Monica Potts

This week, the House passed a bill that extends Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, for a year instead of leaving it up for reauthorization debate. As Yvonne Yen Liu writes in Colorlines, this is bad news for progressives. Welfare reform in 1996 was designed not to keep people out of poverty, but to […]

The FCC chair, Julius Genachowski is planning to announce new rules for network neutrality today. It’s expected to be a compromise position, one that doesn’t allow Internet providers to control where customers go via a heavy-handed pricing scheme that charges higher rates for some types of content but one that does allow the companies flexibility […]

While state lawsuits against the Affordable Care Act arguing that the individual mandate is unconstitutional continue apace — with hearings and arguments set for both the Virginia and Florida cases before the end of the year — at least one ridiculous suit ended in common sense. Liberty University, a conservative Christian college in Virginia, had […]

As early as tomorrow, the House is poised to reauthorize the Childhood Nutrition Act, which was passed by the Senate before the midterms, to preserve the legislation as is. Of course, the Senate-passed version offset the cost of increased spending on school lunches and other food programs by ending the increased spending on food stamps […]

The Senate just passed an overhaul of the country’s food-safety laws, a long-overdue modernization that, perhaps most important, increases inspections and gives the FDA the power to enforce recalls instead of relying on companies to do them voluntarily. But the safety legislation still takes as a given a large-scale agribusiness industry and doesn’t deal with […]

Over the weekend, Megan McArdle posted a video of a woman trying to make it through a TSA security checkpoint without her breast milk being X-rayed. TSA rules allow women traveling with or without their children to carry on more than 3 ounces of breast milk, though they don’t, as the woman seemed to be […]

Dylan R. Matthews, writing for the Harvard Crimson, argues that an admissions lottery system that chooses students randomly from a pool of qualified applicants is the only fair way to admit students. The current admissions process, Matthews says, creates a meaningless system in which students enroll in extracurricular activities and other application boosters just for […]

The AP published an important story that raises what should be an obvious point but is, unfortunately, lost in the shuffle in the deficit debate: Raising the Social Security retirement age hurts the poorest workers, who might actually be more likely to apply for disability benefits if they can’t retire at the current early-retirement age […]

The Senate extended TANF, the basic welfare bill, which was set to expire after a temporary extension in December, but didn’t include reauthorizing the Emergency Fund, a provision of the stimulus bill that encouraged employers to hire low-income, unemployed workers by partially subsidizing their paychecks. The emergency fund expired in September but the hope was […]

A new report by a navigation and mapping company called Navteq shows that Denver has the 10th worst rush hour traffic in the country. Elsewhere on the list are large, old cities with huge commuter populations and limited physical space in which to increase capacity — like New York, Washington, Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco […]