Blog: Policy Shop

It’s the people who complain loudest about rising debt who most obstruct the solution.

Perhaps the volume hasn’t been quite as loud as it was in 2008, perhaps a lot of the discussion has been subsumed into coded language, but the 2012 presidential election is still very much about redistribution: when it’s fair, when it isn’t, and, perhaps most importantly from a political perspective, whether Americans like it. Just […]

An important component to the student debt crisis involves law and medical school enrollees. Students preparing to enter these professions represent an overwhelming majority of students or recent grads looking at six figures worth of loans, according to a study by Finaid.orgs’s Mark Kantrowitz. Medical school grads have, on average, a staggering $162,000 in debt. […]

One of the few thin­gs that President Obama and Mitt Romney are likely to agree on when they debate next week is the need for tax reform. Both candidates have backed streamlining America’s crazy-quilt tax code, and both have said that reforms could boost economic growth. Meanwhile, two key congressional committees held a rare bipartisan […]

It appears that the German Bundestag is ready to impose meaningful limits on high-frequency trading, or “HFT.” This is a very big deal. High-freqeuncy trading is an extraordinarily dangerous practice that has fundamentally changed capital markets in the U.S. and around the world, and not for the better. The U.S. regulators seem to have recognized […]

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund filed a federal civil rights complaint this week claiming that New York City’s admissions process for eight specialized high schools* is biased. According to NAACP’s Rachel Kleinman: There is a single two-and-a-half hour multiple choice test that is the sole criterion for admissions…African-American and Latino students who are qualified to […]

The historic elections taking place this November will not just decide what candidates win or lose, or even “just” what policy directions our states and country will take. They will also be a test for democracy itself. I served as Secretary of the State in Connecticut during the 1990s, and we had our share of […]

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund filed a federal civil rights complaint this week claiming that New York City’s admissions process for eight specialized high schools* is biased. According to NAACP’s Rachel Kleinman: There is a single two-and-a-half hour multiple choice test that is the sole criterion for admissions…African-American and Latino students who are qualified to […]

Our long, national nightmare is over. Well, for NFL fans at least. After a protracted negotiation, NFL referees will maintain access to their defined pension plans…for a few more years. When a union wins the support of noted laborphobe Scott Walker, you’d think they’d be on their way. Alas: The pension proved more complicated. Officials […]