Lauren Kelley does the math on Panera’s new pay-what you-can experiment: The company opened a nonprofit “community café” in a suburb of St. Louis, near Panera’s headquarters, that’s different from every restaurant you’ve ever been to. At this restaurant, there are no prices on the menu. Instead, customers are told to pay what they can Read More
There are a few things in personal finance as aggravating as overdraft fees: you make a $55-dollar purchase with your debit card, and you only have $53 in your account. Your bank honors your charge anyway — for a $35 fee. In theory, customers willingly sign up for the service in order to avoid embarrassment Read More
The folks at ColorLines have put together an episode on the way race has helped hinder the economic prospects of poor people, both before and during the economic downturn.
x-posted from TAPPED. Last month, Brookings released a report that showed poverty on the rise in suburbs, especially in the Midwest — now, suburbs have the largest share of the nation’s poor. Suburbs often don’t have the same same level of services that many cities do, and the absence of things like good public transportation alongside Read More
Foreign Policy’s Annie Lowrey pens an opinion piece for the Washington Post, and presents some awesome alternatives to the Senate we currently have: Imagine a chamber in which senators were elected by different income brackets — with two senators representing the poorest 2 percent of the electorate, two senators representing the richest 2 percent and Read More
If you want to understand the anger at Obama’s proposed freeze on discretionary spending, just take a look at how the 2009 federal budget shook out: Glenn Greenwald: The facts about America’s bloated, excessive, always-increasing military spending are now well-known. The U.S. spends almost as much on military spending as the entire rest of the Read More
Cross-posted from TAPPED. Bloggers and columnists, in the flurry of predictions that come at the start of any new year, are wondering how we’ll consume media in 2010. What will be the new Twitter? Will any of it will be enough to save old media outlets? These questions are important, but it’s worth remembering that Read More
The story of Michael Oher’s intellectual development is also the story of his body type. Michael Oher is rare. Huge. A freak of nature. He’s also an anomaly of nurture and it has taken a village to raise him. The Blind Side by Michael Lewis chronicles Oher’s turbulent childhood, his unlikely ascent into professional football Read More
This month we’ll be reading The Blind Side by Michael Lewis. In an excerpt called “The Ballad of Big Mike,” Lewis tells the story of Michael Oher, an impoverished kid from Memphis who through a strange confluence of events ends up in the legal custody of a wealthy white family. At the time of his adoption Read More
Colin Asher looks at the deteriorating financial situation in the D, which has left dozens of families without the means to claim their loved ones’ bodies from the city morgue. Inside the Wayne County morgue in midtown Detroit, 67 bodies are piled up, unclaimed, in the freezing temperatures. Neither the families nor the county can Read More
