Rana Plaza in Bangladesh collapsed last month, killing more than 1,100 garment workers. (Wikipedia Commons)

Everyone likes a good deal.

And for that reason, most of us have flocked to clothing stores like H&M and Old Navy for the unbelievably cheap and expansive selection they offer.

T-shirts for five bucks; jeans and dresses for under $20. It’s almost like you can’t afford to not buy it.

Clothing is cheaper now than it’s ever been: today average Americans spend less than four percent of their total income on their wardrobes, about half what was spent 50 years ago, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

It’s almost cheaper today to buy a whole new wardrobe than to pay to wash your old one (a bit of an exaggeration, yes, but really not all that far off).

But you know the saying that there’s no such thing as a free lunch? Same thing goes with your $5 t-shirt – it comes with some steep hidden costs. There’s no possible way retailers like H&M could be making billions in profits selling clothing at such low prices without there being some catch.

So what are we, the consumers, not seeing?

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

The answer became painfully clear last month when an eight-story factory building in Bangladesh collapsed, killing more than 1,100 garment workers who were manufacturing clothing for American and European retailers.

Bangladeshi garment workers, the majority of whom are women, receive among the world’s lowest wages – as little as $37 a month. They often work 15-hour shifts in unsafe, sweatshop conditions. Workers rights are few, and labor activism is commonly – and sometimes violently  - squashed. More than a few major factory owners are either government officials or have close political ties, allowing the industry to commonly ignore safety and labor standards.

Rana Plaza, the building outside of the capital Dhaka that collapsed on April 24, was owned by a local politician who illegally built three additional floors onto the structure and installed heavy textile machinery (he’s currently being detained).  The building housed five different garment factories and more than 3,500 workers. Even after large cracks were found in the walls the day before the disaster, factory supervisors – under pressure to fill orders – ignored warnings to vacate the building, and ordered workers to continue production.

This was the deadliest industrial disaster in Bangladesh’s history, but certainly not the only one in recent memory. Just last November, 112 garment workers were killed in a factory fire near Dhaka, when supervisors ignored fire alarms and prevented workers from leaving their sewing machines. Roughly 500 Bangladeshis have died in similar disasters over the past decade. And even since the Rana Plaza collapse, a factory fire on May 8 killed at least eight more workers.

Why Bangladesh?

Simple: labor and production costs are dirt cheap. Making clothes in Bangladesh costs less than just about anywhere else in the world. Check out this graphic to get a sense just of just how dramatic the contrast is.

If you take a quick look at the tags on the clothes in your wardrobe, chances are good that at least some of them were made in Bangladesh.  Since the 1990s, Bangladesh’s ready made garment industry has exploded: it now generates close to $20 billion a year in exports.  More than 25% of these garments go to stores in the U.S. and close to 60% are shipped to to Europe, according to a report by the International Labor Right Forum (ILRF) Major retailers that look to Bangladesh for much of their clothing manufacturing include H&M, The Gap, Walmart, Benetton, J.C. Penney and Zara.

Bangladesh’s textile factories have popped up like gangbusters in the last decade. There are now about 5,000 of them, employing nearly four million people, according to the ILRF. It’s become one of the largest clothing exporters in the world. In fact, it’s second only to China, which has actually lost a good deal of textile manufacturing contracts because it’s no longer the cheapest place to do business.

The Dark Side of Fast Fashion

It used to be that most clothing stores had seasonal fashion lines that would remain on the shelves for at least few months. But go into an H&M store today and then go back again a week or two later, and you’ll likely find a completely changed inventory. This is the concept behind fast fashion, pioneered over the last 15 years by European brands like H&M and Zana, and to a lesser extent, The Gap, Benetton, Urban Outfitters and Forever 21. The idea is to capture the latest design trends and whisk them from the catwalk to the store, quickly producing trendy but generally low quality garments in the fastest, most cost-effective manner possible.

This business formula has proven remarkably successful, with many of the big brands posting record profits (the founders of H&M and Zana are both among the richest people on the planet). And they’ve done it by providing a nearly unlimited selection of super cheap, fashionable clothing that consumers reliably devour.

