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.
Employees would likely contribute less to IRA accounts
If the proposal passes, there is a strong indication that U.S. workers will either shift their savings to Roth Individual Retirement Account (IRA) accounts, where contributions are taxed immediately or employees and employers will contribute less for retirement.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court is delaying its early November argument over Ohio's effort to purge its voter rolls because one of the lawyers for the challengers is ill.
Allie Boldt for Demos: In 2015, by a 26-point margin, Seattle voters passed an initiative that has the potential to transform Seattle elections. The initiative established a first-in-the-nation program that gives Seattle residents $100 in "democracy vouchers," which they can distribute to candidates who pledge to receive more of their funding from small-dollar sources and less from big money.
Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Institute, a challenge to the procedure that Ohio uses to remove inactive voters from its voter-registration lists, had been scheduled for oral argument on Wednesday, November 8, but it will be postponed to a later, as-yet-undetermined date.
The ACLU of Indiana, national ACLU and voting rights group Demos are representing Common Cause in the suit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana.
Algernon Austin is an economist at the think tank Demos and the author of the book America Is Not Post-Racial.
"I think what sometimes people miss is, what are the comparisons?"
He points out that college-educated and high-earning black folks are in many ways more likely to be better off than black people who earn less.
But Austin, who did not work on NPR's poll, adds there is overwhelming data showing that when comparing educated and high-earning blacks to their white counterparts, the gap is substantial.
On Friday, the court removed the case from its calendar in response to a request from Demos Senior Counsel Stuart C. Naifeh. Naifeh said a colleague who was supposed to argue the case on Nov. 8 will be "unable to work for a sustained period of time." Naifeh said he will replace his colleague but needs a postponement "to allow adequate time to prepare for the argument."
That casting was born from a meeting back in June with NBC’s showrunners, spearheaded by NBC entertainment president Jennifer Salke and America Ferrera, who stars in and executive produces NBC’s “Superstore,” and one of the founders of Harness, an activist group launched in the wake of the election. The purpose was to encourage the network’s writers to weave characters from underrepresented communities into their storytelling. [...]
Democrats have all kinds of ways of addressing this problem. One would be to cultivate the class identity of white voters by embracing populist rhetoric that paints “the billionaire class” as an out-group they can define themselves against. Another would be to invest more resources into registering nonwhite voters. According to the Census Bureau, 74 percent of non-Hispanic whites are registered to vote in the United States.
“You’re going to have deductions and credits that primarily benefit the middle- and upper-class go away, but it’s not done in benefit to the working class,” said Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at Demos, a left-leaning think tank. “It’s just done as a revenue raiser.”
As Wisconsin’s Latino community responds to the needs of people on the island, it’s very clear that some Puerto Ricans will come to live with family and friends in the Dairy State.
