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David Callahan

David Callahan is a senior fellow at Demos and editor of PolicyShop, the Demos blog.

Recent Articles

One Month at the SEC Shows Ongoing Financial Fraud Epidemic

David CallahanOct 19, 2012

Judging by all the complaints about the Dodd-Frank Act, you might think that Washington over reacted to the financial excesses of a few years ago and that the Feds can now ease up on Wall Street.

In fact, though, bad behavior among America's money men -- and yes, those doing wrong are typically men -- continues onward at a furious pace. Consider just the past month at the SEC:

Direct Democracy, for Billionaires

David CallahanOct 17, 2012
(Flickr/ehoyer)

Over a century ago, progressive reformers were deeply worried about how wealthy interests had hijacked American politics populating state legislatures with cronies who did as they were told and otherwise steamrolled the will of the people.

To level the playing field, reformers worked to create mechanisms for direct democracy through state referendum and ballot initiatives, allowing voters to bypass corrupted political systems.

Why Schumer Is (Mostly) Right on Taxes

David CallahanOct 11, 2012
(Pete Labrozzi/Flickr)

Senator Schumer offered a much needed intervention in the tax debate in a speech on Tuesday. What Schumer said is that revenue-neutral tax reform was a fantasy and that any big Congressional deal on tax reform had to include higher rates on the wealthy, as well as more revenue overall.

Yes and yes to both points.

As Schumer pointed out, one major distortion in today's tax code that needs to be fixed is its favorable treatment of the wealthy, particularly through the historically low rate of taxes on capital gains—the source of much income for the wealthiest Americans:

Hey! Hey! Government Is Hiring Again

David CallahanOct 05, 2012
(Demos DataByte)

Here's one very interesting piece of news from today's jobs report: The public sector has stopped firing people and started hiring. According to the report, government at all levels has added 68,000 workers in the past three months.

Obama and Romney: What About Inequality?

David CallahanOct 04, 2012
(Flickr/PaulSteinJC)

Just a year ago, Occupy Wall Street commanded attention from the media and politicians alike. Yet last night the central concern of that social movement—one shared by a majority of Americans—wasn't even mentioned as both candidates and the moderator ducked the problem of economic inequality. 

Yes, Obama did say several times that America does best when the middle class is growing. But he never overtly talked about the growing chasm of income and wealth—or how a big reason that ordinary people are not doing so well is because so much new prosperity created in today's economy gets channeled upward to a tiny sliver of the population.

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