(Photo by Art Cummings/Flickr)

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.

The collapsed Rana Plaza in Bangladesh, which killed more than 1,100 garment workers last month. (Wikimedia Commons)

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 the graphic below to see 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.

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?

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

Resources to 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

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.

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).

Source: NPR

Much of President Obama’s State of the Union address last Tuesday centered on the theme of boosting America’s dwindling middle class.

“It’s our generation’s task,” he implored, “to reignite the true engine of America’s economic growth — a rising, thriving middle class.”

Among the more tangible policies mentioned that evening to further that objective,  the president proposed raising the federal minimum wage – from $7.25 per hour to $9 by the end of 2015 –  and provide for annual cost of living adjustments. (This would apply to most hourly jobs, with some exceptions, including some tip-based work.)

“Let’s declare that in the wealthiest nation on earth, no one who works full time should have to live in poverty,” he said. “Working folks shouldn’t have to wait year after year for the minimum wage to go up, while CEO pay has never been higher. So here’s an idea that Gov. Romney and I actually agreed on last year: Let’s tie the minimum wage to the cost of living, so that it finally becomes a wage you can live on.”

• How much does a minimum wage worker actually make?

• What are the arguments?
  

• When was the minimum wage first established, and how often does it go up?
  
• How do minimum wage laws differ by state?
  
• How does our minimum wage compare to rates in other wealthy nations?
  
• Audio and video resources

How much does a minimum wage worker actually make?

Source: Center for American Progress

A full-time worker making the federal minimum wage (at $7.25/hour) earns about $14,500 a year, which is slightly above the federal poverty line ($11,490) for a person living alone. But for a single parent with one child, that same wage would be below the poverty line (which is $15,510 for a two-person household). In 2011, roughly 4 million Americans were making at or below the minimum wage, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Over 60 percent of them were women and roughly half were under 25.

The Obama administration argues that a $1.75 wage increase would affect an estimated 15 million workers (taking into account those now making more than the minimum wage but less than $9).

What are the arguments?

As with most things in politics, it’s one thing to propose something, and quite another to actually make it so. Raising the minimum wage is no exception. Since the U.S.established it’s first minimum wage in 1938 (at 25 cents and hour), increasing it has never come without a long hard fight.  In fact, when Obama first prepared to take office in 2008, his transition plan included a promise to raise the minimum wage to $9.50 an hour by 2011. And that was the last we heard about that …  up until now.

Raising the wage is strongly opposed by most conservatives who view it as a job killer and a prime example of government overreach into the free market economy.

When Benjamin Franklin famously wrote that “in this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes,” he neglected to mention a third absolute: our government’s eternal failure to agree on how high those taxes should be and what they should pay for.

As long as our nation continues to spend a lot more than it takes in, the issue will continue to be a saga between conservatives and liberals, the former fighting for lower taxes, fewer public services, and smaller government; the latter pushing for higher taxes on the wealthy, more government revenue, and a preservation of the social safety net. It’s like a really boring, annoying version of the NeverEnding Story (without the cool flying animals). Just think about the last few months in Washington: we narrowly averted hurling ourselves over the fiscal cliff only to re-enter into a battle over the debt ceiling.

So, why should you care? The most compelling reason is because this is your hard-earned cash that these guys are fighting over. The federal budget mainly consists of revenue from income taxes and payroll taxes. It’s about knowing how the government is spending your cash and what they’re spending it on. Along those lines,  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 some of the following interactives (click on each to explore the interactive versions).

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

Every Day Is Tax Day Designed by Fred Chasen, this project took second place in the contest. It allows users to explore how many hours they actually spend working directly for the government – based on individual salary – 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.

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.

More resources on the two tax propositions