The year is drawing to a close, and it’s time to take a look back. Time magazine has named its person of the year – the medical personnel and others who fought Ebola. The war in Syria rages on, unabated. The United States closes its final detention center in Afghanistan, just as the Senate’s report on torture makes headlines. Protests erupt nationwide over police shootings of unarmed young black men.  But what about what could have happened, but didn’t?  In what ways could we have taken steps to make things better, but dropped the ball? Perhaps we did a half-assed job of it; perhaps we didn’t really engage at all. Perhaps we haven’t even really grasped just how to go about tackling a particularly thorny problem.  Here are five areas that (unlike Ebola or the Syrian conflict) are – to some extent – under our control, because we can affect outcomes in these areas by choosing which policies to adopt.  Inaction, too, is a choice that has its consequences.  During the state of the union address in January, Barack Obama vowed to do his utmost to get the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour from $7.25 an hour. He could do so for federal contractors, via an executive order, but as of today, the federal minimum wage remains at $7.25. That translates into poverty-level wages for those American households struggling to exist on it.  Some states are stepping in where Congress fears to tread, raising their own minimum wage levels and, in the process, creating a patchwork quilt of “have” and “have not” regions of the country. Even Walmart, some of whose employees have relied on government programs and food drives to meet their needs, has pledged to ensure that its workers get more than the federal minimum. If Walmart has woken up and can smell the coffee, isn’t it time for Congress to follow suit?  Yes, oil prices have tumbled, and gasoline and heating oil prices along with them. But before you become jubilant, consider this: the lower they go, the less incentive there is for us to invest in renewable energy sources. We’ve been bad at that anyway, especially given that there is no single, clear winner in the battle to replace fossil fuels as a source of electrical power generation, transportation fuels and home heating fuels.  This year, one of the rare bills that did win widespread support (from everyone from politicians from energy-producing districts to environmental organizations) that would have mandated myriad helpful energy conservation measures fell victim to political wrangling over the Keystone XL pipeline project. Shame on us. And still more shame if we allow low energy prices to postpone taking much-needed steps in addressing these issues.  Yes, the pace of job creation has picked up this year, as November’s figures from the Labor Department showed (the private sector created 321,000 jobs in that month alone). But where are those jobs? Disproportionately, they are in segments of the economy that don’t pay well and may pay below the median wage; they may not even require a college degree. Many are in retail (in front-line sales positions, not designing marketing strategies from an office) or food services.  Otherwise, you need to be a white-collar worker of some kind – a lawyer, an accountant, a consultant – to capture the benefits of the current economy. Blue-collar jobs just aren’t going to cut it. And the data show all too clearly that if you’re not white – excuse me, Caucasian – the odds that you’ll end up filling one of those white-collar jobs go down significantly.  Which segues neatly into the next squandered opportunity of 2014. Although really, this could just as well have been included in each year of the last century or more, because it refers to the stubborn reluctance to address the link between poverty and race in the United States. But this year, perhaps more than any other, has challenged our ability to cling to the idea that we live in some kind of post-racial society. Perhaps comedian Chris Rock is right, and his daughters are meeting some of the nicest white people that America has ever produced. But there are a heck of a lot of the other kind around, too, and a lot of institutions that were shaped and are still overseen by those who haven’t donned their color-blind glasses yet.  How else to explain that African American high school students get take longer to receive their high school diplomas? Are less likely to attend college or graduate? That 28% of African Americans live in poverty, compared to 11% of the total population? That the wealth gap between African Americans and the rest of the population is increasing? We have fast and furious debates about how to protest police tactics, but no serious debates on how to solve the real everyday problems confronting African American families.  And speaking of income inequality … While everyone this year seemed to walk around clutching a copy of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century and to have an opinion on its contents, and the phrase “income inequality” at least became a buzzword, nobody seemed to agree on what could or should be done. Janet Yellen, the new Federal Reserve chair, at least approached it with a measure of intellectual honesty when defining the problem, questioning whether the widening gap between the ultra-wealthy and the rest of us – to measures not seen since the days when my teenage grandmother tried to learn the Charleston – is compatible with the country’s values.  But while millionaires – the beneficiaries of this – say they’re worried too, they also say leave it up to them to solve the problems through charity, rather than taxing them and redistributing the income more equitably. And we’ve already witnessed the shrieks of outrage at the idea that those among the wealthy who are employers should pay higher salaries (see #1). That, they argue, would stifle the economy.  One observer gets it right: he says we’re actually suffering from a giant “empathy gap” on the part of the wealthy. Moreover, this is a topic of national interest and importance; one we can’t afford to leave to the personal whims of wealthy individuals.  There’s a reason that we moved away from the Victorian-era charity of the lords of the manor (along with the need to bow and curtsey in acknowledging the largesse of those overloads): it’s incompatible with a democratic society.  These are five key areas about which we at least need to have an honest dialogue in 2015. Perhaps then we can think about moving forward and not squandering further opportunities to make a difference in critical policy areas.  And a happy new year to you, too.
Among the other ills of 2014, the US failed to take action on economic issues affecting the poor and middle class. Here’s where our lawmakers and CEOs did a shoddy job of helping the economy