Budget cuts have lowered the nation’s average food stamp benefit to less than $1.40 per person per meal. Seventy percent of local agencies that service seniors have had to cut back on Meals on Wheels deliveries. “Sequestration” has also shut out 57,000 preschoolers from Head Start. Next in the cross-hairs? Maybe the biggest of them […]

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Dear America: Costly complexity is baked into Obamacare. No health insurance system is without problems but Canadian style single-payer full Medicare for all is simple, affordable, comprehensive and universal. In the early 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson enrolled 20 million elderly Americans into Medicare in six months. There were no websites. They did it with index […]

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  (David Cote, right | Source: Bloomberg/Getty via CNN) David Cote, the CEO of Honeywell, has more than $134 million in his personal retirement fund. If I were sitting on a nest egg that big, I might feel a bit sheepish about telling ordinary grandmas and grandpas to take a cut in their Social Security […]

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  Americans are generous by nature. About half of U.S. families contributed to earthquake relief in Haiti in 2010, and millions of us have already supported typhoon aid for the Philippines. But there’s a golden opportunity for our country to do much more. We can help generations of Filipinos withstand the typhoon seasons that rock […]

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  Pittsburgh On a Monday morning a month ago, I was sitting on the marble floor of the Squirrel Hill branch of PNC Bank, with a circle of activists protesting PNC’s financing of mountain-top removal (MTR) coal mining across Appalachia. MTR causes increased cancer rates and birth defects as well as massive environmental degradation—not to […]

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