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A payday for no work? Let's give it a deserved rest
Excerpt from The Oregonian - 2009-02-22; Page B4Let's start with the primary reason to be against a proposal for paid family leave in Oregon: Establishing a safety net for people who don't need one is wasteful, misguided and unnecessary.
The paid family leave law being proposed this legislative session would have workers in companies with 25 or more employees paying a 2 cent payroll tax for each hour worked. (Smaller businesses could opt into the program but would not be required to.) The tax would go into a family leave insurance program that parents of newborns and individuals with seriously sick family members could tap to the tune of up to $300 a week for six weeks each year. Other states have similar laws funded in various ways.
While granting paid leave for important life events sounds like a nice idea, it's odd to charge all employees -- regardless of their means or income -- so other employees can take several weeks off work.
Even though the program's proposed cost isn't outrageous at $42 a year for a full-time worker, there are better ways to spend $42 than offering paid leave to people who might not need it. (There's also no reason to think this program's cost wouldn't grow over time.)
Salary and family income wouldn't determine who receives the paid-leave benefit and who doesn't, which means the state could be taxing a low-income fast-food worker to pay a higher income attorney $300 a week to be home with her new baby. That doesn't make any sense and is the first of many reasons to write your legislators and urge them to resist this feel-good legislation when it comes up.
Another reason to oppose government-mandated paid family leave is that it sends the wrong message. The nation is experiencing a frightening financial fumble in part because so many individuals and businesses have adopted a borrow-and-spend mentality rather than pay-as-you-go prudence. Paid family leave -- which is typically used for time off with newborns and sometimes used for employees needing to care for ailing family members -- suggests that our personal choices and circumstances are others' burdens to bear.
They aren't. Choosing to start a family or deciding to care for loved ones is something individuals should plan for -- emotionally and financially. While employers and co-workers have every right to be generous with their money and could choose to donate time or pay an employee to take time off for family, the government has no business being so generous with people's hourly wages.
Programs like this encourage people not to plan ahead and can create a false sense of security or an unwise reliance on government. A similar proposal failed to pass the state Senate in 2007. While supporters say they've tightened up the measure a bit since then, it still goes too far. Federal law has it right, requiring businesses with 50 workers or more to allow employees up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for a qualified medical reason or the addition of a new family member. That's as it should be. The law protects people's jobs during life changes and hard times.
People shouldn't lose their jobs because they decide to have kids or because a family member gets sick. But when a person doesn't work, they aren't entitled a wage. The people left behind in the workplace have to pick up the pace for the missing worker, or an employer has to hire a temp to keep things running.
While $42 a year might sound like a bargain to those planning to use a paid leave law to help finance their personal choices and commitments, for childless workers and those without unique caregiver needs this is a complete rip-off.
Our society is generous. People already pay a great sum to make it easier and more affordable to have families. The Internal Revenue Service rewards procreation with child tax deductions and tax credits. Taxpayers also rightly contribute to provide a free K-12 education to all children, subsidized college tuition for young people, health care for children from low-income families and so on. A lot of employers and employees pay higher insurance premiums to accommodate families, too. After all this shared financial responsibility, it's hard to hear opponents of paid family leave deemed uncaring or stingy.
The reality is taxpayers are doing their share when it comes to funding families. Individuals need to do their part, too. But most importantly, adding another state safety net for people who aren't even falling through the cracks makes us less able to help the neediest among us.
by Elizabeth Hovde, Oregonian columnist
Half of undergraduates don't belong in college
Excerpt from The Oregonian - 2009-02-22; Page B3The Oregonian's recent articles on the escalating cost of undergraduate education and the incredible debt carried by most graduating seniors did not address the fundamental issue underlying this problem: Even at these costs, the quality of education being delivered to a majority of students is closer to remedial high school rather than college.
Undergraduate education in America is an enormous business, with 9 million undergraduates spending $20,000 to $50,000 each year on tuition, books, lodging, meals and entertainment. Make no mistake about it: Administrators, academics, publishers, bankers and the sports industry all have a vested interest in increasing the undergraduate population.
Our colleges and universities compete to attract students through amenities such as fine facilities, strong sports programs, spas and easy course options.
A standing joke among faculty members is an adaptation of a communist adage: "We pretend to teach and they pretend to learn." We all know that there are so-called "graduates" who can barely read or write and couldn't pick out the United States on a map.
A vibrant and rigorous higher education system is, of course, a vital part of our national infrastructure. Indeed, we have many fine institutions and many students who are working hard to extract as much as they can from the schools they are attending. The problem is that about half of our student population shouldn't be there for academic or motivational reasons.
Why are they there, then? Because the higher education business, in its zeal to keep expanding, has convinced us that everyone "has to" go to college regardless of what they get out of it. We have managed to raise the bar for getting any kind of menial job to a bachelor's degree and are well on the way to requiring a master's to qualify for a barista position.
The sad thing is that the kids who are there for the wrong reasons are not only carrying a huge debt after their four or five wasted years, but they have also given up several years of productive output, on-the-job learning and income.
Most businesses have to train graduates from scratch anyway because most don't come to them with useful skills; they use the bachelor's degree as a simple tool for winnowing applicants, because those with a bachelor's may be more trainable than those without. If a bachelor's degree really meant something and there was a significant nonbachelor's pool of talented people, job requirements would become more realistic.
