Half a century ago, President Lyndon Johnson declared a “War on Poverty.” That war would soon make a real difference. In the decade following its 1964 launch, our official poverty rate dropped from 19 to 11.2 percent. But that progress stalled in the 1970s, and a profound economic insecurity now afflicts the vast majority of […]

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Teaching macroeconomics with a group of union stewards and local leaders last month, I had just finished explaining the enormous economic stimulus the combination of “food stamps” and unemployment compensation is providing to our struggling economy. When you include the “macroeconomic multiplier effects” of these “automatic stabilizers,” it was about $260 billion in 2012, and […]

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(Source: AP) Rest easy. Your metadata is safe, as are the private telephone conversations of foreign leaders (deemed to be friendly to the United States). But you still might one day find yourself on the receiving end of a national security letter. The Times Peter Baker mentioned national security letters in an article anticipating the […]

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(Source: Khalil Bendib for OtherWords) It seems like almost every week brings news about Wall Street’s latest sins. “JPMorgan Is Penalized $2 Billion Over Madoff,” blared one recent New York Times headline, when the paper explained that Bernie Madoff, the infamous Ponzi scheme con artist, wheeled and dealed via accounts at the bank. Wall Street […]

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(Source: Demos) Today’s progressive coalition—the one that elected Obama twice and just put Bill de Blasio in power—looks a bit like a barbell: Lots of poorer voters on one side and lots of highly educated professionals on the other. Obama won the high school dropout vote by a landslide and also won post-grads by 13 […]

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