Laura mentioned Paul Krugman’s excellent op-ed. He and Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald have been thinking along similar lines. Here are some of the stories that inspired them:
The city of Camden, NJ is permanently closing its library system by the end of the year:
Camden is preparing to permanently shut its library system by the end of the year, potentially leaving residents of the impoverished city among the few in the United States unable to borrow a library book free.
At an emotional but sparsely attended meeting of the library board Thursday, its president, Martin McKernan, said the city’s three libraries cannot stay open past Dec. 31 because of severe budget cuts by Mayor Dana L. Redd.
All materials in the libraries would be donated, auctioned, stored, or destroyed. That includes 187,000 books, historical documents, artifacts, and electronic equipment. Keeping materials in the shuttered buildings is a fire hazard, officials said, and would make them vulnerable to vandalism and vermin.
Camden is a city of over 500,000 people, who will have no access to free books or to free library computers and internet.
Paved roads, historical emblems of American achievement, are being torn up across rural America and replaced with gravel or other rough surfaces as counties struggle with tight budgets and dwindling state and federal revenue. State money for local roads was cut in many places amid budget shortfalls.
In Michigan, at least 38 of the 83 counties have converted some asphalt roads to gravel in recent years. Last year, South Dakota turned at least 100 miles of asphalt road surfaces to gravel. Counties in Alabama and Pennsylvania have begun downgrading asphalt roads to cheaper chip-and-seal road, also known as “poor man’s pavement.” Some counties in Ohio are simply letting roads erode to gravel.
Remember when America’s roadways and highways were something to be proud of?
Utah looks at making the senior year of high school optional:
The sudden buzz over the relative value of senior year stems from a recent proposal by state Sen. Chris Buttars that Utah make a dent in its budget gap by eliminating the 12th grade.
The notion quickly gained some traction among supporters who agreed with the Republican’s assessment that many seniors frittered away their final year of high school, but faced vehement opposition from other quarters, including in his hometown of West Jordan.
“My parents are against it,” Williams said. “All the teachers at the school are against it. I’m against it.”
Buttars has since toned down the idea, suggesting instead that senior year become optional for students who complete their required credits early. He estimated the move could save up to $60 million, the Salt Lake Tribune reported.
There’s more. In the NY Times we learn of a Georgia public bus system being shut down completely:
Many transit systems have cut service to make ends meet, but Clayton County, Ga., a suburb of Atlanta, decided to cut all the way, and shut down its entire public bus system. Its last buses ran on March 31, stranding 8,400 daily riders.
and Hawaii furloughed schools:
Plenty of businesses and governments furloughed workers this year, but Hawaii went further — it furloughed its schoolchildren. Public schools across the state closed on 17 Fridays during the past school year to save money, giving students the shortest academic year in the nation and sending working parents scrambling to find care for them.
We’re in a big, big mess - and there aren’t any real solutions being offered. Cutting taxes for the wealthy isn’t going to dig us out of this hole. Worrying about the deficit isn’t going to dig us out. Cutting food stamps or Social Security isn’t the way forward. President Obama has said that everything other than defense is on the chopping block. We are supporting over 1000 overseas military bases. Is this really making us stronger or safer? If we can cut food to hungry families without even blinking, we shouldn’t be afraid of reevaluating how we spend our defense dollars.
…A country that once amazed the world with its visionary investments in transportation, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System, is now in the process of unpaving itself: in a number of states, local governments are breaking up roads they can no longer afford to maintain, and returning them to gravel.
And a nation that once prized education — that was among the first to provide basic schooling to all its children — is now cutting back. Teachers are being laid off; programs are being canceled; in Hawaii, the school year itself is being drastically shortened. And all signs point to even more cuts ahead.
-snip-
In effect, a large part of our political class is showing its priorities: given the choice between asking the richest 2 percent or so of Americans to go back to paying the tax rates they paid during the Clinton-era boom, or allowing the nation’s foundations to crumble — literally in the case of roads, figuratively in the case of education — they’re choosing the latter.
