In the News

(Mar. 21) – Last week, in America, I was in one of the country’s most celebrated tourist spots – renowned for it’s natural beauty, swanky resorts and marine life. I spent the first part of the week in what could be kindly termed as a service hub. Let’s call it Depresso. On my morning walk […]

(Mar. 18) – Nobody dreams of falling into poverty in the future. But for too many, poverty is a doom-filled nightmare that all too often comes true. To help people who don’t have a realistic sense of just how financially vulnerable they are, sociologists Thomas Hirschl  and Mark Rank of Cornell and Washington University respectively, […]

(Mar. 18) – Two economic issues loom especially large in the United States today: widespread economic insecurity and soaring levels of income inequality. These are not just issues of interest to academics and policy makers; they are a prime concern of ordinary citizens. “How much economic risk do I face in the future?” you may […]

(Mar. 18) – “Kids at the bottom of the income distribution are discouraged by higher levels of income inequality as opposed to being driven by it,” Kearney says. “Low income kids are more likely to drop out of high school than high income kids. But conditional to being low income, kids who are growing up […]

(Mar. 18) – Many readers responded to a piece we ran earlier this week on the high cost of diapers for the poor by suggesting a cheaper alternative: cloth diapers a family can buy once and then reuse.

(Mar. 17) – When policymakers create or expand regulations, they often assume that the cost of compliance falls on businesses. While businesses do shoulder many of the burdens of regulation, consumers ultimately end up paying for regulations through higher prices or decreased competition. But these costs do not affect all consumers equally—they disproportionately fall on […]

(Mar. 17) – In the most recent season of Shameless, the long-running Showtime series about the dysfunctional, poverty-stricken Gallagher family in Chicago, a new story line develops. Unlike the drug- and crime-filled narratives of past seasons, this one hits closer to home for the average viewer: gentrification.

(Mar. 16) – While Republicans and Democrats tend to disagree on most things related to combating poverty, both parties have found common ground on one measure: the Earned Income Tax Credit. The budget passed by Congress last December made permanent several extensions and improvements to both the EITC and the Child Tax Credit.

(Mar. 16) – In an apparent attempt to appeal to archconservative members, the House Republican budget is a highly ideological document that proposes extreme policies in several areas. It would decimate large swaths of the federal government, shrinking spending outside Social Security, Medicare, and interest payments to 7 percent of GDP by 2026 — less […]

(Mar. 14) – One of the hardest parts of homelessness is admitting that you have nowhere to go. In the beginning, there’s always another friend to plead with, another couch to sink into, another number to call. But eventually, as weeks give way to months, that fiction yields to reality.