The whining of the higher education business execs for more money from their students and state governments certainly would subside if the undergraduate population suddenly dropped by half and parents demanded that colleges actually deliver a rigorous education for the money invested.
It's time to make the "higher" in higher education mean something.
Ken Moyle lives in Beaverton.
by Ken Moyle, guest opinion
A Short History of the National Debt
Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal - 2009-02-09; Page A17When President Barack Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 into law yesterday, he was adding to what is already almost guaranteed to be the largest deficit in American history. In January, the Congressional Budget Office projected that the deficit this year would be $1.2 trillion before the stimulus package. That's more than twice the deficit in fiscal 2008, more than the entire GDP of all but a handful of countries, and more, in nominal dollars, than the entire United States national debt in 1982.
But while the sum is huge, it is not in and of itself threatening to the solvency of the Republic. At 8.3% of GDP, this year's deficit is by far the largest since World War II. But the total debt is, as of now, still under 75% of GDP. It was almost 130% following World War II. (Japan's national debt right now is not far from 180% of that nation's GDP.)
Still, it's the trend that is worrisome, to put it mildly. There have always been two reasons for adding to the national debt. One is to fight wars. The second is to counteract recessions. But while the national debt in 1982 was 35% of GDP, after a quarter century of nearly uninterrupted economic growth and the end of the Cold War the debt-to-GDP ratio has more than doubled.
It is hard to escape the idea that this happened only because Democrats and Republicans alike never said no to any significant interest group. Despite a genuine economic emergency, the stimulus bill is more about dispensing goodies to Democratic interest groups than stimulating the economy. Even Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) -- no deficit hawk when his party is in the majority -- called it "porky."
It was not ever thus. Before the Great Depression, balancing the budget and paying down the debt were considered second only to the defense of the country as an obligation of the federal government. Before 1930, the government ran surpluses in two years out of three. In 1865, the vast debt run up in the Civil War amounted to about 30% of GDP; by 1916 it was less than a tenth of that.
There even was a time when the U.S. made it a deliberate policy to pay off the national debt entirely -- and succeeded in doing so. It remains to this day the only time in history a major country has been debt free. Ironically, the president who achieved this was the founder of the modern Democratic Party, Andrew Jackson.
Jackson was a Jeffersonian through and through. The smaller the federal government, the more he liked it. And, like Jefferson, he hated banks, speculation and the "money interest." Unlike Jefferson, however, he was born poor and made his own fortune. An early personal encounter with debt had taught him to fear it. When the notes of someone who had bought land from him proved worthless, he became liable for the debts he had secured with those notes, and it took him years to pay them off.
When he ran for president the first time, in 1824, Jackson called the debt a "national curse." He vowed to "pay the national debt, to prevent a monied aristocracy from growing up around our administration that must bend to its views, and ultimately destroy the liberty of our country."
"How gratifying," he wrote in 1829 as he began his presidency, "the effect of presenting to the world the sublime spectacle of a Republic of more than 12 million happy people, in the 54th year of her existence . . . free from debt and with all . . . [her] immense resources unfettered!"
When Jackson entered the White House, the national debt, which had reached $125 million at the end of the War of 1812, had already been reduced to $48 million. To get it to zero he was perfectly willing to forego what were then called "internal improvements" and are now known as infrastructure projects. One Kentucky congressman, after a trip to the White House to beg Jackson to sign one such bill, reported to his allies that "nothing less than a voice from Heaven would prevent the old man from vetoing the Bill, and [I doubt] whether that would!"
At the end of 1834, Jackson reported in the State of the Union message that the country would be debt free as of Jan. 1, 1835, with a Treasury balance of $440,000. Government revenues that year would be twice expenses.
It didn't last long, to be sure. The great prosperity of the early 1830s broke in the summer of 1836 when a bubble in land speculation, fueled by easy credit, abruptly ended. The bubble burst, ironically enough, thanks to Andrew Jackson's issuance of the "specie circular," which required that all land bought from the government, except that actually settled on, be paid for in gold or silver.
By the next spring, just as Jackson left the White House, the longest contraction in American history -- six years -- had begun. As one Wall Streeter put it, "The fortunes we have heard so much about in the days of speculation, have melted like the snows before an April sun." Federal revenues fell by half that year and the national debt was back, this time for good.
While today there is no hope of balancing the budget -- or wisdom in trying to -- until the economy substantially improves, we could make a sort of down payment on reforming Washington's porky ways by simply starting to tell the truth.
It has been widely noted that 2009 will have the first "trillion-dollar deficit" in American history. Actually it's the second. In fiscal 2008, the national debt increased from $9 trillion to slightly over $10 trillion. Yet the budget deficit in the last fiscal year was officially reported as being $455 billion. How could the national debt have increased by considerably more than twice the "deficit"? Simple. Just call the money borrowed from the Social Security trust fund an "intragovernmental transfer" and exclude it from the calculation of the deficit.
Corporate managers have gone to jail for less book cooking than that.
Mr. Gordon is the author of "Hamilton's Blessing: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Our National Debt" (Walker, 1997).
By JOHN STEELE GORDON