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The Forgotten 40 Percent
In this season of much talk about the 99 percent versus the 1 percent, let’s also remember the bottom 40 percent: the poor and near-poor who lost their homes, who live paycheck to paycheck, who don’t even have access to regular banks. These people can save and build wealth, but it won’t happen through free-market magic. A special symposium on asset building.
- Andrea Levere: Asset Building: Now More Than Ever
- Ray Boshara: Ownership and Debt: Minding the Balance Sheet
- James H. Carr: Wealth Stripping: Why It Costs So Much to Be Poor
- Paul Bradley & George McCarthy: Manufactured Housing: The Homeowners No One Thinks Of
- Bob Friedman, Ying Shi, & Sarah Rosen Wartell: Savings: The Poor Can Save, Too
- Bob Annibale & Wade Henderson: Tax Policy: Spreading the Benefits More Widely
The Election and the Future
Politicians won’t change until they’re forced to. Only a more demanding electorate and more responsible elites can compel them.
The Long Term Is Now
As the population ages, the costs—financial and social—of long-term care will rise rapidly. And our current model of funding it will not work.
The Stakeholder Strategy
Changing corporations, not the Constitution, is the key to a fairer post-Citizens United world.
The President as Pugilist
Robert Caro’s latest volume depicts Lyndon Johnson on the attack—and shows why his methods aren’t replicable today.
Why (Some) Men Still Have It All
Working-class men may be doomed, but the ones who run the world are doing just fine.
Suburb Slickers
Demographic churn is changing the nature and definition of cities and suburbs. We need policies that keep up with those changes.
The One They Were Looking For
The first serious biography of Aung San Suu Kyi arrives at perhaps the most serious point of her public life.
The Root of All…
Michael Sandel’s salvos against the conventional wisdom of what markets should—and should not—do.
Editor’s Note
Michael Tomasky introduces Issue #26
The Mother’s Load
Forget culture—French mothers are more relaxed because government policies actually support them. A response to Sarah Blustain.
Letters to the Editor
Letters from our readers
Less Than Sporting
Reducing the exorbitant amounts paid to athletes and owners would help the average fan—and the government should do it.
City Services Are a Zero-Sum Game
The city of Chicago has no military to cut, no capital gains tax to increase. It’s mostly providing mundane but important government services—public safety, utilities, road maintenance—none of which are larded with fat to trim. That urban governments often have more progressive priorities makes finding targets for spending cuts or taxation much more difficult.
The Gun Deaths Not Talked About
59 percent of all gun deaths are self-inflicted—18,735 people in 2009. That’s 51 people—over four Aurora shootings—per day. And yet suicide has never been what’s stoked discussion of gun control, and even in ongoing debates it’s rarely mentioned.
The Cost of Civic Inequality
Cheapening public spaces through advertisements and disinvestment ensures that those wealthy enough to opt out will. The result is that income inequality breeds civic inequality. A difference in paycheck becomes a difference in the area ones lives in, in the places one walks, and in the people one interacts with.
Events
CFED to Host Assets Learning Conference
In our Fall Issue, we feature a symposium supported by the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED) on “The Forgotten 40 Percent,” the low- and moderate-income families who lost a staggering amount of wealth and assets in the Great Recession. The issue will be distributed at CFED’s biennial Assets Learning Conference in Washington, D.C. from September 19-21.
News
Washington Post Cites Democracy’s Citizenship Issue
In a September 11 piece on The Washington Post’s website, Post opinions editor James Downie wrote about the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the theme of civic obligation, citing Democracy journal’s “Reclaiming Citizenship” symposium from the Spring 2012 issue.
Events
Democracy Hosts Foreign Policy Roundtable
Democracy hosted a foreign policy roundtable discussion at the Metropolitan Club in Washington, D.C. on June 6. The event was sponsored by Democracy board member Robert Abernethy and featured U.S. Sen. Jack Reed (D, R.I.) and former Director of Policy Planning at the State Department Anne-Marie Slaughter as special guests.
