This is how I want you to understand the college affordability crisis. As taxpayers, we understand, and largely accept, that a good deal of the taxes we pay will go to causes that will not benefit us directly. It is highly possible that you will live your entire life without ever calling the fire department to save your burning house. But you…

Several bills were recently introduced in Congress (passed through committee with bipartisan support) to lower the barriers to entry for investing in private placements. A private placement is the sale of stock or bonds to a limited set of investors. Often used by start-up companies, a private placement offering has…

One of the more positive fallouts from the growing attention to the student debt crisis is the focus on the underlying issue, the high cost of college education. …

“What do you want?” This is the hardest question most people face in their finances. Once you get past the very basics — food, shelter, health, safety — most questions of personal finance are questions of choice. …

In principle, there should be absolutely nothing wrong with requesting an “advance” on your weekly or bi-weekly paycheck. When the electrician comes to my house and completes his task, I don’t say “I’ll send you a check in two weeks.” Labor is performed and payment is due on completion. There…

If you care about student debt and the cost of college, housing affordability, child and elder care that does not require you to sacrifice your retirement, medical care that does not bankrupt you, then you care about voting rights. If your job or your passion is to enable people to…

In his recent book, Ben Rhodes wrote, “This is the apathy that those with unchecked power seek to engender in others: the idea that it’s not even worth caring about something because it’s not going to change.” He was writing about creeping authoritarianism and the threat to democracy, but I…

Because it was enacted so close to the arrival of the pandemic and the subsequent CARES Act, the SECURE Act of December 2019 barely registers beyond the world of financial planners. And now we have a proposal for its successor, nicknamed SECURE 2.0. Given its bipartisan support, we can expect…

The annual World Happiness Report was released in March and we Americans are…not completely despondent. The US ranks 14th on the list and there are no points for guessing that the Nordic and Scandinavian countries came out on top. Our Declaration of Independence asserts that the pursuit of happiness is an unalienable right. Shouldn’t our public policy support this belief? There is a wealth of research on what makes humans happy…