Will you be better or worse off if Republicans pass their version of health care reform? That’s the burning question for most Americans as they watch the arm wrestling going on in Washington, D.C. As with the health care debate itself, there are no easy answers. The bill being debated right [Keep reading]
American consumers owe mountains of debt, but one of these mountains looms large over all the others: student loans. It’s astonishing to consider: Add up every auto loan in the country, and total student loan debt is bigger. Add up every credit card bill in the country, you only get [Keep reading]
Here’s an excerpt from a story I did for CNBC.com that published this weekend. Click above to read the entire piece. Older Americans struggling to overcome age discrimination while looking for work face a new enemy: their computers. Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan recently opened a probe into allegations that [Keep reading]
Wikileaks got everyone’s attention again this week, with dire headlines proclaiming the entire American government spook infrastructure had just been decimated by the secret-smashing site. Hold on to your hyperbole: there’s a lot more to this story. Julian Assange, true to form, has shared a little leaked data and promised [Keep reading]
On Tuesday, “iPhone Queen” replaced “Welfare Queen” as an attack on lazy Americans who don’t want to pay for things. This attack is much broader, however. “So rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love and want to go spend hundreds of dollars on that, maybe they should [Keep reading]
Howard Schmidt had an incredible American life. He was cyberczar to two presidents – a Republican and a Democrat. Before that, he ran security at Microsoft, and later practically rescued eBay when it was turning into a cesspool of fraud. He was a soldier (Air Force, then the Army Reserves), [Keep reading]
Several major online job listing sites potentially discriminate against older job applicants because of age limitations built into their software, Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan alleged on Thursday. Menus that let users create resumes and profiles prevent would-be applicants from entering years beyond a certain date, in some cases prohibiting [Keep reading]
A stunning number of Americans say they’ve been victimized by a digital crime, like credit card fraud (41 percent). But even more say they write their passwords down on a piece of paper (49 percent). In fact, Americans have a lot of bad digital habits. Some 41% say they have [Keep reading]
Before there was fake news, there was the “pseudo-event.” Fake news, the concept, is hardly new. Some argue that it dates back as far as the Golden Spike which completed American’s first transcontinental railroad, back in 1869. One could argue that the thing which finally unified America set the stage [Keep reading]
Instead of demanding that presidents produce their tax returns, maybe we need to be asking for their credit reports instead. After all, it’s not what a person has, or what a person earns, that creates a real conflict of interest. It’s what — or who — that person owes. Debt [Keep reading]
Bob Sullivan