In a recent interview with NPR, Elizabeth Cline, author of Overdressed: The Shockingly High Price of Fast Fashion, explained that stores like H&M produce hundreds of millions of garments per year. “They put a small markup on the clothes and earn their profit out of selling an ocean of clothing,” she says. H&M has about 2,800 stores in 48 markets and it’s growing fast, especially in China and the United States.

But if these companies are making billions and consumers are getting great deals, the cost has to be absorbed somewhere. And that’s where developing countries like Bangladesh come into the picture. Because there’s no way the fast fashion model could exist without an army of extremely low-paid workers to quickly turn massive orders around.

Digital First Media

Unfortunately, the insatiable demand of the fashion model has also encouraged harsh working conditions: garment workers toil around the clock to quickly meet ever changing orders, while factory owners pay paltry wages and often avoid necessary safety improvements in order to keep production costs low. If conditions were improved and workers paid even a few cents per hour more, production costs would rise, and the retailers would likely look to cheaper suppliers.

See a NY Times slideshow on Bangladeshi factory workers

This, of course, is not unique to the fashion industry. A slew of other Western industries – food included – also rely on global supply chains. One prime example is electronics companies, which depend heavily on cheap production lines in developing countries. The issue came to light last year after worker abuses were reported at a Chinese factory that made products for Apple.

So who’s to blame?

There’s no simple answer. It’s easy to blame the big clothing companies, many of whom reap enormous profits, fully aware of the decrepit conditions where their products are made.  After the huge factory fire last November, a number of major clothing brands and retailers rejected a union-sponsored proposal to improve safety throughout Bangladesh’s garment industry, the Associated Press reported. Instead, companies expanded a patchwork system of private audits and training, which labor groups allege do little and lack any real enforcement mechanism.

The textile factories are almost all locally owned and managed, allowing Western retailers to maintain a distance from them and turn a blind eye to factory floor conditions.   And blame, of course, can also be directed at the factory owners and Bangladeshi government officials who knowingly exploit and endanger the workforce.

In the wake of this recent tragedy, a number of European designers including H&M, Zana and Benetton, signed a new legally binding agreement to pay for major safety improvements. But very few American brands have gotten on board: as of May 17, only two companies – PVH, parent to Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger and Abercrombie & Fitch signed.  The Gap, Walmart, Sears and Target are among the major American clothing retailers that have refused to sign despite relying heavily on Bangledeshi suppliers. Some of these companies counter that they have their own safety improvement measures in place, while others, like Disney, have announced that they will leave Bangladesh altogether.

Western companies are often quick to argue that although working conditions in Bangladesh are far from ideal, they’re a whole lot better than they would be if the garment industry wasn’t there at all. Western demand has created jobs and training for millions of people, particularly women, offering a greater degree of independence and economic security. Since the arrival of textile manufacturing in the late 1970s, Bangladesh’s poverty rate has fallen from about 70 percent to less than 40 percent. And even though about half the country still lives on less than a dollar a day, income has risen markedly for large swaths of the population. Health and education have improved incrementally as well.

NPR’s Planet Money show is documenting how t-shirts around the world are made.

What role do you play?

And then there’s us – the consumers. Because the reality is that none of this would be happening if the demand wasn’t there to fuel it. Consumers in Western nations now buy more clothes than ever before, according to Cline, particularly cheap clothes that aren’t  made to last.  Factory conditions would likely improve if consumers were to demand it, especially if we were willing to pay more for our clothes and absorb some of the costs .

But doing so is a lot easier said than done. It’s one thing to be horrified by Bangladesh’s recent tragedy and to hope conditions improve. It’s quite another thing, though. to voluntarily pay more for your clothes at the register. With the exception of the worst tragedies that grab our attention, most of the inequities in this system are out of sight, out mind. It’s really easy to just pretend they don’t exist.

Which begs the question: how much more would you be willing to pay to know your clothes were being produced in an ethical manner?

