All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

Ben Tracy is a CBS News correspondent based in Los Angeles.

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A couple of weeks ago I received an e-mail from a producer in New York who said, “We’d like you to do a story on trickle-down economics.” I was kind of perplexed as to why we would be revisiting Ronald Reagan and the 1980’s.

I was quickly corrected. The story idea was actually about the effect someone at the top of the economic food chain (well-off person) cutting back their spending has on those of us further down (middle class and below).

It’s actually reverse trickle down economics.

So, we set out to find some people affected by someone else’s cutbacks. Believe me, it wasn’t hard.

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Ben Tracy is a CBS News correspondent based in Los Angeles.

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Having spent most of my life in Minnesota, I have to admit that stories about illegal immigration and the border always seemed very far away. They were. My recent trip to Arizona for our “Immigration Nation” piece was an eye-opener. Protestors hurling insults at Mexican day-laborers and calling the people who hire them “traitors.”

Arizona has become a real fault line in the debate over illegal immigration. The state has adopted one of the toughest immigration laws in the country. Instead of simply being fined for hiring illegal workers, businesses can now be shut down. By almost all estimates the law is working. Bus loads of illegal and legal workers are streaming out of the state.

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Ben Tracy is a CBS News correspondent based in Los Angeles.

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Experts say a family of four uses nearly 1,500 plastic bags each year. Less than 1 percent of those are recycled.

So some communities and stores are taking action by simply not giving them out — or making it illegal to do so. While each store or city seems to have a slightly different policy, check out this list (courtesy of the environmental non-profit group Heal the Bay) of areas that either have or are considering a plastic bag ban.

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