Almost 52% of households are now relying on cell phones for their day-to-day communications. Demographic groups most likely to use cell phones only included Americans between the ages of 25 and 29 (60.1%), renters (58.2%), Americans between the ages of 30 and 34 (55.1%), adults living in poverty (51.8%) and Hispanic adults (46.5%). An estimated 1.9% of adults have no phone at all.   read more

About 90% of all new mortgages are backed by the government, three times more than in 2006. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the taxpayer-controlled, semi-private housing giants, were saved with infusions of $187.5 billion of public funds starting in 2008, and now guarantee 69% of new mortgages, up from only 27% in 2006, while the Federal Housing Administration and the Department of Veteran’s Affairs back about 21% of mortgages, up from just 2.8% in 2006.   read more

The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which was used two years ago to allow the government to indefinitely detain anyone, including U.S. citizens, has been approved again by the U.S. Senate. A group of Democrats and Republicans pushed for an amendment to the NDAA that would have prohibited the military from detaining American citizens on U.S. soil. But then a House-Senate conference committee led by Senator John McCain (R-Arizona) removed the provision from the bill.   read more

The federal government will continue to access Americans’ emails without a warrant, after the U.S. Senate dropped a key amendment to legislation now headed to the White House for approval. Currently, the government can collect emails and other cloud data without a warrant as long as the content has been stored on a third-party server for 180 days or more. Federal agents need only demonstrate that they have “reasonable grounds to believe” the information would be useful in an investigation.   read more

Simple assaults (those not involving an injury or a weapon) constituted 60% of violent victimizations committed by strangers two years ago. Aggravated assault made up another 20%, robbery 17%, and rape or sexual assault just 2%. The Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates that about 45% of violent crimes by strangers are not reported to the police.   read more

Counting only random mass murders with at least two casualties, Lankford found that 179 such crimes occurred between 1966 and 2010, an average rate of 3.97 per year. From 1966 to 1980, there were 20 mass killings for a rate of 0.75 per year, but in the 1980s the rate doubled to 1.8 per year, tripled in the 1990s to 5.4, and went up 160% in the 2000s to 8.7 per year. The rate could easily reach 10 per year during the present decade.   read more

For about thirty years now, the federal government has been implementing policies that take tax dollars from middle class Americans and give them to the rich. The net effect has been to redistribute wealth to the rich and create the most unequal developed society on earth. Three specific aspects of federal policy—low taxes for the rich, outsourcing government functions to private companies, and the financial clout of Washington lobbyists—have been the major drivers of growing inequality.   read more

One piece of bad news was that African-Americans age 12-17 were still experiencing higher rates of violent crime. From 2002 to 2010, the rates of serious violent crime declined among white youth by 26% and among Hispanic youth by 65%, but actually increased by 4% among black youth.   read more

In 1963, when Inouye joined the Senate, 39 of 100 senators had served in WWII and another 25 had served in World War I. As of next month when Congress reconvenes, there will be only one WWII vet in the Senate: Democrat Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey. When Barack Obama and Joe Biden faced Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan in the 2012 presidential elections, it marked the first time in 80 years that neither major party included a veteran on their ticket.   read more

The agency currently has only 2,500 agents—a total smaller than what it had four decades ago—and 60,000 gun retailers to inspect and oversee. The NRA has been so effective in keeping a permanent director from being confirmed by the Senate that even President George W. Bush couldn’t get his choice of Michael J. Sullivan, a former U.S. attorney in Boston, from winning confirmation.   read more

Of the 43 people executed by the government in 2012, 33 of them died in Texas, Arizona, Mississippi and Oklahoma, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. As it usually does, Texas led the nation with 15 executions. The other three states each had six. Nine states total conducted executions this year, the lowest number of states to do so in 20 years.   read more

Haley chose Tim Scott, a Republican elected to the House of Representatives only two years ago. In taking over for DeMint, he will become the first black senator from the South since 1881. A Tea Party member, Scott will be sworn into office on January 3. Scott will be the only African-American in the current Senate and only the seventh to serve ever.   read more

When Adam Lanza, 20, gunned down 20 children and six adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, the firearm he used was an AR-15 assault rifle. The AR-15 was also employed by James E. Holmes, 24, the man accused of killing 12 people in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, July 20. Jacob Roberts, 22, who shot and killed two people before taking his own life in a Happy Valley, Oregon, shopping mall on December 11, also used an AR-15.   read more

The Obama administration claims the plaintiffs, who are relatives of the deceased, have no legal ground to sue the government for the attacks. Federal lawyers also have threatened to invoke the State Secrets Privilege, which allows the government to seek dismissal of a suit if it could expose national security secrets.   read more

“Changes over the past 65 years in the top marginal tax rate and the top capital gains tax rate do not appear correlated with economic growth. The reduction in the top statutory tax rates appears to be uncorrelated with saving, investment, and productivity growth. The top tax rates appear to have little or no relation to the size of the economic pie.…However, the top tax rate reductions appear to be correlated with the increasing concentration of income at the top of the income distribution."   read more

The abuse of the law should not come as a surprise. At the time that the JOBS Act passed through Congress, Democratic Senator Carl Levin of Michigan warned, “We are about to embark upon the most sweeping deregulatory effort and assault on investor protection in decades.…It will allow vast new opportunities for fraud and abuse in capital markets.”   read more