Resources to help further explore this issue

Lesson plan suggestions for using this issue in the classroom

• NY Times Learning Network
• PBS Newshour Extra

International labor rights advocacy groups

• International Labor Rights Fund
• Fair Labor Association
• IndustriAll Global Union
• International Labour Organization (a United Nations organzation)

Sites that help track product origins in the global supply chain

• SourceMap
• ImportGenius 
• Piers

Corporate responsibility statements from some major clothing retailers

• H&M
• Gap
• Walmart
• Target

Recently arrived Irish immigrants in the the mid-1800s.

Ever since the first Europeans landed here over four centuries ago, America has had a conflicted relationship with its newcomers. It’s a serial drama that continues today in the halls of Congress, as legislators wrestle with a new generation of immigration reform. We are, of course, a nation of immigrants: the U.S. has less than five percent of the world’s population, but is home to about 20 percent of its migrants. And the vast majority of us – everyone, in fact, except for American Indians – can trace our roots to foreign lands. Despite that common thread, though, America has not always treated its newest residents with the most empathy.

There have been four major waves of immigration to America, the last of which – mainly from Mexico and other Latin American countries - continues today. Several themes play out consistently in all four chapters:

• Each successive wave of immigrants has been, to an extent, a reflection of conditions elsewhere in the world.
• Each cycle of newcomers has faced animosity and backlash from the already assimilated.
• The history of America’s immigration policy is one of continual repetition and vacillation, a revolving door that often swings open during periods of economic prosperity and slams shut when times get tough.

Scroll through the timeline below to follow the tangled history of America’s ever-changing immigration policies. The interactive chart beneath it shows rates of legal immigration from 1820 to the present (use the scroll bar to zoom into specific chunks of time).

Number of Foreign-Born Legal Permanent Residents, 1820 to 2012

Source: Department of Homeland Security, Office of Immigration Statistics

View data table

PBS

Remember that “binders full of women” comment made by Mitt Romney in the second presidential debate last October?

That infamous blunder – the subject of countless tweets and memes – was in response to a question about gender wage disparities, an issue that still receives relatively little political attention despite its prevalence.

Although earnings rates have gradually narrowed since the Equal Pay Act was signed into law 50 years ago, the gap is still significant: in 2010, female full-time workers made only 77 cents for every dollar earned by men, as calculated by the National Women’s Law Center (which used 2011 U.S. Census American Community Survey data). That year, the median (middle) wage for full-time male workers was $48,202. And for women: $37,118.

The earning gap between men and women is narrowest for younger workers and grows consistently wider for older workers.  

Women make up about half of the U.S. workforce and are the main breadwinners in roughly 4 out of 10 households, according to NWLC. Today women also earn more college and graduate school degrees than men do. Yet, on average, women earn less than men in almost every occupation for which there is sufficient wage data.

Why?

The reasons behind the gap are still hotly contested. Some academic studies argue that the disparity is due mainly to non-discriminatory factors involving a division of labor in the home — including childcare — that often falls more heavily on women. Because of family-related circumstances, women are also more likely than men to have interrupted careers and to work part-time, both of which generally result in lower wages. Additionally, women still tend to be employed in a greater number of “helping” and support professions that are often compensated at lower rates than jobs that are still more typically performed by men.

However, many studies point to evidence that the gender wage gap still persists even after these expected factors like family leave are taken into account, leading to the conclusion that systemic discrimination is still a primary factor in explaining the disparity.

Republicans in Congress recently blocked a House vote on legislation known as the Paycheck Fairness Act. The bill, which has been introduced by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) in the last eight consecutive congresses, would expand the Equal Pay Act to close specific loopholes and allow employees to share salary information with their coworkers. It would also require employers to demonstrate that pay disparities between male and female employees are based on job performance, not gender.

Wage Gap by State

Click on each state in the map below to see what a woman makes for every dollar a man makes (the ratio of female and male median earnings for full-time, year-round workers). The “wage gap” is the additional money a woman would have to make for every dollar made by a man in order to have equal annual earnings. The map uses data collected by NWLC. Download the data here.

Leading the pack in 2011 was Washington D.C., where full-time female workers made, on average, 90.4 cents for every dollar that full-time male workers made. In California, which ranked fourth, women made 84.9 cents for every dollar made by men. At the bottom of the list was Wyoming, where women made a mere 66.6 cents for every dollar men made.

