(White House Press Secretary Jay Carney) The Congressional Budget Office predicted that one impact of the Affordable Care Act would be hundreds of thousands of people choosing to work fewer hours, or even not work at all. Republicans immediately attacked the president over this report, while many Congressional Democrats distanced themselves from the policy—Senator Joe […]

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 You’ve probably heard it said a gazillion times that nearly all Americans think of themselves as middle class, even if they are dirt poor or filthy rich. This everyman mindset is supposedly a big reason that class consciousness has always been so low in the United States. Which is all nonsense, according to polling data […]

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Last year, legislators in Illinois passed a law that decreases pension benefits for public employees, and in Detroit a bankruptcy judge required municipal employees to get in line with other creditors owed money by the bankrupt city. The focus on these trouble spots feeds a misperception that public pensions, generally, are in crisis. In reality, […]

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  Detroit Exactly one week before Christmas, 18 lawyers huddled in front of a bankruptcy judge in a federal courtroom in downtown Detroit. All were white, one was a woman, most were from the Jones Day law firm. There was one African-American attorney sitting on the side of the bar reserved for counsel, principals, and […]

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(Mike Ilitch)  On the Friday before Christmas, I was interviewing 15 members of the AFSCME Local 98 Retirees Executive Board when one man became impatient with my questions. In less than 700 words, Mark Phillips described the winners and losers in a city controlled by an emergency manager who has turned pensioners into creditors in […]

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