With all the rhetoric swirling around the debate over the fiscal cliff and the consequences of "going over," I found this interactive feature from the Washington Post quite enlightening — it enables the user to calculate how the outcome of the fiscal cliff negotiations will affect particular households based on household composition and income. An […]
Author Archives: Scott Michelman
In the fiscal cliff negotiations, a lot is on the table. One policy formally viewed as untouchable but now up for discussion, the Washington Post reports, is the mortgage-interest deduction, which is designed to encourage home ownership but has been criticized as responsible for inflating home prices and benefiting the wealthy disproportionally. The Post story […]
Keep an eye on this case, which raises the question whether a defendant in a wage and hour case can make an offer of judgment under Rule 68 to the named plaintiff in a putative collective action under the Fair Labor Standards Act and thereby render the case moot whether the plaintiff accepts the offer […]
A devoted CL&P Blog reader from teachingdegree.org thought our readers might find useful these eight common-sense tips for handling student loans in repayment. Definitely worth a look.
Today the United States filed a civil complaint for more than $1 billion against Bank of America, alleging that its component Countrywide engaged in a massive scheme to sell defective mortgage loans to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from 2007 to 2009. According to the lawsuit, "In order to increase the speed at which it […]
Pursuant to congressional mandate, since March 2011 the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) has maintained an electronic database of reports of harm associated with consumer products. This database serves a crucial function in helping alert consumers to dangerous products; before the database existed, as Public Citizen has reported, the CPSC took on average more than […]
Continuing what seems to have become a trendy move for Republican attorneys-general, the states of Michigan, Oklahoma, and South Carolina are joining a legal challenge to another signature Obama law. Here's a helpful summary from the Blog of Legal Times: Three states have joined a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the Dodd-Frank Act, complaining that […]