Blog: Policy Shop

Yesterday, California came one step closer to adopting a proven innovation that helps increase voter participation –Same Day (or Election Day) Registration. SDR allows eligible voters to update or add their information to the rolls on Election Day and/or during the Early Voting period, which is especially helpful for the highly mobile Americans of today. […]

It’s not often that we get a detailed look inside the tax strategies of a private equity firm, so Gawker’s publication of a trove of documents related to Bain Capital is a welcome event. The documents show — once again — how sophisticated business people have myriad ways to avoid taxes — and, in the […]

Last week, I wrote about the difficulties that young people with student loans can have getting getting a mortgage — yet one more example of how debt can make it hard to build assets. Now it turns out that young people who do have homes aren’t doing so much better. According a new analysis by […]

New York State has a chance to move from the back of the class on campaign finance regulation to star pupil status by enacting a small donor match public funding system. State leaders discussed the value of such a system, and the differences it could make in the lives of New Yorkers, at a forum […]

Steve Forbes (Flickr/World Economic Forum) These days, there’s not a lot of sympathy out there for the big banks. That isn’t likely to change through the advocacy of Steve Forbes. Of all the controversial provisions of Dodd-Frank, Forbes, and the banking industry, has seized upon the Durbin Amendment as the most dangerous. Why? The Durbin […]

“I went through four interviews and everything went smoothly. I was on my way to the orientation program [for my new job] when I got a call on my cell phone: they had to cancel my orientation because there was a discrepancy in my credit report. . .” I’ve written about employment credit checks in […]

Tip O’Neill famously observed that “all politics is local.” That’s for good reason: most of the popular things that government happen on the state and local level. Firefighters, teachers, hospitals and police provide services that, by and large, Americans rely upon. That’s why the Census numbers released today, which show the change in the number […]

If you believe that self-interest is both the strongest and most virtuous motive for human behavior, you may well calculate that current Medicare recipients wouldn’t object to a plan that leaves their benefits alone while gutting the program for future retirees. And there you would be wrong. In fact, seniors don’t want to pull the […]

The Pew Research Center is out with a depressing new study today about how America’s middle class has lost ground — along with some of its famous can-do optimism, too. No big surprise there, given that we’re now in year five of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. But what’s striking from the […]

The news of looming cuts in California’s education system is, an and of itself, depressing and frightening. Considered as part and parcel of a pervasive American tic — the ability to be both aware of a problem but obstinately unwilling to do anything to solve it — well, one can’t help but be gloomy. University […]