Cost of living

Just in case you need a reminder of how lopsided the economy has become, a new paper from economists at the London School of Economics and the University of California at Berkeley shows the bottom 90 percent of American families are no wealthier than they were in 1986. While the top one percent have seen their share of wealth steadily grow, the vast majority of Americans are making due with less.

The nation's most massive inequality can be located in one very expected New York City community. The numbers show that the top 5 percent of households in Manhattan earned 88 times as much as the poorest 20 percent.

A child born in 2013 will cost a middle-income American family an average of $245,340 until he or she becomes an adult, with families living in the Northeast taking on a greater burden, according to a report out Monday. Those costs — food, housing, childcare and education — rose 1.8 percent over the previous year.

Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton signed into law a bill that raises the state's minimum wage to $9.50 an hour over two years. The new law then allows the minimum wage to go up based upon inflation. "Our fight is more than raising the minimum wage, we're fighting to raise up people," said one of the bill's authors, Sen. Jeff Hayden.

For the first time, the U.S. Labor Department has gotten involved in a high-profile lawsuit brought by unpaid interns. On Friday, the federal agency filed an amicus brief in support of eight former interns suing Hearst Corporation for back wages.

Like many places across the country, there is mismatch between the average rent and a worker's income in the Green Mountain State. You might not be surprised to learn that a recent report demonstrates, once again, that Vermont is one of the hardest places to afford housing. Without rent control in place, some legislators are looking at a minimum wage increase and sick leave guarantees to help balance the equation.

President Obama highlights the importance of making sure our economy rewards the hard work of every American — including America's women. The President again calls for Congress to ensure that women earn equal pay for equal work and increase the minimum wage to $10.10, which would give nearly 28 million Americans the raise they deserve. He underscores his belief that providing opportunity for working women and families is the right thing to do for our economy, because when women succeed, America succeeds.

A committee in the Democratic-majority Kentucky House of Representatives voted down Republican proposals to make Kentucky a right-to-work state and to exempt school construction projects from the state’s prevailing wage laws.

Colorado workers are gathering at the Capitol at noon today, calling on the state legislature to ask Congress to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. Then the workers are heading a few blocks away to continue their rally at, appropriately, a McDonald’s. No doubt, some state lawmakers will flatly oppose an increase of the minimum wage, which is $8 an hour in Colorado — higher than the federal minimum of $7.25 hourly.

It used be Molasses to Rum to Slaves and so on and so forth back in Colonial American days of old, but today we see a new version of a horrid classic. Walmart and Sam's Club love to pay their people low wages, so low that they can't possibly afford to sustain themselves and their families on them, so they end up on programs like food stamps and using local food pantries to supplement their food to survive on which Sam's Club and Walmart are all too happy to donate to the local bank that supplies these pantries.