Rep. Paul Ryan R.-Wisc. has made a career of proposing to “reform” US poverty programs mainly by trying to eliminate them: calling for “savings” in spending on the poor ThinkProgress, 5/8/12, declaring that “top-down anti-poverty programs” have failed and should … Continue reading
When companies that got their start on college campuses come to mind, the universities in question are typically the big-name schools that bespeak tech royalty: Stanford spawned Google, Harvard launched Facebook, MIT begat Dropbox. Locally, NYU has been the big … Continue reading
In a year that has featured increased coverage of rising economic inequality—helped along by President Barack Obama’s call to rebuild the economy from the “middle out,” and New York mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio’s campaign focus on a “tale of … Continue reading
Bianca Rodriguez, a Philadelphia school reading specialist, was 22 years old when the seizures started. A year later, after she developed more mysterious symptoms, including swollen joints and an outbreak of hives, Rodriguez finally received a diagnosis: adult-onset Still’s disease, … Continue reading
A new study by four Harvard and UC-Berkeley economists (including inequality guru Emmanuel Saez) on where in the U.S. it’s toughest to climb the economic ladder got nice placement in the Times yesterday. And if you looked at the handy … Continue reading
When House Republicans voted last night to remove food stamps from the Congressional farm bill, they took the first step toward ending a 40-year-long compromise tying food aid to the poor (liked by big-city liberals) to farm subsidies (liked by … Continue reading
It was a story that, if true, was certainly alarming: New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof (12/9/12) reported that poor families in Appalachian Kentucky were pulling their kids out of literacy classes. The reason: They feared that if their kids … Continue reading
Sometime in the next few weeks, a state supreme court judge could issue the first of several rulings on a legal challenge to FreshDirect’s plan to open an 11-acre headquarters in the Port Morris section of the Bronx, which would … Continue reading
Karen Gregory is still puzzled by the events of “the day the syllabus went crazy,” as she calls it. The Queens College instructor, searching for something to spark discussion on the first day of her Introduction to Labor Studies class … Continue reading
When congressional Republicans and the White House agreed to their long- awaited “fiscal cliff” tax deal early on January 1, the news media celebrated it as a compromise that raised taxes on the rich while protecting everyone else. As NBC … Continue reading