Economy
Payday Lenders Use Installment Loans To Evade Regulations
Installment loans seem like a kinder, gentler version of their “predatory” cousin, the payday loan. But for consumers, they may be even more harmful. Use of the installment loan, in which a consumer borrows a lump sum and pays back the principal and interest in a...
Is It Time To Regulate Or Nationalize Facebook?
I was oblivious to the real significance of Facebook in everyday life until the company disabled my personal, private thomhartmann account. The list of “possible” reasons they posted for doing this included “impersonating a celebrity,” so maybe they shut me down...
Will The 2020 Contenders Take On Inequality?
Is America’s political discourse on inequality finally getting real? In the early going of the 2020 presidential campaign, this has become a question worth asking. White House hopefuls have been condemning the maldistribution of America’s income and wealth with an...
Medicare For All, Or Endless War? It's Our Choice
Photo credit: Markeith Horace/MCoE PAO / cc If you’re following the presidential race, you’ve heard plenty of sniping about Medicare for All and whether we can afford it. But when it comes to endless war or endless profits for Pentagon contractors, we’re told we...
A Star-Spangled Knockoff
Photo credit: futureatlas.com / flickr / cc An American flag made in China is not an American flag. It’s a knockoff. New York Assemblyman Angelo Santabarbara wants a guarantee that flags flown at New York events and on New York poles are made in America. He has...
America's Rich Just Scored A Triple Jackpot
America’s awesomely affluent don’t have to place any bets to pull in the windfalls. They’re essentially hitting jackpots on a daily basis, as a “trifecta” of timely just-released research reminds us.
American Democracy is Not a Charity Case
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, America’s fourth-richest person, finally admitted that no one deserves to accumulate as much wealth as he has. But hey, he says, at least he plans to give a lot of his $69.6 billion net worth to charity. That’s nice. But it’s not enough...
Pennsylvania Is Ready For A Just, Clean-Energy Future
Pennsylvania is ready for a just, clean-energy future. Ever since 1859, when Edwin Drake ushered in the modern era’s addiction to fossil fuels when he struck “rock oil” in Titusville, our state has been at the front lines of the extraction industry’s booms and busts....
College For All Means Dignity For All
My name is Chris Simmons, and I want to tell you why we need - I need - Free College For All now. I grew up in Newton, Iowa, a small city east of Des Moines. For a hundred years, Newton was the “washing machine capital of the world.” It was home to the Maytag...
Wealth That Concentrates Kills
The weight of the wealth that sits at the top of America’s economic order isn’t just squeezing dollars out of the wallets of average Americans. That concentrated wealth is shearing years off of American lives. The latest evidence for that squeeze on American wallets comes from the Census Bureau. And increasing inequality, a just-released Government Accountability Office study makes clear, is killing many of us off before our time.