Next Tuesday, October 8, the Supreme Court is scheduled (pending shutdown nonsense) to hear oral arguments on McCutcheon v. FEC , a challenge to the total cap on the amount of money one wealthy individual is permitted to contribute to all federal candidates, parties, and PACs. The current “aggregate contribution limit” is $123,200—twice the median household income in the U.S. As you might imagine, this cap affects very few people; just 1,219 people were at, over, or within 10 percent of the limit for the 2012 election cycle. I’m guessing you are not sitting on $150,000 you’d like put into politics next year—so, why should you care? Here’s why: This tiny group of people already has substantial sway in our election system, and a bad ruling in McCutcheon would give them even more. Demos and U.S. PIRG have worked together to project that striking aggregate contribution limits would bring more than $1 billion in additional campaign contributions from elite donors through the 2020 elections...

It’s their fifth strike in five months, but the workers of Good Jobs Nation didn’t seem the least bit tired this morning. Low-paid employees from the food courts of federal buildings, the gift shops of the Smithsonian, and others employed under federal contracts, concessions, and lease agreements donned matching t-shirts, picked up signs and marched to the White House. Congress might be locked in endless, dismal debates about defunding health care and cutting food stamps, but President Obama—the man who recently said reversing rising inequality was his highest priority ,—could sign an executive order with the potential to raise wages for 560,000 low-paid contract employees. The workers delivered a petition with 250,000 signatures calling on the President to take action. Fifteen U.S. Senators submitted their own letter , urging President Obama to use his executive authority to “require federal agencies to give major preference in awarding contracts to companies that… pay their workers...

Last week, we talked about the role that outside spending played in the New York City Council race and how of the 20 candidates Jobs for New York supported, 16 won. However, as Mark Schmitt at The New Republic pointed out , over half of the candidates Jobs for New York supported also had the support of the Working Families Party, who are often on the opposite side of the real estate debate. According to Common Cause’s scorecard , both groups supported the same 13 candidates, the vast majority of whom won their races. It’s unclear why Jobs for New York would support candidates that also have the backing of their opponents—perhaps they were just shrewdly banking on the winners—but it is clear that the group’s spending highlights the rise of outside spending and the importance of public financing. Jobs for New York’s spending raises two issues: One, as Schmitt points out, New York City at least has a public financing system allows small donors to offset some of the impact of outside...

Last week, we highlighted how the outside money group, Jobs for New York, was dominating the New York City Council races. So, how did they do? Not too shabby—of the 20 candidates they supported , 16 won , two are still too close to call, and two more were unsuccessful. Let’s look at the two races that are too close to call, Council District 19 and Council District 36. In Council District 19, the chart below shows the level of outside funding. Jobs for New York contributed over $324,000 to Paul Vallone’s campaign, it also spent over $21,000 in opposition spending against Shafran. Vallone won. In Council District 36, a similar spending pattern emerges. Currently Robert Cornegy is leading, but Kirsten Foy is less than 100 votes behind and the race has not been called either way. Let’s assume Cornegy wins and Foy loses. Jobs for New York would have supported 17 successful candidates, which is an 85 percent success rate. It’s hard to quantify the impact of outside spending, but...

Are people better off than they were before the recession? By most headline figures they’re not: Poverty and inequality have risen to record levels, median incomes declined. Unemployment has improved marginally, but 37 states have yet to regain their pre-recession job levels . Conservatives like to push back on claims of rising inequality or worsening poverty by pointing out that their measure of poverty or inequality insufficiently captures the increasing well-being of even the poor. They're better off, they say, because low and middle-income Americans are living better than they did in the past. These arguments manifest themselves in concern over “Obamaphones” or access to liquor or drugs, and generally recommend policy solutions as odious as drug-testing as a prerequisite for welfare or stricter control over food stamps. As Matt Bruenig aptly pointed out on this blog , even taking these conservative policy solutions at their face value, fraud complaints are spurious. We want poor...

With the passing of the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, commentators have been assessing the status of blacks in society. Matt Yglesias has a post about the black-white income gap, and how it has not budged in 40 years. Brad Plumer has a post at Wonkblog that features ten charts showing the persistence of the black-white economic gap, including rates of unemployment, poverty, and so on. The statistics provided in these posts—and indeed most statistics provided on this question—compare all blacks against all whites. This kind of comparison is worth making for certain purposes, but it also has its limitations. By itself, such group-level comparisons lend themselves to the hasty conclusion that the difference between the economic situations of blacks and whites is mainly that blacks are more concentrated on the low end of the economic ladder. When you've concluded that the black-white disparity is primarily an issue of black over-representation on the bottom and white over-...