(Illustration by Edel Rodriguez for the Spectator) Around october 1, more than a quarter-million low-income Oregonians received a life-changing letter in the mail. The state’s Medicaid director wrote to tell them they were eligible for coverage, without having to apply. Through this “fast-track” letter, 56,000 people—one-tenth of the state’s uninsured population—were enrolled in the Oregon […]

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(Source: Getty via NPR) Three years ago I set out traveling around America to chronicle the country’s modern-day poverty epidemic. Mostly, the people I met as I reported The American Way of Poverty didn’t fit the stereotypes, nor did they necessarily live in places historically associated with concentrated poverty. Some lived in large suburban houses, […]

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In 1990, Kevin Phillips, a former Nixon speechwriter, published The Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and the American Electorate in the Reagan Aftermath. His book was a prescient warning about accelerating income and wealth inequalities in the U.S. In the ensuing two decades, a genre of research has documented how extreme inequality is undermining […]

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(Gary Gensler | Source: Getty via CNN) Remember credit-default swaps? Naked credit-default swaps? A $45 trillion credit-default swap market? The market collapse of 2007? The $45 trillion swaps market in 2007 was twice the size of the U.S. stock market ($22 trillion and plummeting at the time) and bigger than the U.S. mortgage market (then […]

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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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