It’s a disastrous choice in both the short run and the long run.
Read the whole thing, if you haven’t already. (If you have, send it to a friend.)
So Medicaid funding that will help elderly people in nursing homes and save the jobs of tens of thousands of teachers and other school employees and firefighters and other first responders is on its way to being passed. Cause for celebration, right? Jobs are saved, needed services (and lives) are saved, and our next generation gets a decent education.
House Minority Leader John Boehner sees this as a payoff to special interests. Who are the special interests here? Grade school students or their teachers? The janitors who clean their classrooms or the lunch ladies? Firefighters or the people they pull from burning buildings?
Other Republicans voted against it because it closed corporate tax loopholes. No, really. Senator Scott Brown looked at this bill and decided that because it closed loopholes that major multinational corporations exploit to avoid paying their fair share, he wouldn’t support jobs and services for Massachusetts.
This is how today’s Republican officeholders think: working people and children are special interests, multinational corporations should be defended at all cost.
An endless summer awaits many of Detroit’s teachers and school buildings this Thursday. Detroit, one of the poorest and most dangerous cities in America, is about to add thousands of teachers to its unemployment rolls and dozens of buildings to its vacancy problem. A third of this cash-strapped city is reported to be vacant already. The closing of more schools could be the death knell for many of the remaining neighborhoods in these dire economic times.
Although the city has a five-year plan to renovate or replace school buildings, funded in part by federal stimulus, 32 buildings will be closed permanently by the end of the year, with a dozen more to follow over the next two years.
In addition to closing buildings and consolidating shrinking enrollment, the district pink-slipped 1,983 teachers, including Michigan’s 2007 Teacher of the Year, Kimberly Kyff.
Tell me again how it’s more important to reduce the deficit by a small amount in the short term than it is to employ teachers, maintain school buildings, and educate America’s kids. Tell me how things like this—widespread across the country, if not to the same degree as in Detroit—help us rebuild our economy.
I already know that I’ll be yelling at the TV early next week when C-SPAN2 carries the Senate debate on the unemployment extension bill, and on an amendment to restore COBRA health insurance aid for jobless workers. That’s because I’m certain that Republican multi-millionaire Senators such as Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn) and John McCain (R-Ariz), he of seveneight houses, will be whining about how we can’t afford to help the families of America’s unemployed millions because of the “burdens” it will place on Alexander’s and McCain’s “children and grandchildren.”
You can bet that their children and grandchildren are all pretty well set with nice trust funds and whatnot, thank you very much. How nice it must be for the upper crust to be so insulated from the impact of the Great Recession.
But what about the rest of us? What about our children and grandchildren?
More children will live in poverty this year. More will have two parents who are unemployed. Fewer children will enroll in pre-kindergarten programs, and fewer teenagers will find jobs. More children are likely to commit suicide, be overweight and be victimized by crime. This is all according to a report released today by the Foundation for Child Development that measures the impact of the recession on the current generation.
These are the children of the Great Recession, a cohort that will experience a decline in fortunes that erases 30 years of social progress. The report – known as the Child and Youth Well-Being Index – predicts that in the next few years, the economy may recover and the unemployment rate may drop, but the generation growing up now could feel the harsh impact of the recession for years to come.
“These are the lasting impacts of extreme recessions,” said Kenneth Land, a professor of sociology and demography at Duke University and author of the report.
The current report predicts that the number of children living in poverty will rise to 15.6 million in 2010, an increase of more than 3 million children in four years. More than a quarter of American children will live in families where both parents don’t have full-time jobs, up from 22 percent in 2006. As many as half a million children could become homeless, up from 330,000 in 2007.
The decline in overall child well-being in the U.S. comes after several years of improvement driven largely by declining rates of crime, drinking and drug use, according to the report, which includes data from the U.S. Census, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Center for Education Statistics. The percentage of children living in poverty had also been dropping relatively steadily until 2000, when it began ticking upward.
