Even before the Equifax breach, the integrity of credit reports was murky at best. A Federal Trade Commission report found that as many as one in five consumers had a credit error from one of the top reporting agencies (Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion). But the fundamental problem isn’t data integrity—it’s economic justice. According to a survey by the think tank Demos, declining credit was associated more with misfortunes and unforeseeable crises than with a lack of financial responsibility.
Another solution — though one that is often a struggle to achieve — is to unionize, which has worked before in industries like teaching, policing, and manufacturing. “If retail workers were able to organize strong unions across the country, there’s no reason retail jobs couldn’t be good jobs like manufacturing jobs,” Amy Traub, Associate Director for Policy and Research at public policy organizationDemos, tells Bustle.
That Texas' discriminatory and partisan voter ID law was allowed to continue is evidence of the Supreme Court's failed understanding of its constitutional responsibilities.
Some are heartened to see functioning-for-free college popping up in places like New York and elsewhere. Mark Huelsman senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank and the author of an influential white paper on free college, said he hopes they’ll serve as “laboratories” for policymakers to understand both the benefits and the limitations of different free college program designs.
“In our interconnected society, racism — both interpersonal and institutional — is the flaw in the machine that often stymies our democracy and our economy,” McGhee, who’s working on a book on this topic, said. “Racism and bias against full portions of the population color the policy responses of elected officials.” [...]
Heather McGhee became the president of Demos, a New York-based think tank focused on creating a democracy where all people have an equal chance in our economy, when she was just 33 years old (she turned down the job at least five times, she says, before her colleagues finally convinced her to take it).
With only the wealthy funding and communicating with the campaigns of elected officials, politicians are incentivized to make policy decisions that align with their donors’ interests, not those of their broader constituency. But the elite donor class holds views that don’t align with the general public’s, as a 2016 Demos study detailed.
Walmart is the country's largest private-sector employer. Which has made it a target of both praise and criticism. [...]
"Walmart's business model is pretty simple," said Amy Traub. "The company pays its workers poverty wages. It offers few benefits and it manipulates workers' hours and understaffs its stores."
That model is expanding the gap between the extremely wealthy and everyone else in America.
Supporters of a higher minimum wage, however, remain undeterred. "Wal-Mart's business model is pretty simple," said Amy Traub, an associate director of policy and research at equality advocacy group Demos, at a recent debate hosted by Intelligence Squared U.S. (IQ2) in New York.
To better understand capital punishment in America—how it works, who it affects, and the myths that continue to surround it—we’ve compiled 10 of the best long form articles on the subject from Fusion and around the web.
While Trump and his allies can debate his progress elsewhere, there’s little dispute that the president’s congressional agenda has been a wreck so far. His glaring failure to sign any major legislation or at least make significant progress on a signature bill stands out among modern presidents. [...]
The division that threatens to split this country in two is not between red and blue states, or between rural and urban areas – it is between the way we discuss politics and the realities of American lives, none of which fit into tidy categories. Contrary to popular narratives, you can be a progressive populist, a wealthy and college-educated Trump supporter, a rural laborer of color, a provincial urbanite, an open-minded midwesterner.
