Tag Archives: Center for American Progress

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It Gets Worse


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Sequestration About To Go From Bad To Worse

Between the government shutdown and the rollout of HealthCare.gov, you probably haven’t heard too much about sequestration lately. Unfortunately, these painful and damaging spending cuts are still here, still hurting people across the country, and are about to get a whole lot worse.

Early next year, another round of cuts kicks in on top of the cuts put in place this year. And many agencies won’t be able to use some of the tactics they did this year to blunt some of the impact of the current round of cuts.

Our Center for American Progress colleague outlines in a new report and this video exactly why and how sequester cuts get worse in 2014 unless Congress fixes them.

Click on the graphic and Check it out:

SequesterGetsWorse

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Colleges Gone Wild


Wasteful Spending by Colleges Helps Jack up Tuition

The president has been on a two-day bus tour focusing on his new plan to make college more affordable in order to help grow the economy from the middle class out.

Our friends at Generation Progress found some egregious examples of colleges wasting money, something which only contributes to the skyrocketing cost of tuition.

Check out their infographic:

GenProgressCollegeWaste-555x832

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Discrimination Against Women Alive and Well in 2013


by Think Progress

Earlier this week the Center for American Progress and ELLE magazine released a poll that unpacks what professional men and women think about “leaning in.”

Disappointingly, nearly one-third of women reported having personally experienced discrimination at work. Women at the top were 45 percent more likely to say they have experienced discrimination. Some 20 percent of men in the survey agreed that they’d be paid less if they were a woman.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of stories to underscore what women in the CAP/Elle poll reported. ThinkProgress’ Tara Culp-Ressler and Bryce Covert round up five startling examples of how employers turn women into sex objects at work:

A New Jersey judge ruled that casino waitresses can be fired for gaining weight.

Twenty two former cocktail servers sued a popular casino in Atlantic City over a policy that forbids waitresses from gaining more than seven percent of their original body weight. The women were subject to regular weigh-ins, and the policy meant that a 130-pound woman was not allowed to gain more than 9.1 pounds. They alleged it was weight discrimination — but an Atlantic County Superior Court Judge disagreed. In July, the judge ruled that casino waitresses are essentially “sex objects,” and it’s okay to fire them for gaining weight because they are no longer fulfilling their contractual obligations.

A widely-used employee training manual tells women how to make sure they don’t lead men on.

Earlier this week, Jezebel reported that a popular manager training guide — used as companies like Google, Groupon, and Modcloth — essentially tells women that they’re responsible for preventing advances from their male co-workers. The manual tells women who are “touchy-feely or flirtatious by nature” to “dial it back,” suggests women socialize in groups, and advises women to avoid “revealing clothing” or “ending statements with an upward inflection.”

Women at Merrill Lynch have been instructed to seduce their way to the top.

Other employee trainings have similarly gone off the rails when it comes to guidance on women’s behavior in the workplace. Female employees at Merrill Lynch allege they were made to read a book called “Seducing the Boys Club: Uncensored Tactics From a Woman at the Top” and to make use of its advice to get ahead. To get men to do their work, the book suggested “play[ing] on their masculine pride and natural instincts to protect the weaker sex.” To diffuse tense situations, it pointed out that men “puff up” at being told, “Wow, you look great. Been working out?” The women also allege that they were pressured to attend female-only events on “dressing for success” and were told to be more “perky” and “bubbly.”

The Iowa Supreme Court decided it’s okay to fire attractive women if they pose a risk to men’s marriages.

James Knight, a dentist in Iowa, didn’t fire his female assistant Melissa Nelson after 10 years of working for him because of performance reasons. Instead, Nelson alleges that Knight’s wife told him to do it because “she was a big threat to our marriage” given that he was sexually attracted to her. Yet in July, the all-male Iowa Supreme Court stood by an earlier decision that she wasn’t improperly fired because it wasn’t gender discrimination. Instead, her firing was found permissible because of the facts surrounding her relationship with Knight, such as several comments he made about her clothing and the fact that they texted each other after work hours.

Two hotel employees were fired after they complained about being photoshopped onto bikini-clad bodies.

Two sisters, Martha and Lorena Reyes, say they were fired from the Hyatt Hotel in Santa Clara, CA after they complained about photoshopped images of them. In the photos, the women’s heads were photoshopped onto the bodies of women wearing bikinis. Lorena told Jezebel that they were “extremely humiliating and shameful for me” and also said she has never worn a bikini, even at home. While the company says it fired them two days after they complained about the images because they took overly long breaks, the sisters feel it was related to the incident. The Reyes sisters have filed a retaliation charge with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Check out the rest of the CAP/ELLE poll HERE.

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Austerity is Dead

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ThinkProgress War Room

It’s Time to Focus on Jobs & Growth

For the better part of three years Washington has been gripped by an obsession with the deficit, but a new paper out from the Center for American Progress today argues that it’s time to abandon austerity, ditch deficit hysteria, and instead focus on jobs and economic growth.

What’s changed since Washington caught deficit fever in 2010? A lot, as it turns out.

  • The deficit has been significantly reduced and stabilized.

