Economic Justice

For some, home means the smell of the desert after a winter rain. For others, it might be the sound of spring peepers; the taste of the summer’s first tomato, fresh from the garden and still warm from the sun; or the sight of gold-hued tamaracks through a frost-touched window. More than one-quarter of the 50 million older adults in the United States live in rural areas or small towns, and for many of them, aging well means aging where the sights, sounds, and tastes of home are renewed with each new season—not locked in memories or frozen in photos that hang on walls far from the places they once called home.

I can’t tell you how many people will say they will take whatever risks necessary—even dying, even spending hours on the floor without help—just to stay in their home,” says Louise Aronson ’92, a professor of geriatrics at the University of California, San Francisco.

Unfortunately, that home may be hours away from a cardiac center, completely isolated from high-quality long-term care facilities, and bereft of local caregivers trained to aid the elderly.

As a demographic group, Aronson notes, older adults are the highest consumers of health care, the most likely to become hospitalized, the most likely to take medications and to have adverse drug reactions, and the most likely to be harmed by medical care.

Do you have a debt with the IRS that’s more than two years old? If so, you might be getting a letter from the IRS about your account being transferred to a private debt collector. This new program only applies to taxpayers who have had an IRS debt for years and who were previously contacted about it by the IRS. Here’s how it will work—and how to spot a scam.

If your debt is put into this program, the IRS says you will get two letters. The first letter will come from the IRS and will say which private debt collection company your account has been assigned to. The companies are: CBE Group of Cedar Falls, Iowa; ConServe of Fairport, N.Y; Perfomant of Livermore, Calif.; or Pioneer of Horseheads, N.Y. The second letter will come from the private debt collection company assigned to your account. Both letters will include the tax amount owed, the name of the private debt collection company assigned, and a taxpayer authentication number that is unique to you.

But here’s how you can tell you’re dealing with the actual debt collector, not a scammer:

• The private debt collectors working with the IRS will never ask you to pay them directly. Instead, they’ll tell you to pay the IRS electronically, or send a check, made out to the US Treasury, directly to the IRS. Anyone who says they’re collecting for the IRS and asks you to make a payment over the phone is a scammer.  Whether they’re asking you to pay by credit or debit card, electronic check, wiring money, or a prepaid or gift card–don’t do it.  
  
• These debt collectors will never use robocalls or pre-recorded messages. You’ll always speak with a live operator.
  
• They’ll always use the authentication number that was in your letters.
  

Looking for a new job is getting easier. Google today launched a new jobs search feature right on its search result pages that lets you search for jobs across virtually all of the major online job boards like LinkedIn, Monster, WayUp, DirectEmployers, CareerBuilder and Facebook and others. Google will also include job listings its finds on a company’s homepage.

With this new feature, is now available in English on desktop and mobile, all you have to type in is a query like “jobs near me,” “writing jobs” or something along those lines and the search result page will show you the new job search widget that lets you see a broad range of jobs. From there, you can further refine your query to only include full-time positions, for example. When you click through to get more information about a specific job, you also get to see Glassdoor and Indeed ratings for a company.

You can also filter jobs by industry, location, when they were posted, and employer. Once you find a query that works, you can also turn on notifications so you get an immediate alert when a new job is posted that matches your personalized query.

Amazon has been ramping up its small loans business, with the company announcing today that it has loaned more than $1 billion to around 20,000 merchants on its platform in the past 12 months alone.

This figure represents a third of the total amount the ecommerce titan has loaned through its Amazon Lending program since its inception back in 2011.

Amazon Lending is available on an invite-only basis to small businesses that sell goods through Amazon’s online marketplace. It was initially only available in the U.S. before it was expanded to Japan, followed by the U.K. in June 2015. The company previously revealed plans to expand the offering to a number of other countries, including China and Canada, but it appears this has yet to come to fruition.

In an SEC filing earlier this year, Amazon revealed that its lending program had roughly doubled from $337 million for the fiscal year ending December 2015 to $661 million a year later. But taken on a rolling yearly basis, starting in mid-2016, Amazon says it has ramped up its lending by around a third.

“We created Amazon Lending to make it simple for up-and-coming small businesses to efficiently get a business loan, because we know that an infusion of capital at the right moment can put a small business on the path to even greater success,” said Peeyush Nahar, VP for Amazon Marketplace, in a statement. “Small businesses are in our DNA. Amazon is providing capital to small businesses to help them expand inventory and operations at a critical period of their growth.”

Amazon is one of a number of tech companies that have opened up lending businesses to encourage spending. PayPal launched its Working Capital program back in 2013 and recently revealed it has lent more than $3 billionto firms operating online. Back in November, Jack Dorsey’s Square revealed it had passed $1 billion in loans after launching Square Capital in 2014.

This is what desperation looks like. A no-frills community center. Volunteers unfolding extra chairs for the parade of poor people who come clutching envelopes of tax documents in hopes of saving their homes.

They’re people like factory worker Merneesha Chears. She is in the front row waiting to meet with a counselor. She needs to enter a payment plan soon on the $2,000 she owes in back taxes to prevent her foreclosed home from being sold at auction.

Chears watches the clock. Her three young children are in the car outside. They don’t know what’s happening.

The scene inside the west side Detroit community center is as depressing as it is mundane.

That’s because misery is monetized by counties across Michigan, and no government relies on money from tax foreclosures as much as Wayne County.

In recent weeks, nonprofits have hosted workshops before the June 7 deadline for owners of tax-foreclosed homes in Wayne County, which includes Detroit, to agree to repayment plans. If they don’t, the homes will be auctioned this fall.

I wonder if they have accessible models????

https://goo.gl/GNijFw

Through a rent-to-own program, residents will pay $1 per square foot in rent each month. For a 250-square-foot house, for example, rent is $250, when a similar home in Detroit might normally cost twice as much. After a maximum of seven years, the house can be fully paid off.

In some other programs, such as homes built by Habitat for Humanity, residents are required to have a mortgage. “People making that small amount of money can’t qualify for a mortgage,” she says. “So they’re essentially locked out of housing that serves as a piggyback for the rest of us. In addition to the pride of having a place you can call your own, the beginning of wealth, or the security of having an asset you can call your own, was very important to us. More important than the tininess of the home.”

Today is the opening day of the TUC’s two day Disabled Worker’s Conference. And last week was the Mental Health Awareness Week, with the theme of Surviving or Thriving?

While the employment rate of disabled people has increased in the last few years there is still a large disability employment gap between disabled and non-disabled people. The 2015 government had a commitment to halve this gap by 2020. This is a welcome pledge but previous TUC research indicates that based on current trends it is unlikely to be met.

New TUC research shows that mental health problems are a barrier to getting into work or staying in work because adequate adjustments are not being made in the workplace. Significant government and employer action is therefore needed to address the employment gap between disabled and non-disabled people.

Fidelity Investments revealed on Wednesday its own version of a special type of savings plan for disabled people, entering the still-young market for the accounts.