The higher education system is broken, but instead of fixing it, the Department of Education is intent on breaking it even more. The gainful employment rule was an Obama-era regulation that protected against the predatory loan practices of for-profit colleges by monitoring their students’ ability to earn back their debt after graduation. Last week, the […]
Blog: TAPPED
Posted inEconomic Policy
Building the Right Narrative to Win the Next Recession
When Obama took office in 2009, senior administration officials equivocated over how to jump-start recovery amid the Great Recession. “Because monetary policy had been the key anti-recessionary tool for the previous 20 years, we had little knowledge of exactly how well fiscal stimulus would work and which type of stimulus would be the most effective,” […]
Posted inEconomic Policy
Every American Pays for Rape
April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month and it is important to understand how the trauma of rape affects every taxpayer: Many sexual-assault survivors depend on federal, state, and local government programs to help heal, recover, and restart their lives. According to a 2017 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) study, rape costs 25 million […]
Posted inElection Night Blog
Notre Dame, the National Museum of Brazil, and Weighing Cultural Losses
The world watched in horror Monday as a massive fire tore through Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral, destroying large portions of the seven-century-old landmark. News channels went into special-coverage mode, newspapers around the world published impressive photos, and millions of dollars in donations for reconstruction began pouring in. A tragedy of this scale clearly merited the […]
Posted inCivil Rights in America
Human Rights Watch Details Ongoing U.S. Criminal Justice Abuses
Despite recent progress toward criminal justice reform, the United States continues to pursue policies that encourage mass incarceration and fail to rehabilitate offenders, according to a Human Rights Watch report presented to the United Nations Human Rights Committee earlier this year. The international watchdog organization also detailed a spectrum of overreach and misconduct in the […]
Posted inLaw and Justice
Prison Advocates Declare Win as Proposed Prison Phone Industry Merger Dies
Last year, two prison phone company giants, Securus and Inmate Calling Solutions (ICS) announced they planned to merge, sparking concerns of duopoly in an industry already dominated by a just a few major players. Such consolidation has long impacted poor people and those of color disproportionately, along with their families, as prison phone companies charge […]
Posted inHealth and Social Policy
Maryland’s Failure to Connect Stalking With Gun Violence
Although Maryland boasts having some of the toughest gun control laws in the country, the state is missing a critical loophole in its approach to public safety: stalking. Maryland is the only state that rules this crime a misdemeanor, which means stalkers can still buy a gun after conviction. And the state has intimate knowledge […]
Posted inEnergy and the Environment
Inventor of the World Wide Web Speaks Out About Online Misinformation
No, we’re not talking about Al Gore. Thirty years ago, on March 12, 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, then a researcher at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory, sent a proposal to his boss for a protocol to access information on the internet. That protocol would become the World Wide Web, the near-universally adopted standard by which […]
Posted inEconomic Policy
Another Way to Police the Poor
On Monday, The New York Times reported that the federal government was exploring ways to use social media to crack down on instances of disability fraud, even as applications for disability benefits fall. This is not the first time that the government has looked to social media to investigate welfare fraud—in fact, such an intrusion […]
Posted inMoney, Politics, and Power
Americans at Odds With Trump Policies—and Priorities
Trump’s policy agenda is losing traction among the American public as he begins his third year in office, according to a January Pew Research Center report. From the economy to health care to the environment, voters find themselves increasingly at odds with both the president’s priorities and apparent solutions. As in years past, the economy […]