Trying to recover his footing after a terrible couple of days, Mitt Romney appears to want to shift his comments on the 47% of Americans who “believe that they are victims” and think they’re entitled to health care and food into a strength. In a USA Today op-ed, Romney tries to pivot into the more [...]

Libyan authorities have now arrested over 50 suspects in the killings of US Ambassador Christopher Stevens and 3 other Americans in what the Libyan interim assembly President has called a planned attack by Al Qaeda, affiliates and sympathizers. US Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, however, contradicted this view, holding to the theory that [...]

The US Census Bureau released median income, poverty and insurance stats today, all of which have a 90% confidence interval, meaning that there’s a fairly high margin for error. Still, the trends in median income are not encouraging, although the insurance stats bucked that trend. Here are the really bad median income statistics: Median family [...]

Most political speeches are pitched directly at the broad segment of the population that considers themselves middle class. The speeches over the last two weeks at the RNC and DNC have broadly fit along these lines, with the glaring and important exception of Bill Clinton talking cogently about Medicaid, a huge fault line in this [...]

The issue of welfare reform has been germinating on the right for a few weeks now, ever since the Obama Administration granted waivers that conservatives claim would subvert the work requirements under the program. Now this has spilled into the Presidential race, as Mitt Romney (who I thought was planning on running a laser-focused campaign [...]

The gains of the war on poverty have been almost totally wiped out. The Census Bureau will report that poverty will reach a 46-year high when they announce their numbers later in the fall. The Associated Press surveyed more than a dozen economists, think tanks and academics, both nonpartisan and those with known liberal or [...]

A new report from the Brennan Center lays out the numerous obstacles to obtaining a valid voter ID in states that now require one for voting. Ten states, consisting of 127 electoral voters, currently have voter ID laws on the books, and two of those states – Texas and South Carolina – are fighting for [...]

The important element of this multi-billion dollar settlement with MasterCard and Visa on an antitrust lawsuit is not the total amount, though retailers stand to gain about $6 billion in damages. It’s the new regime of pricing that will affect all our lives: Retailers will be able to charge their customers more for paying with [...]

We all know that we’re only at the midway point of the implementation of the Affordable Care Act and that subsidies for people who don’t get health insurance at work, so they can afford to purchase their own, won’t come around until 2014. And we know that, even after the final implementation, most studies still [...]

Eli got at this yesterday, based on an early read from HuffPost Hill. Now, Pete Stark has introduced his bill called the Women’s Option to Raise Kids (WORK) Act, which would allow low-income mothers with children up to 3 years old to classify their child-rearing responsibilities as work, just the way Ann Romney did: Current [...]

Now that we’ve exposed the flaws from cutting welfare so it cannot provide adequate benefits during an historically bad recession, we can gather a new appreciation for the main mandatory spending program on the poor that has served to keep them afloat in these troubled times. That would be the food stamp program, also know [...]