I was recently a guest lecturer at William Paterson University (WPU) in Wayne, New Jersey. Part of the New Jersey state system, WPU is home to a very diverse and dedicated student body – many of them the first in their families to attend college and virtually all of them ...

President Harry Truman once said, “It's a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it's a depression when you lose yours.” And while economic experts may tell us that the current recession ended in June 2009, for almost 15 million Americans, this is still a depression.According to the September 2010 ...

On the afternoon of September 30, a fire destroyed Gene Cranick's home in Obion County, Tennessee. The fire department was on-hand before the fire became un-controllable, but didn't move to extinguish it. It turns out, firefighters arrived because Mr. Cranick's neighbor paid his annual rural fire service fee guaranteeing his ...

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “deficit” to mean “a deficiency in amount or quality.” When it comes to the federal budget “deficit,” it’s specifically about the amount of money in the U.S. Treasury.Each year, money comes into the Treasury as revenues from such things as individual and corporate income taxes, payroll ...

In the last couple of years it's become strikingly clear that the majority of people in the United States do not know where or how their federal tax dollars are spent. As a result, they feel disengaged from both the personal and societal impacts of federal spending and believe they ...

On March 23, 2010, President Obama signed into law the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPAC). In tandem with the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act, ratified a week later to amend portions of the PPAC, these two pieces of legislation represent the passage ...

Version:1.0 StartHTML:0000000167 EndHTML:0000012525 StartFragment:0000000604 EndFragment:0000012509 On June 26, 2009 the U.S. House of Representatives passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) to address the role of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in perpetuating climate change. Most notably, the bill features a 'cap and trade' initiative to set the total volume ...

The U.S. Census Bureau released a report showing a significant decrease in U.S. economic security, tied to a rise in unemployment, between 2008 and 2009. The report highlights trends in median income, poverty and health insurance coverage during this time frame.NPP's Income Security and Labor provide a powerful context for ...

On March 13, 2010 the Obama Administration released its blueprint for reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), known widely now by its most recent reincarnation, the Bush Administration's “No Child Left Behind Act” (NCLB). ESEA mandates that an increased proportion of the education budget be allocated towards programs ...