The law’s assistance to lower-income Americans was modest—and temporary.
inequality
You don’t get people to show up in court by threatening to take away money they never had.
How Heather Cox Richardson looks to the past for hope
The “Letters from an American” author provides historical context for today’s threats to democracy.
How wealth and unjust tax policy erode democracy
Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman distill a complex topic into manageable takeaways.
Bong Jong-ho’s genre-bending film reveals the fantasies of salvation that feed off of us all.
It’s not clear that college applicants will be the ones served by another number to measure them.
The resentment that capitalist modernity leaves in its wake
What do terrorists and populist nationalists have in common? They're fueled by inequality.
Our Kids, by Robert D. Putnam
Balancing biography and quantitative research, Robert Putnam paints a sobering picture of the state of the American dream.
The recent conversation around University of Michigan student Jesse Klein’s column on being middle class has been fascinating. Klein’s family makes $250k a year and lives in a $2 million house. But it’s not an enormo-house, because that’s $2 million in Silicon Valley.
Dionne Searcey and Robert Gebeloff do a nice job crunching some numbers on what sorts of people are part of the middle class, and how they’re doing (the short version: not great). This caveat of theirs, however, is an important one.
Some modest good news this week from the Census Bureau [pdf]: for the first time since the Great Recession began, the poverty rate is down a little and the child poverty rate is down a little more. The latter was driven by a bit of job growth and—among families with children—higher income. But at this pace it'll take years for the poverty rate to get back down just to where it was in 2000.
We may have the power and privilege to avoid having to work in a sweatshop. But we feel powerless to prevent such horrors from existing.
The sequester cuts are a supreme case of Washington dysfunction. Yet Congress is actually quite capable of getting some things done.