In most US states, child care costs more than college.

This may have contributed to the big increase in discouraged workers, as parents find that the costs of going to work leave them with no gain from working.

If it were feasible for these people to work, that would not create jobs for them. Rather, they would appear in the unemployment rate, and thus make the harm done by anti-employment anti-poor policies harder to disguise.

Growing up in poverty can permanently stunt a person, so the US policies that augment child poverty are causing irreparable damage.

ALEC's latest nasty proposal: an agency to streamline privatization of any government services, including any and all roads.

This would naturally lead to a new form of massive surveillance of drivers.

De facto segregation has returned to US schools. Where in the 1950s it was segregation between schools in the same school district, now it is segregation between school districts.

This seems to be a consequence of de facto segregation in housing.

When combined with the practice of funding education mostly from local property taxes, the result is that the schools where poor children go are badly funded.

Real-Life Hunger Is No Game.

Costa Rica's public banks have shielded that country from the worst damage, even through US economic warfare that subjugated the economy in every other aspect.

By the way, the world urgently needs some countries to default on their debt, so as to teach predatory lenders a lesson. At present they have every reason to suppose they can profit heavily by leading a country into international debt.

Newspapers in Sri Lanka urged the UK not to proceed with a royal charter to regulate the press, lest states like Sri Lanka cite it as a precedent.