How has the wage gap changed over time?

Although the pay gap between men and women remains fairly wide, it has narrowed significantly over the last half century. When the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963, the median wage for a woman working full time, year round was about $22,000, as compared to roughly $37,000 for men (or 59 cents for every dollar a man made).  By 1973, women, on average, made only 57 cents to every dollar made by men, a gap of 43 cents, the widest since the Census Bureau began tracking earnings. Since then, the gap has gradually narrowed, although it’s remained fairly stagnant for the past decade.

NWLC also has created charts listing the wider wage gap that exists between African-American and Latino women over time, as compared to white males.

Gender Wage Gap by Race/Ethnic Group

Although the gender wage gap among whites and Asians is greater than among African Americans and Latinos, it should be noted that African-American and Latino men and women both make significantly less overall than their white counterparts. In 2012, Asian women full-time wage and salary workers had higher median weekly earnings than women of all other races/ethnicities, as well as African-American and Latino men.

The current pay gap grows significantly wider when comparing average annual wages made by women of color to those made by white men. For instance,  African-American women working full time, year round were paid only 64 cents, and Hispanic women only 55 cents, for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men, according to NWLC.

Mouse over the following chart, produced by Catalyst, to explore the data.

Pay Gap by Profession

Even within the same professions, women today are still paid significantly less, on average, than men. But the pay gap varies dramatically for different jobs. That’s according to an analysis that NPR’s Planet Money did of the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

The chart below, by Lam Thuy Vo, shows the jobs where the wage gap is the smallest and the biggest (based on comparisons of full-time workers).

Part of the gap in pay, Vo notes, results from professional decisions some women make voluntarily, even within some individual job categories. She writes: “Among physicians, for example, women are more likely than men to choose lower-paid specialties (though this does not explain all of the pay gap among doctors).”

It’s also interesting to note, writes Vo, that the jobs where the gap is biggest are the one’s that pay more, on average, than the jobs where the gap is lowest.

Percentages are based on the median weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers. Not all jobs have enough workers for BLS to calculate a meaningful ratio.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
Credit: Lam Thuy Vo / NPR

Getty Images

Benjamin Franklin once famously wrote: “In this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.”

Well, the deadline for the latter inevitability (and hopefully not the former) is just around the corner.

For many Americans, mid-April means last minute scrambling and groaning, a last ditch effort to get taxes filed by the April 15 deadline.

So what happens to all that hard-earned cash of yours?

The federal budget – on which the government operates – consists mainly of revenue from income taxes and payroll taxes. In an effort to demystify what the government actually does with that cash, Google and Eyebeam last year put out a call to graphic designers and developers to help visualize how our federal income tax dollars are spent. The Data Viz Challenge, as it was called, drew some very cool entries, including the following interactives (click on each to explore the multimedia versions).

Where Did All My Tax Dollars Go?
Designed by Anil Kandangath, this won first place in the contest. It allows users to enter their income and view a clear breakdown of what services that money went towards.

Every Day Is Tax Day
Designed by Fred Chasen, this project took second place in the contest. It allows viewers to explore how many hours they actually spend working directly for the government over the course of a year, and what programs that cash funds.

Federal Income Tax Receipt
Although not actually an entry in the contest, this is a good straightforward visualization produced by the National Priorities Project that spits out a simple itemized receipt of your tax breakdown based on income.

The U.S. has entered the dreaded sequester, a very costly consequence of the federal government failing to reach a budget deal by their self-imposed deadline (March 1). This is one for the history books -  the largest, automatic across the board spending cuts in American history.

But if this latest government crisis hasn’t been keeping you up at night, you’re certainly not alone. A recent study found that the vast majority of Americans have paid little to no attention as the sequester drew near; many dismissed it as a poorly made sequel to last year’s more compelling fiscal cliff thriller (along the lines of the The Hangover Part II, if you will).

