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Human & Civil Rights Agencies

Deciding on Care for Elderly Parents in Declining Health

By Lesley Alderman

Published: March 12, 2010, New York Times

TWO years ago my father, then 83, became very ill. Until then, he had been living alone in a pleasant one-bedroom apartment on the Hudson River, an hour’s drive from my home in Brooklyn. After a couple of months i...

A Consumer Bill Gives Exemption on Payday Loans

By Sewell Chan, New York Times

Published: March 9, 2010

WASHINGTON — Senator Bob Corker, the Tennessee Republican who is playing a crucial role in bipartisan negotiations over financial regulation, pressed to remove a provision from draft legislation that would have empowered fe...

African American Experiences in the Economy: Recession Effects More Strongly Felt 

By: Rebecca Perron, AARP Knowledge Management

Source: AARP.org (February 2010)

While millions of Americans have experienced hard times during the economic recession, the environment for many African Americans age 45+ and their families h...

New jobless claims filed last week dropped 29,000, to 469,000, slightly better than forecasters expected, the government said moments ago. Forecasters expected last week's new jobless claims to come in at 470,000. The four-week moving average for new jobless claims, which smooths out the week-to-week volatility, dropped 3,250 to 470,450. Continuing claims last week dropped to 4.5 million from 4.6 million the prior week.

House Adopts $15 Billion Plan to Spur Job Growth

By: Carl Hulse

Published: March 4, 2010 in the New York Times

WASHINGTON — The House on Thursday approved a $15 billion measure intended to spur job creation by granting tax breaks to businesses that hire workers, as Democrats, bracing for new jobless figures, tried to show that Congress ...

One of the great advances of 20th century was increased life expectancy. This advance might have bankrupted Social Security, if it were not for women in the work force. When the Social Security program was created in the 1930s, life expectancy was 60 years, as compared to 75 years in the 1980s and 78 years today. With 1930s life expectancy, a great number of people were expected to pay Social Security taxes while they worked, but never live long enough to ever collect benefits. The early plan...

Earlier today Casey B. Mulligan wrote about how the entry of more women into the work force has helped sustain the solvency of Social Security, which has been otherwise stressed by the size of the retiring baby boom generation and longer life expectancies. The decisions by many more women to trade in their aprons for pantsuits in the last few decades meant that there were more workers paying Social Security taxes — taxes that financed the Social Security paychecks given to this growing ...

While Washington debates how to help the country’s struggling small businesses, states and municipalities have stepped up with an array of initiatives to stanch closings and save jobs. The local approaches are as varied as subsidizing wages for new hires, running a $100,000 regional business-plan competition and giving out grants to help small manufacturers reposition themselves. Some states and cities are using federal stimulus dollars, and others are mixing federal, state and private ...

The Senate has passed a $15 billion package that is aimed at helping small businesses. There are two key parts. One is the extension of section 179 of the tax code, which allows up to $250,000 of capital expenditures to be expensed immediately instead of being depreciated over time. This will motivate some companies to make capital expenditures that will reduce their tax bills, which is good for the economy. The other part is the suspension of FICA payments for the rest of the year for new hi...

Better health doesn’t seem to explain why so many young people forgo health insurance. Rather, income does, according to new survey data released by Gallup. First, some background. One of the explanations for rising health care costs is that relatively healthy people are taking their chances and going without insurance. The relatively sick pool of insured customers who remain drive up the cost of premiums, at least if there is any form of risk-sharing (like community rating) within that...