The Marketplace Wealth and Poverty Desk explores money and class, where we came from and where our country is going economically, thanks to funding from the Ford Foundation. We want to hear your stories, ideas, and questions to help us create great journalism about the growing concentration of wealth in the United States. We’ll report on the forces and policies that led to the wealth gap. We’ll look at what the consequences are, good or bad, for our families and communities. We’ll be asking you what economic choices our country should make.
Cecilia Sirianni's small office at Massabesic High School can sometimes get a bit messy. Piles of donated clothes and boxes of snacks fill cabinets an...
The U.S. Department of Agriculture says more than 50 million people across the country live in “food deserts” – low-income communities where it can be...
Many people in Wise County agree that they can’t jail their way out of a drug epidemic, but there’s a lot less agreement on what to do instead. And we...
The unemployment rate is near historic lows, the job market is tight, and wages have been rising steadily.But since the Great Recession, wage gains ha...
For the past 30 years, courts in the United States have experimented with different programs designed to keep convicted offenders out of jail — things...
It’s not easy being an undercover cop in a county of just 40,000 people. But drugs were making it hard for Bucky Culbertson to run his business, so he...
Historically low rates of interest have helped the U.S. economy recover from the Great Recession. But there have been casualties. Savers — and the wid...
When American-born children age out of foster care without identifying documents like birth certificates and state ID cards, their financial futures c...
The drug bust and the trial were a “farce,” but the full force of the law still came down on Keith Jackson — and thousands of people like him. That di...