But despite the lack of popular interest, the sequester is actually a pretty big deal – and real pain will be felt. While it won’t lead to across the board tax hikes – as the fiscal cliff threatened to do – it will result in sweeping cuts to government services that millions of Americans rely on.

In the days leading up to the deadline, Obama referred to the sequester as “a meat cleaver approach” to reducing the deficit, making dire warnings about the damage it would inflict on the economy and individual states.

“Across the board spending cuts mean that hundreds of thousands of Americans won’t get services they rely on from the government,” he said.

So … what is it?

Source: NY Times

Let’s start with the good news:

It’s not a bird flu epidemic.

Now the bad news:

The sequester means more than $85 billion in automatic across the board spending cuts to military and domestic programs over the next seven months ($42.7 billion from each).

This is the first phase of the $1.2 trillion in total cuts set to take place by the end of 2021 (spread over the next nine years), sliced evenly and indiscriminately from a range of mostly discretionary spending programs (programs that Congress renews funding for every year). Defense programs will be cut by about 8 percent and domestic programs by about 5 percent.

In anticipation of the looming cuts, immigration officials have already started releasing detainees from detention centers to reduce costs.

Only a handful of services are exempt from the cuts, including some basic safety net programs like Social Security, retirement programs, veterans’ benefits, Medicaid, and refundable tax credits.

How much is this gonna hurt?

Brace yourself – it might sting pretty bad. That’s according to congressional budget experts and a recent report from the White House, detailing the widespread impact the sequester will have across the country. Of course, there is some dispute over the extent of the damage, and a number of conservative groups – particularly those advocating for smaller government – argue that the consequences have been grossly exaggerated. While seemingly large, they say the cuts are still only a tiny percentage of the federal budget – just over 2 percent.

However, a series of independent analyses have made clear that these cuts will have significant impact throughout the country. Click on the image at right to see an interesting multimedia breakdown produced by the Texas Tribune that shows the extent of various cuts in each state, as well as the impact-per-person.

Generally speaking, the sequester is expected to stunt America’s already sluggish economic recovery by reducing our growth (in terms of GDP) and killing approximately one million jobs over the next two years, according to estimates by the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Most immediately, the cuts will impact millions of jobless Americans whose unemployment checks will be reduced by upwards of 10 percent beginning as early as mid-March.

It will also result in widespread service cuts, furloughs, and layoffs across government agencies.

These are some of the key cuts you may notice in the coming months (as reported by the NY Times):

• Air Traffic: To meet the scheduled $600 million cut to its budget, the Federal Aviation Administration will likely furlough about 10 percent of its work force each day, including air traffic controllers. This will result in reduced air traffic throughout the country and increased delays. Travelers have already begun to experience some effects of this.

• Early childhood education: The scheduled $424 million in cuts could mean an estimated 70,000 children losing access to Head Start programs and layoffs of roughly 14,000 teachers and other employees. Parents of about 30,000 low-income children could also lose child-care assistance.
• Health: To meet its scheduled $350 million cut, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will likely perform significantly fewer preventative health screenings and STD tests and significantly decrease the availability of crucial vaccines. Facing a $120 million cut, community health centers will treat roughly 900,000 fewer patients who lack health insurance.
• Food safety: A three-week furlough of all food safety employees could result in a shortage of meat and dairy, and lead to higher food prices and greater public health risks.
• Environment: Several air-monitoring sites will be shut down, as will more than 100 water-quality projects around the country. In addition, roughly $100 million will be cut from the Superfund program that regulates the nation’s worst polluters.
• Recreation: National parks will have shorter hours, staffing reductions, service cuts and a decrease in firefighters and law enforcement.
• Criminal justice: The nearly $1 billion in combined criminal justice cuts will significantly reduce the number of federal prison employees and F.B.I. officials. Additionally, federal prosecutors will likely handle 2,600 fewer cases each year.
• Research: The National Science Foundation will cancel or reduce nearly 1,000 grants for research in things like clean energy, cyber-security, and education.
• Defense: The sequester will likely impose numerous furlough days on civilian employees and force major cuts to the military’s health insurance program. It would also curtail military operations, including an immediate shutdown of four naval air wings and cutbacks to satellite and missile warning systems. Additionally, the Army and Air Force both plan to significantly reduce training, allowing large numbers of units to fall below acceptable levels of combat readiness.

