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Yuri Gripas / AP The House Freedom Caucus Is Trying to Be Reasonable
The cadre of conservative budget hawks on the Hill feels damned if it does play spoiler in budget negotiations, and damned if it doesn’t.
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Mary Altaffer / AP A Major Leap for the Minimum Wage
California announced a deal to reach $15 an hour by 2022, and New York could soon follow.
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Gary Cameron / Reuters Can Paul Ryan's Pleasant Language Sell His Divisive Policies?
If your ideas hurt people, it doesn’t matter what you call them.
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Drew Angerer / Stringer / Getty How Can the U.S. Shrink the Influence of Money in Politics?
Campaign finance is at the very heart of complaints about elections. Let’s look at some of the claims about money’s role, and proposals to change it.
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Frank Franklin II / AP End the Opportunity Monopoly
It’s not just that the rich get richer and the poor poorer; it’s that the rich get louder and poor quieter.
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Chris Carlson / AP Twilight of the Super PAC
The campaign groups are enriching the people who run them—but are they helping anyone else?
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Dave Kaup / Reuters Marco Rubio's Extreme Tax Plan
Though the senator may be running as a moderate, his proposal is anything but.
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David Goldman / AP What Clinton and Sanders Are Really Fighting About
The Democratic candidates have revived an old progressive debate about whether big business can be regulated, or must be broken up.
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Scott Morgan / Reuters Hillary Clinton’s Women Donors Could Change Politics Forever
Female donors, especially first-time female donors like those Clinton is courting, have the potential to re-create campaigns, alter the face of government, and fund future elections.
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Matt Rourke / AP The Unfair Opacity of Credit Cards Peddled to the Poor
Complex financial jargon, unwieldy contracts, high fees—these are the common tools of fringe subprime lenders.
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Evan Vucci / AP What Is This ‘Wage Insurance’ Obama’s Talking About?
During his State of the Union speech, the president mentioned a labor protection with a long history.
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Lynne Sladky / AP Immigrants or Executives: Who’s to Blame for Wage Stagnation?
In his final State of the Union, President Obama said that corporate priorities, not workers from other countries, were responsible for sluggish salaries.
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Nick Prete / Flickr The U.S. Supreme Court Can Still Take Big Money Out of Politics
Who the next president appoints to the Supreme Court could revolutionize—or reinforce—big money’s dominance of political campaigns.
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Kevin Lamarque / Reuters How the Government Underestimated the Extent of Income Inequality
Social Security is underfunded today because policymakers didn’t foresee just how rich today’s rich would be.
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Brian Snyder / Reuters The Great Clinton-Sanders Tax Divide
The candidates have very different ideas about how crucial government programs should be funded—and who is responsible for society’s well-being.
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Eduardo Munoz / Reuters The December Jobs Report Caps a Year of Steady Growth
With unemployment down and the number of jobs up, there’s a lot to cheer. But in 2016 economists will be looking for improvements in the labor-participation rate and a rise in wages.
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Fred Prouser / Reuters The Age of the Ghost Company
In the last few years a couple of tech companies have become massive, but where are the jobs?
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Gretchen Ertl / Reuters What Bernie Sanders Thinks Is Wrong With the Fed
If elected president, he said he’d board up the “revolving door” between regulators and the bankers they’re supposed to regulate.
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Mark Kauzlarich / Reuters Bernie Sanders’s Plan to Make Banking Affordable for Average Americans
In a speech on Tuesday, he said that there's a "special place in the Seventh Circle of Hell for those who charged people usurious interest rates."
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Rebecca Cook / Reuters Donald Trump’s Christmas Present to His Fellow Millionaires
An analysis finds that the Republican frontrunner’s tax plan reserves its greatest benefits for the wealthiest Americans.
