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Hard-working New Yorkers need time to care for their families without the pressure of missing a paycheck or losing their job. 

In his State of the Union Address, President Obama announced a “Good Jobs” Executive Order requiring government contractors to raise the minimum wage for their lowest-paid workers to $10.10 fo

To be sure, all voters turn out less during the midterms. Twenty-nine percent less white people voted in 2014 than voted in 2012, according to a September analysis by the progressive think tank Demos.

The 2016 election is the first Presidential election that will occur since the Supreme Court struck down key provisions in the Voting Rights Act. Partially because of the weakened VRA, 10 states passed harsh new voting restrictions that will be in full force for 2016, including seven new voter ID laws. New studies suggest that the motivation of these laws is suppressing non-white voters, and worryingly, that they will be successful at doing so.

The campaign money chase makes the sliver of Americans who donate large sums the most important citizens.

In a recent report, Demos and the Public Interest Research Group showed how many viable candidates, including many candidates of color, struggle to compete against better-funded incumbents.

European countries also differ substantively from the US in terms of the percentage of college attendees that their debt free models serve.

"Germany has a lower percentage of students go on to college than we have here in the US," Mark Huelsman, a senior policy analyst at think tank Demos, told ATTN.

But even if young white women are aware of how affirmative action could likely benefit them -- and how likely it is that they, in fact, have already benefitted from it -- it’s possible these millennials view efforts to remedy the effects of racism as unnecessary, just as they view efforts to remedy the effects of sexism.  

The 2016 presidential election will be the second since the court's disastrous Citizens United decision and the first without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act in place. That means big donors will have more sway over elected officials to dictate the agenda.

When Bartels compared the policy preferences of the rich and poor to actual policy results (with controls) his results were disturbing. He finds that low-income preferences had virtually no effect on policy outcomes.

The idea of a property-owning democracy has long roots in American political thought. In their book, The Citizen's Share, Joseph R. Blasi, Richard B. Freeman and Douglas Kruse argue that the Founding Fathers wanted everyone (well, everyone who was white and male) to own a small slice of property. Both Madison and Washington praised the relatively equal distribution of property in the United States (compared with Europe). Thomas Jefferson wrote, "It is not too soon to provide by every possible means that as few as possible be without a little portion of land.

The vast riches of schools like Stanford and Harvard have created dilemmas about how their endowments should be directed. One slate of candidates for Harvard's board of overseers is calling for the school to spend some of its $37.6 billion endowment to cover tuition for all students. Lawmakers have also mulled requiring colleges with at least $1 billion in their endowments to spend at least one-quarter of the endowment's income on financial aid.

But as Demos senior policy analyst Amy Traub points out in a blog post on Friday, "[b]eing paid less for doing the same job is just one aspect of the pay gap."

Wal-Mart for increasing the starting salary of workers from $9 to $10 an hour, which would boost the wages of 500,000 employees, along with other boosts in specialized sections. While this step is a positive one, a new Demos brief argues that despite this new policy, Wal-Mart wages and schedules still aren't livable. Demos finds that the new $10 an hour wage "still does not provide enough income to support the basic needs of a single adult working Walmart's full-time schedule of 34 hours per week in any state in the country."

A compelling vision of free, high-quality preschool for every child in New York City helped to propel Bill de Blasio into the mayor’s office.

Amy Traub, senior policy analyst at Demos, a public policy organization, told the Public News Service that the vast majority of people who work in New York would benefit from paid family leave.

The average Black household has fewer resources than the average white one — and the disparity is only getting worse. In 2015, the median wealth of white households was 16 times that of Black households, according to a study from Brandeis University and public policy organization Demos. The numbers are stark — while the typical white household has more than $100,000 in assets, the typical Black household has just over $7,000.

Political scientists who have studied voter registration have found generally that young and highly mobile people are the ones least likely to be registered. They tend to have lower incomes as well.

For example, in a 2015 report, ‘Why Voting Matters,’ a research associate at Demos, Sean McElwee, found that “white Americans, and particularly affluent white Americans” are much more likely to vote than “people of color, low-income people, and young people.”