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Alfred Carpenter, 52, was working for a high-end shoe store in 2007, when the recession put the company out of business. A long-time salesman, Carpenter wasn't worried about getting another job, but then broke an ankle a few months later and ended up in the hospital. With no insurance and a $50,000 emergency room bill, he filed for bankruptcy protection.

Then his troubles got worse. One employer after another rescinded job offers after checking his credit report, he says. He finally found work, but at a fraction of his usual pay.

High unemployment and underemployment forced one in four Americans to pull money out of a retirement plan to make ends meet.

Demos has produced a very important document about our austerity crisis. I don't think its conclusions will surprise many of you, but it certainly should be eye-opening to general public. It discusses the well-known fact that austerity is counter-productive in an economic down turn and that unemployment remains our greatest barrier to a full recovery. And it lays out the time-line of the politicians' obsessive focus on deficits at exactly the wrong moment. 

A new report from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office adds to the mounting evidence that spending cuts have held back America’s economic recovery. According to the CBO’s budget and economic projections for the next decade, released on Tuesday, middling GDP growth over the past year is partially attributable to “scheduled automatic reductions in federal spending.”

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Harsh, an IT professional from Tuscola, Illinois, is 62, around the age at which a lot of people start actively planning to retire to a white-sandy beach with a frozen margarita in hand.

Harsh's debt snuck up on her as she helped her two daughters with college and living costs. She went back to school after a divorce and dealt with unexpected expenses such as big dental bills. Now she has about $300 a month in minimum payments, spread across three credit cards, and the balance never seems to go down because of all the interest she is paying.

If you consider yourself part of the middle class, you could be forgiven for not standing at the ready after President Obama called for you to be reignited.

Despite millennials' lingering reputation as financial delinquents, it turns out not everyone drowning in credit card debt has a newly-printed college diploma and a stack of student loan bills.

A recent article by Reuters' Chris Taylor reveals baby boomers are facing an even steeper road to financial freedom. 

Already, the biggest banks in the U.S. are huge. The largest 0.2 percent of institutions — just 12 mega-banks — control 69 percent of total bank assets. The 20 biggest banks hold assets equal to 84.5 percent of the nation’s entire economic output.

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, plenty of Americans have seen their credit scores tank. But can that really affect your ability to get a job? Yes, because employers increasingly are relying on workers' credit histories in screening applications.

We live in a populist moment. The Great Recession shattered the myths and lies of the conservative era. Barack Obama’s historic election briefly lifted hopes, but they were dashed in a recovery that still fails most Americans. A young generation, bequeathed unprecedented debt, lousy or no jobs, and a calamitous climate, has every reason to challenge business as usual.

A public policy group instrumental in a successful campaign to win a higher minimum wage for federal contract workers is now aiming at a larger target — federal contracting companies.

Demos, in a report released Wednesday, said Uncle Sam could better use his $1.3 trillion in purchasing power by pushing government contractors to improve conditions for their employees.

Once upon a time, the term “government job” was not synonymous with boondoggles, corruption or the perennial “waste, fraud and abuse.” During the New Deal, the state proudly created jobs and spent public money as a vital intervention to check the excesses of market capitalism. Today, the public is disgusted with both fiscal policy and the free market.

The White House is holding a summit Monday, June 23 on working families. The summit is intended to call attention to the fact that President Obama wants to raise wages and job opportunities for working Americans, especially for working women. This is a welcome initiative, though there is a great deal that the President could do by executive order without waiting for a deadlocked Congress to act.

Stymied by the partisan gridlock, President Obama’s recent directives to bar federal contractors from discriminating against gay employees and to cut carbon pollution are bold examples of how presidents have used their executive powers to address critical issues when Congress has failed to adopt much-needed legislation.

I know the $3,750 yearly tuition I paid the Catholic University of America at Alana’s age has gone the way of six-mile walks to school in the snow. But even after inflation, the $39,200 tuition-only cost of 2014-15 is more than three times what I paid. And CUA is — sorry — not three and a half times the school it was.

Now this becomes a tale of Mark Cuban, Howard Schultz and Barack Obama.

To Bene’t Holmes, the White House Summit on Working Families was personal, not just another event designed by President Obama and his fellow Democrats to draw a policy or political contrast with Republicans this election year.

“I believed everything he said,” the 25-year-old single mom said of the president’s pitch.

In a 2006 Saturday Night Live sketch, Chris Parnell sums up the conventional wisdom about credit card debt:

Did you know millions of Americans live with debt they can not control? That's why I've developed this unique new program for managing your debt. It's called Don't Buy Stuff You Can't Afford.

My niece is a smart, hardworking gal who recently received her master's in architecture and is having a hard time finding a job, like many Millennials. To make matters worse, she's facing more than $93,000 in student debt. And this isn't from her bachelor's degree, but her master's degree -- despite the fact that she received it from a state university and half of the two year program was free.

Another major retailer in the United States is giving a boost to its base salary, although the size of the increase will vary from state to state. On Thursday morning, the Swedish furniture retailer IKEA announced that it would be adopting a new wage structure which is expected to increase pay for about 50% of its American employees. The change in company policy will take effect on January 1, 2015.

“Room to Grow” is the new GOP manifesto to win middle-class voters.  We’ll drill down on its content.