Thursday on Bloomberg Television, Robert Borosage made the case for Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s Bank On Student Loan Fairness Act, which would set student loan interest rates at the same rate banks get from the Federal Reserve discount window: “There is a universal consensus that we have to educate the next generation. And now college is [...]
Read Post
On July 1, interest rates on student loans will double, jumping to 6.8%, according to current law. While the Big Banks are now enjoying interest rates of almost zero. Enter Elizabeth Warren with her first bill as a Senator: It solves the problem by giving students the same rock-bottom interest rates as the big banks. [...]
Read Post
College students today graduate with the terrible burden of an average of $25,000 in student-loan debt. That total increases with the rising costs of tuition, even at public colleges and universities, and by the actions of our own government in letting the rates for student loans rise. If nothing is done by July 1, the [...]
Read Post
The Senate campaign in Massachusetts will be close and hard fought. Ed Markey, the winner of the Democratic primary, knows he has to run a bare-knuckled, knock down, full bore campaign to win. So it is notable that one of the first appeals to his supporters is to enlist them in telling the president that [...]
Read Post
This week, President Obama will travel to Austin, Texas to call for action on jobs. The proposals the president put forth in his State of the Union address – investing in infrastructure, expanding preschool, bolstering manufacturing assistance centers, raising the minimum wage – have been blocked in the Congress, and disappeared from the public debate. [...]
Read Post
Democrats are enjoying the spectacle of Republican disarray. All of Washington is sinking in popularity, but Republicans rank lowest in public esteem. The old right-wing wedge issues – guns, gays, racial division, the war on women – now bolster Democrats rather than weaken them. Republicans in Congress are so divided, they can barely unite around [...]
Read Post
The April jobs report of the Bureau of Labor Services is sobering. The mediocre jobs number – 165,000 new jobs or barely enough to cover new entrants into workforce — is a self-inflicted wound. Government austerity — tax hikes and spending cuts — is suffocating the economy, just when it needs air. And the perversity [...]
Read Post
“Spending cuts hold back US growth,” warns an across the page headline of the conservative Financial Times. No surprise there. Americans are in trouble. Wages are losing ground. Over 20 million need full-time work. The percentage of working-age Americans with jobs is at its lowest level since 1979. A continuing seriesRead the full seriesTell your [...]
Read Post
Today, the president releases his budget for fiscal year 2014, the year that begins this October. Commentators and advocates will pour over its disparate parts, although the White House has already leaked its major contours. This document is less a budget for government than a purpose statement of the administration. In this divided government, it is already [...]
Read Post
Dismal jobs production in March – only 88,000 net jobs created, not sufficient even to cover people coming into the workforce – is a wake-up call to Washington. The weak recovery is now floundering in face of harsh headwinds – the payroll tax hike, the beginnings of the sequester cuts, continued wage stagnation, deepening recession [...]
Read Post
