For generations of Americans, working for a state or local government — as a teacher, firefighter, bus driver or nurse — provided a comfortable nook in the middle class. But they are now finding themselves financially downgraded.
If it's enacted, the GOP tax cut now working its way through Congress will be the start of a decades-long economic policy disaster unlike any other that has occurred in American history. - And this dire warning is from Forbes, the business publication.
Overwhelming analysis shows the tax plan does very little to help middle income families. The non-partisan Tax Policy Center found that after the tax plan has taken full effect in 2027, 80 percent of the benefits would go to the top 1 percent.
Ending the medical tax break could be a ‘gut punch’ to the majority of the country. Eliminating the medical-expense deduction would end a source of relief that has helped millions of people cope with steep medical costs in a country without comprehensive, universal health coverage.
Netflix's Ozark brings capitalism's corrosive effects to middle america through the lens of a financial adviser and money laundering. Right from the opening monologue narrated by star Jason Bateman, Netflix’s new drama “Ozark” makes clear it doesn’t just want to depict a financial adviser up to his neck in danger. It’s out to convey profound truths about money.
Racism, fascism, and working-class Americans. If you’re looking for Trump’s implacable support, Texas trailer parks and Kentucky cabins are the wrong places to find it. Fascism develops over hands of poker in furnished basements, over the grill by the backyard pool, over beers on the commuter-rail ride back from the ball game—and in police stations and squad cars.
"Improving our nation's child-care system will have a compound effect," said Aleyamma Mathew, director of the Women's Economic Justice Program of the Ms. Foundation for Women. "Not only on the millions of women in the workforce but on communities and the economy as a whole."
Using policy to shift economic power and make U.S. incomes grow fairer and faster. Boosting income growth for the bottom 90 percent requires a policy agenda that explicitly aims to halt or reverse the rise in inequality. Finding no relationship between rising inequality and faster growth means raising living standards for the bottom 90 percent can likely be better for overall growth.
The debate this election cycle about how to shore up the American middle class and the longer-term worry that automation will chip away at the labor market both miss a more proximate and pressing reality: knowledge work, including tech jobs, are already being shipped overseas. What happened to manufacturing jobs a generation ago is now being repeated in the knowledge economy, linking the fates of the professional class and the working class together.
Matthew Desmond is an academic who teaches at Harvard - a sociologist or, you could say, an ethnographer. But I would like to claim him as a journalist, and one who has set a new standard for reporting on poverty. In Milwaukee, he moved into a trailer park and then to a rooming house on the -poverty-stricken North Side and diligently took notes on the lives of people who pay 70 to 80 percent of their incomes for homes that are unfit for human habitation.
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