News Day

Minnesota student test scores came out this week to the usual fanfare of attention, including sounding of alarms by school critics and trumpeting of successes Minneapolis and St. Paul school districts. The Minnesota Department of Education produced a really pretty Powerpoint that shows … not much change. Continue reading →

You are sitting on a bench in a mall, waiting for a friend to join you. As you wait, you write in a notebook, look around at other people, check your watch to see how much longer you have to wait.  And then the security officers arrive to question you, because writing in your notebook is suspicious behavior. After prolonged questioning, you are released, but a report is sent to local police, who will keep your record on file for 20 years in a file headed “suspicious person.”  The national security police may also have been notified that you have been stopped as a “possible terrorist.” Continue reading →

Several items across my desk this morning on the perennial favorites of sex, drugs, money, guns, and politics. Let’s start with the money and guns story, since that one comes from Minnesota. Continue reading →

What kind of country do you want to live in? That’s one of the questions posed in a fascinating, in-depth series airing on PBS right now. They started with a pie chart (reproduced below), which shows distribution of wealth in three countries. You can go here to take the quiz, guessing which pie chart represents which country, including the United States.

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Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, Barbara Ehrenreich’s best-selling investigation of how people in low-paying jobs live, is being re-issued on its tenth anniversary. Unfortunately, as Ehrenreich notes in a new afterword (published in TomDispatch),

When you read about the hardships I found people enduring while I was researching my book — the skipped meals, the lack of medical care, the occasional need to sleep in cars or vans — you should bear in mind that those occurred in the best of times. The economy was growing, and jobs, if poorly paid, were at least plentiful. … [B]ut the brunt of the recession has been borne by the blue-collar working class, which had already been sliding downwards since de-industrialization began in the 1980s. Continue reading →

If your household earns $50,221, you are smack in the middle of U.S. households by income. That might make you middle class in income, but class is based not just on how much people earn, but also on how much they have. Continue reading →

Once upon a time, we were admonished not to talk about politics or religion at social gatherings, because these were controversial topics. Later, these became the most interesting topics, but sex was considered off-limits. Today, sex is on the table (or under the table or anywhere else), but money is still a taboo topic. Just imagine asking your girlfriend’s mother what she earns, or asking your own parents how much they have in the bank. Continue reading →

Doing business along the trenches and behind the fences of Central Corridor construction on University Avenue is tough enough. Dana Rose from Sharrett’s Liquors is one of the business owners who doesn’t think that getting the promised help for businesses should require a “13 page monstrosity” of an application, including personal financial data for the business owner (income, property owned, bank accounts, etc.) and authorization for a personal credit check. Continue reading →

In the first week of August, the U.S. raised the debt ceiling, cut trillions from the budget, and saw its/our credit rating downgraded from AAA to AA — sort of. “Sort of” is the operative characterization for all of these events, despite their high-profile news treatment during the dog days of summer. (August’s more traditional dog-days stories include a polar bear attack that killed one camper and injured others in Norway, a St. Paul man, who didn’t have time to use his bear spray before grizzly bear attack in Glacier National Park, and an end to a ban on dogs in Jiangmen, China.) Continue reading →