That’s when the Republicans gained control of the White House and Congress.
Already, U.S. students trail their peers in many developed countries on most measures of child well-being. American children were last or close to last in terms of poverty, parental employment, safety, health and family relationships compared to 20 other developed nations, according to a 2007 UNICEF report. They were also close to the bottom in educational achievement.
And then came the Great Recession. Right now, school districts across the country are cutting back, and perhaps the programs hardest-hit are in early childhood education.
Schools will be hit particularly hard by the aftershocks, said Land. As more families enter the ranks of the poor, more children will arrive at school behind their wealthier peers, yet fewer will have the benefit of quality early education to help them catch up. The children who miss out on pre-kindergarten now will likely have lower reading and math scores in five years, when they enter fourth grade. In another decade, they’ll be more likely to drop out of high school.
“If you trace out those cohort effects, kids who don’t get good schooling early in life, typically score less well on standardized tests later. They have a more difficult time staying attached to school,” Land said.
Curtis Skinner, the director of family economic security at the National Center for Children in Poverty at Columbia University, said he’s seen similar trends in his own research.
“It means a lot of long-term bad effects,” he said. “We can expect more of these problems down the road.”
The recent extension of unemployment benefits has also reinforced the safety net for poor families, which could mitigate the experience of severe poverty, according to Sanders Korenman, a professor in Baruch College’s School of Public Affairs and a senior economist for labor, welfare, and education under President Clinton.
Korenman, along with other researchers, agrees that the recession has yet to unleash its full force on most families, leaving uncertainty about how children will ultimately fare. The federal bailout delayed the fiscal crisis in most states, but now, huge cuts in education, public safety, and Medicaid are imminent in many states.
“The strongest evidence for adverse impacts is long-term, severe poverty,” Korenman said. “Certainly a recession like this raises the risk for that.”
Sometimes the junk in my Inbox is enough to make me want to pull what’s left of my hair out. Such was the case with the article I just opened from my online subscription to Education Week. Check this out:
Teacher Layoffs May Be Linked to Hiring Spree
By Stephen Sawchuk
An increase in teacher hiring in recent years is leading some observers to posit a link to the waves of pink slips that districts are sending across the country.
So let me get this straight: the tens of thousands of teacher layoffs, which could well become hundreds of thousands shortly, are happening because more teachers were hired to improve our schools when the economy was in better shape before the Great Recession.
Teachers must be fired because they were hired. I would say ‘that’s rich’ if it weren’t so freaking stupid. Has the author entered some bizarre contest with the JPMorgan Chase economist whose report we exposed in Blaming Unemployment Insurance for Unemployment?
But back to the Education Week piece and the potential mass wave of teacher layoffs. Nowhere in the article is there even a hint that the gaping budget shortfalls faced by states, municipalities and local school districts are the direct result of the huge decline in revenues caused by the Great Recession.
And who are the “observers” mentioned in the opening sentence who are said to “posit a link” between teacher layoffs and previous hiring? There aren’t any! Or, if there are, the author seems to have forgotten to include them in the article. Several educators and others are quoted, but none “posit” the “link” that the author asserts.
Way down in the article, though, Andy Smarick — a former Bush White House adviser and education official — is quoted attacking the Recovery Act’s support for education and teachers’ jobs:
Some experts contend that the up-to $100 billion in education dollars in the federal economic-stimulus legislation, most of it pushed out through formula to states and districts, has only exacerbated the problem.
Andy Smarick, an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who has studied the economic-stimulus bill, contends that it absolved districts from having to make such decisions until now.
“They could have taken the last year to figure out how to resolve these long-term structural issues, to say, ‘Let’s look at all of our contracts, let’s consider online learning,’” Mr. Smarick said. “But instead, what they mostly did was preserve existing jobs and programs.”
So, let’s review:
Preserving teachers’ jobs in our schools is a bad thing.
Teacher layoffs are caused by teachers having been hired.
