for this bleeding city for so many years now. It's long been one of the country's designated loser cities, beginning in the 1960s, when change hit it hard. The phrase at the time was "urban blight," a social cancer with unexamined causes that, in the ensuing years, has gotten progressively worse.
Far too many Hawaiians are excluded from voting—our most important democratic process—due to arbitrary voter registration deadlines. As a result, voter turnout in the state is lower than the national average. There is a simple solution to ensure all eligible voters in Hawaii can participate in our elections. Same-Day Registration (SDR) (also known as Late Registration in the current Hawaii legislative proposal) allows eligible voters to register to vote and cast their ballots on the same day, at the same time.