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  • We have already enacted significant deficit reduction: $2.5 TRILLION worth, three-quarters of which has come from spending cuts.
  • Health care spending has grown much more slowly than expected, due in part to Obamacare.

  • The intellectual argument in favor of austerity collapsed in a somewhat spectacular fashion.
  • The implementation of austerity in Europe has been nothing short of disastrous. Unemployment in the Eurozone is at a record high and the UK’s austerity almost resulted in triple-dip recession and has actually resulted in more, not less debt.

    What hasn’t changed? We continue to have tepid growth and the economy is not creating nearly as many jobs as it could or should be.
In fact, we don’t even need the painful and ill-conceived sequester cuts to achieve the level of deficit reduction that we originally set out to, hence the report calls for replacing it for the next three years.
So instead of painful austerity and needless hysteria about the deficit and debt, we ought to be making investments in order to grow the middle class and the economy along with it. The report identifies $82 BILLION worth of pro-growth investments:
  • $50 BILLION to fix our crumbling infrastructure.
  • $20 BILLION for early childhood education.
  • $12 BILLION  for the “Pathways Back to Work Fund,” which would help provide opportunities for the long-term unemployed, young people, and low-income people.
Now is the perfect time to make these kinds of investments as interest rates on government bonds are unusually low right now.In addition to all of these key facts, it’s also time to recognize some political realities. Since Republicans refuse to negotiate in good faith toward a so-called “grand bargain” there is no point in continuing to pursue one. Instead, we ought reset the debate, replace the sequester for three years with an achievable package of cuts and revenue increases, and turn our attention toward making the investments we need to fuel jobs and growth.You can read the entire report in all of its wonky goodness HERE.

BOTTOM LINE: Austerity is dead — or at least it should be.

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6 Ways to Boost the Middle Class

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By ThinkProgress War Room

Pro-Middle Class Policies That Won’t Cost the Government Anything

In this era of painful spending cuts, it often feels like there’s little political space to get much done to help the middle class — or anyone else. Fortunately, that doesn’t have to be the case. Our Center for American Progress colleagues put together six pro-middle class policies that won’t cost the government anything.

Here’s the short version and a few charts:

  • Increase the Minimum Wage

Since 1968 the inflation-adjusted value of the minimum wage has declined by 31 percent.The minimum wage would be more than $10.50 per hour today if it had kept up with inflation. This decrease has occurred even as workers have become more productive. Over the same period of time, productivity—the measure of output per hour of work—increased by 124 percent.

  • Make Saving for Retirement Easier, Cheaper and More Secure

An increasing number of households are at risk of seeing their standard of living decline in retirement due to a lack of sufficient retirement savings.

In order to help the middle class retire with dignity, we need to expand retirement coverage and improve the quality of retirement plans available. We can achieve these goals and improve the current retirement system by creating a new hybrid retirement plan type—the Secure, Accessible, Flexible, and Efficient Retirement Plan, or SAFE Retirement Plan, a hybrid between a traditional pension and a 401(k) plan—and opening the federal Thrift Savings Plan, the 401(k) for federal employees, to the public.

  • Lower Monthly Housing Costs by Providing Homeowners with Principal Foregiveness

Although housing markets are beginning to recover from the collapse of the housing bubble, more than one in five homeowners are still “underwater” on their loans, meaning that they owe more on their mortgages than their loans are worth. Not only does this threaten individual homeowners, but the more than $600 billion in negative equity also significantly hampers economic recovery.

Paid sick days should be available to all U.S. workers. Implementing this policy would provide greater job security to millions of Americans, reduce worker turnover, and ultimately strengthen the middle class.

There are currently no federal laws guaranteeing workers the right to earn paid sick days. Nearly 40 percent of workers in middle-income families and more than 55 percent of workers in low-income families do not have access to paid sick days. Twenty-three percent of adults report either being threatened with losing a job or being fired for taking time off when they or a family member have been sick.

  • Make Sure That Workers Who Want to Form a Union Can Do So

Unions help strengthen the middle class by enabling workers to negotiate for fair wages and benefits and helping ordinary citizens get involved in the political process.

But as unions became weaker over the past four decades—due in part to an unfair union election process—they became less able to perform these functions. The middle class has withered as a result, with the share of income going to the middle class falling alongside the percentage of workers in unions. (see Figure 5)

  • Require Colleges to Provide Consumer Information Via College Scorecards

Two-thirds of students with four-year bachelor’s degrees finish their studies with student-loan debt, and the average amount of debt per student is nearly $25,000. (see Figure 6) Yet average debt loads at schools can range from $950 or less to $55,250, and graduation rates range from0 percent to 91 percent. Many students, however, are unaware of these differences.

The federal government should require colleges and universities to do a better job of providing pertinent information to prospective students concerning their likelihood of graduating, finding employment, and paying off student debt. Schools should be required to direct students to this information on all promotional materials to allow students to easily compare schools.

For all of the wonky details, check out the full report HERE.

BOTTOM LINE: Instead of continuing the painful austerity spending cuts we’re currently living under, we can and should make needed investments in the middle class, such as expanding access to preschool and child care, as part of a package that reduces the deficit over the longer term. And there’s also no reason not to immediately put in place a set of pro-middle class, pro-growth policies that won’t require any additional federal spending.