Teachers wouldn’t be losing their jobs if they didn’t have them in the first place.
And we wouldn’t have to lay teachers off if we didn’t have any schools.
A big round of teacher layoffs is coming. From the NY Times:
School districts around the country, forced to resort to drastic money-saving measures, are warning hundreds of thousands of teachers that their jobs may be eliminated in June.
The districts have no choice, they say, because their usual sources of revenue — state money and local property taxes — have been hit hard by the recession. In addition, federal stimulus money earmarked for education has been mostly used up this year.
As a result, the 2010-11 school term is shaping up as one of the most austere in the last half century. In addition to teacher layoffs, districts are planning to close schools, cut programs, enlarge classes and shorten the school day, week or year to save money.
Tolleson Union High School District is laying off 207 employees, including 34 classroom teachers, to balance a budget hit by state funding cuts, climbing expenses and the March failure of a crucial budget override election.
That’s nearly 19 percent of the district’s workforce.
The cash-strapped Flint school district will lay off 261 teachers at the end of the year.
The Flint Community Schools Board of Education approved the layoffs Wednesday night.
These cuts are also affecting state colleges and universities. In New Jersey:
Facing record deficits, Gov. Chris Christie has proposed cutting $173 million in state aid to universities, a nearly 8 percent reduction. New budget language released last week also included a surprise cap on tuition proposals, further squeezing the bottom lines at state colleges and universities.
The first battle will take place Wednesday afternoon in Trenton, during an Assembly budget hearing on the governor’s proposals. The stakes are high for the universities, which have endured cuts in state aid for seven of the past 10 years, according to union officials.
“Immediate effects include larger class sizes, fewer faculty hires, fewer class offerings, cutbacks in services and hours, and cutbacks in technology purchases and facilities renovations,” the New Jersey Association of State Colleges and Universities said.
As universities across the nation face budget shortcuts, Georgia is trying to meet the demands of a $385 million budget cut from the state’s higher education budget.
Chancellor Erroll B. Davis, responsible for the 35 public colleges and universities in Georgia, says that in order to meet this budget cut, the colleges and universities would have to increase tuition by 77 percent. Chancellor Davis, along with other university presidents in the state of Georgia, is attempting to discuss specific budget cuts, rather than have the state House-Senate joint budget committee make budget cuts wherever they choose.
A survey of community college presidents finds that as unemployment rises, so does the enrollment at community colleges. At the same time, these schools are facing significant budget cuts.
The new law will eliminate fees paid to private banks to act as intermediaries in providing loans to college students and use much of the nearly $68 billion in savings over 11 years to expand Pell grants and make it easier for students to repay outstanding loans after graduating. The law also invests $2 billion in community colleges over the next four years to provide education and career training programs to workers eligible for trade adjustment aid after dislocation in their industries.
The law will increase Pell grants along with inflation in the next few years, which should raise the maximum grant to $5,975 from $5,550 by 2017, according to the White House, and it will also provide 820,000 more grants by 2020.
Eliminating the middle man (the banks) means more help will be available, which will ease the financial burden of families who want to send their kids to college. It also means that repayment terms are a little kinder:
Students who borrow money starting in July 2014 will be allowed to cap repayments at 10 percent of income above a basic living allowance, instead of 15 percent. Moreover, if they keep up payments, their balances will be forgiven after 20 years instead of 25 years — or after 10 years if they are in public service, like teaching, nursing or serving in the military.
A disability rights activist sent me a link to Disability Scoop:
When health insurance reform was signed into law just last week, Democratic lawmakers said that coverage of children with pre-existing conditions would be one of the most immediate effects. But within days, insurers argued a detailed reading of the new legislation allowed them to continue cutting-off kids with conditions like Down syndrome and cerebral palsy in certain circumstances until 2014.
The good news is - that insurance companies quickly thought the better of that. From The NY Times (same day):
“Health plans recognize the significant hardship that a family faces when they are unable to obtain coverage for a child with a pre-existing condition,” said Karen M. Ignagni, president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, a trade group. Accordingly, she said, “we await and will fully comply with” the rules.
