Today is the 45th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King. Contrary to the sanitized saccharine version of Martin Luther King most school children are force fed stands the real man. A radical. A democratic socialist. A man truly despised in the circles of power. Who, in the last campaign before he was struck [...]

While Washington debates cutting Social Security and Medicare the facts are in on the “recovery” – it’s a bust. Not only has unemployment remained historically high – 7.7% officially, 23% by the old metrics – but poverty has spiked to historic highs. The U.S. Census Bureau puts the number of Americans in poverty at levels [...]

Republican craziness has stopped a deal from happening on the fiscal slope, and really nothing else. Because here’s Nancy Pelosi yesterday on chained CPI, a benefit cut to Social Security recipients that happens to be regressive and more painful as people age: Q: Members of your Caucus are organizing against the chained CPI that the [...]

First of all, this is a benefit cut of about 0.3% a year, as Dean Baker points out. He adds that “This loss would be cumulative through time so that after 10 years the cut would be roughly 3 percent, after 20 years 6 percent, and after 30 years 9 percent.” Actually if we started using chained CPI in 2002, we’d be 3.6% behind today. That’s well over $1,000 a year, and the situation grows worse over time. So the greatest impact would be on the oldest seniors, which happens to correlate with the poorest.

New Census Bureau statistics on poverty show a shocking increase in the number of seniors below the poverty line, suggesting that this would be the worst time to add on benefit cuts to critical social insurance programs like Social Security and Medicare. Focusing on adequacy of those programs would make much more sense. The Census [...]

Liberals are working hard to more accurately name the fiscal cliff. They want to remove the sense of immediacy, the idea that the world would end on January 1 if Congress takes no action on expiring tax and spending policies. Democrats would benefit from a strategic standpoint from “going over the cliff” in many cases, [...]

As I’ve said before, the domestic policy area where the candidates truly differ in both their positions and their actions is clearly on Medicaid. Barack Obama signed a signature law that expands Medicaid to 16 million additional beneficiaries from current law; Mitt Romney would turn Medicaid into a block grant, eliminating the ability for the [...]

Michael Gerson is a former Bush speechwriter, and an unlikely candidate to have written something with which I wholeheartedly agree. But I think he’s reached a core insight here: In its heyday — say, the 1960s — American liberalism had an obvious identity. It was ambitious, reformist and frankly moral in its appeal to a [...]

Poor people don’t vote. At least, they don’t vote in proportion with their share of the population. And they certainly don’t “vote” in the sense that politicians would notice, by attending thousand-dollar-a-plate dinners and contributing to their campaigns.

A new study from the Bureau of Labor Statistics out today probably won’t get as much notice as their other report showing the US gained 386,000 jobs more than expected. However, this one shows a persistent problem in America, that it’s actually expensive to be poor. The average individual in the lowest 20% of the [...]

Here’s an interesting and less-discussed portion of the now-infamous Mitt Romney fundraising tape, where he explains the importance of being American: Romney told the donors there are people who say to him, “‘Oh, you were born with a silver spoon,’ you know, ‘You never had to earn anything,’ and so forth. And, and frankly, I [...]