For more on how the sequester’s impact in California:

Why’s all this happening now?

Well, first thing to know is that the whole sequester situation is self-imposed. Yeah, you heard that right – this didn’t have to happen; the government created it all.

The whole thing derives from that perennial debate between Republicans and Democrats over spending and taxation (kind of like those old “Taste great, less filling” commercials, but much less entertaining). Both parties want to reduce America’s huge budget deficit (the big gap between what the government takes in as revenue and what it spends). But Republicans argue that this should be done by dramatically reducing government spending. Democrats, however,  insist on preserving funding for most government services by increasing revenue through moderate tax increases. A middle ground, apparently, is hard to find to find.

Back in 2011, House Republicans refused to raise the debt ceiling (the amount that the U.S. is allowed to borrow to meet its spending obligations) without significant reductions to the massive deficit.

A bipartisan committee was tasked with coming up with a plan to reduce the deficit in a way that both parties could stomach.. And to force the process along, negotiators came up with a brilliantly sadistic self-discipline strategy: they created a set of consequences so undesirable it would push them to quickly agree on a reasonable solution.

It’s kind of like pledging to burn your house down unless you get your homework done by a certain deadline. Obviously, you’d figure out a way to get your work done on time and save your home from being reduced to ashes.

Right?

Not so much with the government. For every self-imposed deadline negotiators have run up against since 2011, little has been resolved – they’ve just managed to narrowly avert economic disaster by repeatedly postponing the hard decisions.

In short, the sequester is an outcome that almost no one – Republican or Democrat – is happy about.

But what about that whole fiscal cliff thing – didn’t we already resolve this?

The fiscal cliff would have raised just about everyone’s taxes, and we narrowly averted plunging off it when Congress came up with a last minute deal on New Year’s Eve. But while that compromise prevented big tax increases, it didn’t resolve the looming threat of huge spending cuts – it just kicked the can down the road a few months. And now here we are again.

Put it in perspective: how big is $85 billion?

Over the course of a full year, $85 billion in cuts comes to roughly 5 percent of domestic programs and 8 percent of defense programs. But because it’s hitting in the middle of the fiscal year (ending in September), the cuts will be about double that rate for the next 7 months.

Is there anyway to make this right?

There is, but that would involve the Republican-controlled Congress and the White House finding some budgetary compromise, which they don’t seem inclined to do. Obama wants a 50-50 mix of spending cuts and tax increases to replace the sequester and allow more time for to negotiate a better deal. But most Republicans remain staunchly opposed to the idea of any new tax increases.

The one action that both sides do seem willing to take is a measure to continue government funding through the end of the fiscal year – if they fail to do so by the end of March, the federal government will shut down.

Oy vey!

Alright – I know I’m going a bit overboard with the Daily Show clips, but this train analogy is just too brilliant to ignore.

There’s been a lot of news recently about the government’s ongoing battle over the deficit and the debt ceiling.

But what does it all really mean?

If you happened to be snoozing through most of your 12th grade economics class, here’s a quick refresher:

The deficit is the gap between what the government spends and what it actually makes in revenue (through taxes).

So, basically, to put it into first-grade math terms: (D)eficit  = (S)pending – (R)evenue 

Debt – as many college students are all too familiar with – is the amount you owe someone else.  The U.S. government has racked up a lot of it over the years in order to pay for all of its programs and services – more than $16.6 trillion, or roughly $52,000 for every American. The debt limit or debt ceiling is the threshold for how much the government can borrow to meet its spending obligations (this sets the limit for how deep into debt American can slide).

Over the years, as the national debt has grown, the Treasury has periodically bumped up against this ceiling. As required by the Constitution, Congress must then approve raising that limit so the government can continue paying for stuff.  Although never a particularly popular thing to do, Congress has agreed to raise this limit dozens of time with little fanfare (until recently). Because if the ceiling is not raised, than the U.S. would have to default on its debt. And that would be really bad news.