Ms. Ignagni made the commitment in a letter to Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, who had said she feared that some insurers might exploit a possible ambiguity in the new health care law to deny coverage to some sick children.
Apparently it didn’t take any time at all for the insurance companies to realize that refusing to cover kids with Down Syndrome wasn’t a good PR move.
Congress is about to enter the final stages of a legislative process that would allow it to pass both substantial health care reforms and fundamental improvements to the nation’s student loan programs at the same time.
Passing health care reform would make medical coverage available to more than 30 million more Americans while reducing premiums, making health care more accessible and affordable while expanding help for lower-income families, making prescription drugs more affordable for seniors, and eliminating the worst insurance company abuses.
Passing student loan reform — a bill known as SAFRA (Student Aid and Financial Responsibility Act) — would make more college loans available to more students at lower costs, increase Pell Grant scholarships, expand college access to more students, increase support for community colleges and minority-serving institutions, all while saving money by ending the huge, needless subsidies paid to banks and private lenders.
I’d say that’s a Win-Win.
By essentially combining these two reforms into one reconciliation bill it will only need 51 votes in the Senate. And, as Ezra Klein has reported, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) it will reduce the federal deficit by $130 billion in the first ten years, and another $1.2 trillion in the subsequent ten years.
I’d say that’s another Win-Win.
But oh the frantic chorus of “No-No!” from the Republican Congressional leaders and their banker buddies. “Government takeovers,” they yell repeatedly, attacking both health care and student loan reforms. They oppose health care reform because they say it creates “government subsidies for entitlement programs.” Ahem. That just means they’re against helping more lower-income families get affordable health coverage.
And the hypocrisy is thick. Get this: they oppose the SAFRA student loan reforms because they want to protect the tens of billions of dollars in federal subsidies currently going to a broken entitlement program for private lenders and big bankers.
What would happen if student loan reform is not passed?
Source: Center for American Progress
A half-million students would face Pell Grant cuts. Eight million students would face 60% cuts in education aid.
But if it does pass, it would redirect the $61 billion the government would otherwise use to subsidize banks and private lenders in the next ten years to instead fund a 100% Direct Loan program — a program that would still be serviced by private lenders, but without the billions in bank subsidies.
The Center for American Progress just produced and posted a very informative, brief video that answers many of the key questions about SAFRA’s reforms.
Health Care for America Now! has a handy link to connect you to Congress. Tell Congress to pass health care and student loan reform now.
We’ve written before about the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act, an excellent bill that would simultaneously save the government billions of dollars and increasing the financial aid available to students. I’m going to repeat that: This bill saves money and helps students graduate from college with less debt. Who could possibly object to that?
The financial industry, of course.
See, the bill saves money by cutting out the big lenders that currently act as middle men between the government and the students. The government subsidizes and guarantees the loans, and the lenders impose fees and high interest—even though, because the loans are guaranteed, they don’t face much risk. The big private lenders see that as their money. They don’t get that they’re supposed to be providing a service and helping kids afford to go to college. They’re only interested in how big a cut they can squeeze out of the student loan business.
So the lenders are waging a major lobbying effort against saving the government money and helping kids go to college:
“We haven’t left any stone unturned — we’ll meet with anyone who will meet us,” Mr. Remondi said in an interview. “We’re trying to identify at least 12 senators who would be helpful in this process.”
At the same time, Sallie Mae and other lenders have staged a series of town-hall-style meetings at their job centers around the country to help mobilize opposition to the White House plan and collect thousands of signatures for a petition drive in support of their own plan.
But money talks in the Senate bigtime. And Democratic lobbyists — like former Clinton official Jamie Gorelick — have no shame. Gorelick hilariously says the White House is reluctant to make Senators make a vote that “is very unpopular” in their states. This gives new meaning to the phrase “no brainer.”
