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GOP Attacks Healthcare, Now Seeks to End Medical Tax Break

Kate Zernike and Abby Goodnough New York Times
Ending the medical tax break could be a ‘gut punch’ to the majority of the country. Eliminating the medical-expense deduction would end a source of relief that has helped millions of people cope with steep medical costs in a country without comprehensive, universal health coverage.

tv

We Asked Financial Advisers: How Realistic is Netflix’s New Show, ‘Ozark’?

Tom Teodorczuk MarketWatch
Netflix's Ozark brings capitalism's corrosive effects to middle america through the lens of a financial adviser and money laundering. Right from the opening monologue narrated by star Jason Bateman, Netflix’s new drama “Ozark” makes clear it doesn’t just want to depict a financial adviser up to his neck in danger. It’s out to convey profound truths about money.

Trumpism: It’s Coming From the Suburbs

Jesse A. Myerson The Nation
Racism, fascism, and working-class Americans. If you’re looking for Trump’s implacable support, Texas trailer parks and Kentucky cabins are the wrong places to find it. Fascism develops over hands of poker in furnished basements, over the grill by the backyard pool, over beers on the commuter-rail ride back from the ball game—and in police stations and squad cars.

Child Care Often Pricier Than Rent, Food, and College Tuition

Teddy Wilson Rewire
"Improving our nation's child-care system will have a compound effect," said Aleyamma Mathew, director of the Women's Economic Justice Program of the Ms. Foundation for Women. "Not only on the millions of women in the workforce but on communities and the economy as a whole."

Economic Policy That Doesn't Confront the Rise in Inequality Head-On Will Do Nothing to Help the Vast Majority of American Families

Josh Biven Economic Policy Institute
Using policy to shift economic power and make U.S. incomes grow fairer and faster. Boosting income growth for the bottom 90 percent requires a policy agenda that explicitly aims to halt or reverse the rise in inequality. Finding no relationship between rising inequality and faster growth means raising living standards for the bottom 90 percent can likely be better for overall growth.

labor

Why Tech Professionals Now Share A Fate with the Working Class

TAMARA DRAUT fastcompany.com
The debate this election cycle about how to shore up the American middle class and the longer-term worry that automation will chip away at the labor market both miss a more proximate and pressing reality: knowledge work, including tech jobs, are already being shipped overseas. What happened to manufacturing jobs a generation ago is now being repeated in the knowledge economy, linking the fates of the professional class and the working class together.

books

Matthew Desmond's `Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City'

Barbara Ehrenreich New York Times Book Review
Matthew Desmond is an academic who teaches at Harvard - a sociologist or, you could say, an ethnographer. But I would like to claim him as a journalist, and one who has set a new standard for reporting on poverty. In Milwaukee, he moved into a trailer park and then to a rooming house on the -poverty-stricken North Side and diligently took notes on the lives of people who pay 70 to 80 percent of their incomes for homes that are unfit for human habitation.

New York Times Invents Left-Leaning Economists to Attack Bernie Sanders

Dean Baker; Doug Henwood
All the news that's fit...well, it seems the NYT news story has been tailored to fit the editorial views of the paper. There are undoubtedly many left of center economists who have serious objections to the proposals Sanders has put forward, there are also many who have publicly indicated support for them. He has not given a fully worked out proposal for many of his ideas, nor is it reasonable to expect a fully worked out proposal from a candidate for the presidency.

Hillary Clinton's New Paleoliberalism; Sizing Up Clinton's Plans to Help the Middle Class - Here's the Rub: It Isn't Enough

Matthew Yglesias; Eduardo Porter
Hillary Clinton's record in office suggests that she is more liberal than either her husband or Barack Obama, and in a Monday speech outlining her economic vision she set out to confirm that. However, still lacking is much policy detail as to how this difference might look in practice. A future Clinton administration might help change the norms of corporate governance to foster the kind of labor relations that everyday workers have not experienced in decades.
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