One way of making some sense of all this stuff is thinking about your own credit card account:

Let’s say you want to buy a new big flat screen TV that costs $2,000, but you only have $1,000 in your bank account. In other words, you have a deficit of a grand.

So, \what are you gonna do?

Well, while prudence might suggest saving up until you have enough dough to actually pay for the TV upfront, instant gratification suggests otherwise. So you reach for your credit card and charge it. That is, you pay for it with money you don’t actually have: you make the conscious choice to hold onto the $1,000 in your pocket – which you need to pay for your other expenses -  and agree to go $2,000 into debt to get the what you want right now.

But before you stepped into the electronics store, you had set your debt ceiling at only $1,000 – the most you ever intended to owe anyone at any given time. But now, since you’re borrowing $2,000, you’re actually raising your debt ceiling to pay for something that barely fits in your living room.

Of course, the credit card company isn’t lending you this money out of the kindness of its heart – it’s making a profit by charging you interest. A whole lot it. And the longer you take the pay off the debt, the more interest you rack up.

So, whereas that TV would have cost a cool $2,000 if you had the money to pay for it when you bought it, it’s now costing you a good deal more since you’re paying off not only the initial cost ($2,000), but also the interest (whatever huge percentage the credit card company is charging you). In other words, the longer you take to pay off the TV, the more debt you accumulate, and the more that TV costs in the long run.

To get a sense of just how fast the U.S. accumulates debt, check out this crrazy real time debt clock (click on the image below).

Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

Wait … Californians actually voted to tax increase their own taxes?

Get outta here!

Like most Americans, California residents don’t look too kindly on the notion of raising taxes. In fact, voters have rejected statewide tax measures the last seven times they’ve been on the ballot!

So in many ways, it’s pretty miraculous that on Tuesday 54 percent of California’s electorate approved Proposition 30, which temporarily increases sales tax for everyone by a quarter cent and raises income taxes for those making over $250,000. The measure, which Governor Jerry Brown crafted and threw himself behind, is expected to raise about $6 billion a year and prevent massive cuts to the state’s already beleaguered public education system.

Here’s how it’ll affect you:

Brown staked much of his political reputation on winning what became a bitter, hard-fought, and incredibly pricey fight; both sides waged a relentless ad war, collectively spending more than $120 million.

“I know a lot of people had some doubts and some questions: Can you really go to the people and ask them to vote for a tax?” Brown told supporters at the victory party late Tuesday night. “Well here we are. We have a vote of the people – I think the only place in America where a state actually said, let’s raise our taxes for our kids, our schools, for our California dream.”

And he was right. In a state where voters haven’t approved a tax hike in almost three decades, the very real threat of huge cuts to education appears to have actually resonated with voters.

The consensus seemed to be: “Yes, taxes suck, but some things are just too important to lose.”

The temporary nature of the tax, also, likely made the measure more palatable to voters.

Interestingly, it was younger voters who turned out in force on Tuesday in support of the measure. Voters ages 18-29 – who Brown and his campaign targeted – made up almost 30 percent of the electorate and were critical in pushing the measure through.

What’s the deal with “the safety net”? The presidential candidates spend a lot of time talking and arguing about it, and the Democratic and Republican party platforms both seem to have pretty different perspectives on the role it should play in our lives.

So what is it? And who needs it? And why’s it gotta be such an issue?

In short, the safety net is a general term for the many government-funded social welfare programs intended to keep lower-income citizens from falling through the cracks – things like food stamps and subsidized health care. But the thing is, these programs aren’t cheap, and deciding how much of our tax revenue should go to pay for them is always a major point of contention – especially in hard economic times. Liberals often argue that providing necessary public services to society’s lower classes is not only the moral path, it’s actually good economic policy, in that it helps lift folks out of poverty and into more economically productive roles. Conservatives, though, often contend that the safety net is another example of big government reaching too far into our private lives. It’s and inefficient and financially irresponsible system that makes poor use of our hard-earned tax dollars, and creates a cycle of dependency, not independence.

So who’s right?

Check out the video, produced for The Lowdown by the folks at Explainer Music.