The Charles Koch Foundation recently released a commercial that ranked a near-poverty-level $34,000 family among the Top 1 percent of poor people in the world. Bud Konheim, CEO and co-founder of fashion company Nicole Miller, concurred: “The guy that’s making, oh my God, he’s making $35,000 a year, why don’t we try that out in India or some countries we can’t even name. China, anyplace, the guy is wealthy.”

Comments like these are condescending and self-righteous. They display an ignorance of the needs of lower-income and middle-income families in America. The costs of food and housing and education and health care and transportation and child care and taxes have been well-defined by organizations such as the Economic Policy Institute, which calculated that a U.S. family of three would require an average of about $48,000 a year to meet basic needs; and by the Working Poor Families Project, which estimates the income required for basic needs for a family of four at about $45,000. The median household income is $51,000.

The following discussion pertains to the half of America that is in or near poverty, the people rarely seen by Congress.

1. The Official Poverty Threshold Should Be Much Higher

According to the Congressional Research […]

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DES MOINES – The buzz in the bee community isn’t good following the harsh winter conditions experienced throughout much of the Midwest.

Iowa bee experts estimate an upward of 65 to 70 percent of the state’s honey bee population didn’t survive the past cold season.

‘This is probably the worst year we’ve seen for the bee population,” said Bob Wolff, a volunteer beekeeper at the Indian Creek Nature Center in Cedar Rapids.

He had 12 hives before winter. Two survived.

Iowa Department of Agriculture bee researcher Andrew Joseph characterized the situation as a ‘death by a thousand paper cuts” as the honey bee population has faced an environment lacking in diversity, pesticide problems, colony collapse and parasites such as varroa mites, since the 1990s.

These conditions lead to stressed, sick and weakened bees that can’t weather the winter.

‘It’s not that bees can’t handle a cold winter or snow … (but) when you go into winter with those types of bees and then you’re confronted with the harshness of this season, they don’t make it through to spring time,” Joseph said.

Honey bees normally cluster tightly around the queen bee and feed off the honey stores in the hive throughout the winter. However, the long winter […]

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Once all its costs are accounted for, the price of commercial solar power has pulled even with retail electricity rates in Italy and Germany, according to a new report.

The analysis is the third installment in a regular report by the consulting firm Eclareon, done on behalf of an international group of sustainable energy interests. This installment was also the first to look at solar power in the commercial sector rather than the residential sector. It looked at a standard 30 kilowatt solar photovoltaic system for your average commercial building, and the built a methodology to assess its ‘leveled cost of energy” (LCOE) in seven different countries: Brazil, Chile, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico and Spain.

The LCOE of any source of power – solar, natural gas, coal, wind, etc – accounts for everything that goes into determining that electricity’s cost: installation, maintenance, investment, the electricity itself, depreciation, and so forth. The goal is to give a more complete picture of each power source’s economic position vis-a-vis its rivals.

According to Eclareon’s analysis, solar’s LCOE in Italy and Germany is now at ‘grid parity,” meaning it’s even with retail electricity prices in general in those countries. Spain’s already gotten there as well, and Mexico […]

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How many Republicans in Congress, would you guess, believe that corporate shareholders should generally be liable for the debts accrued or crimes committed by that corporation? Working in the other direction, how many free market-loving, conservative donor capitalists believe corporate shareholders or board members ought to be able to tip the playing field by voting said corporation into non-compliance with laws and regulations that apply to competitors?

I’d wager that the number is zero. The impermeability of the corporate veil is central to their beliefs about how the economy should be organized, how the market should promote risk taking, encourage investment and so on.

And yet this week, nearly all of them – whether they’ve thought it through or not – will claim to want to pierce the corporate veil in the latter direction. On Tuesday the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby – a case that will determine whether employers who oppose the use of birth control on religious grounds can deny female workers contraceptive coverage guaranteed to them by the Affordable Care Act.

That’s how the stakes are typically described. The centrality of contraception to the case has united religious conservatives behind Hobby Lobby (a nationwide […]

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Taxpayers in 14 states will bankroll nearly $1 billion this year in tuition for private schools, including hundreds of religious schools that teach Earth is less than 10,000 years old, Adam and Eve strolled the garden with dinosaurs, and much of modern biology, geology and cosmology is a web of lies.

Now a major push to expand these voucher programs is under way from Alaska to New York, a development that seems certain to sharply increase the investment.

Public debate about science education tends to center on bills like one in Missouri, which would allow public school parents to pull their kids from science class whenever the topic of evolution comes up. But the more striking shift in public policy has flown largely under the radar, as a well-funded political campaign has pushed to open the spigot for tax dollars to flow to private schools. Among them are Bible-based schools that train students to reject and rebut the cornerstones of modern science.

Decades of litigation have established that public schools cannot teach creationism or intelligent design. But private schools receiving public subsidies can – and do. A POLITICO review of hundreds of pages of course outlines, textbooks and school websites found that many […]

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