September 13, 2015, 8:00 a.m.
Note: Looking for the blog about the UI president search? Click here.
Note: For a documentary related to this blog post ("Three Steps to Creating a Caring Community"), see Michael Moore's "Where to Invade Next." Here is a review from the Toronto Film Festival.
Create a Caring Community
Nicholas Johnson
The Gazette, September 13, 2015, p. C3
What does it take to create a civic society, a sense of community, a preservation of culture?
Our Declaration of Independence asserts that every American is “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
The World Bank reports 2.2 billion people try to subsist on less than $2.00 a day. Our Census Bureau says 45 million Americans (half are children) live below the poverty threshold.
Poverty, whether here or abroad, can put quite a crimp in one’s life, liberty and happiness. Indeed, a Princeton study found you can buy additional happiness -- up to $75,000. (Additional income adds nothing.)
But even in a capitalist (or our corporatist) country, true happiness -- self-actualization, sense of self-worth, a sense of community – requires more than money.
We’re aware of income inequality, the gap between us and the 1%. But what of the happiness gap?
Let’s say roughly 30% of Americans confront challenges and conditions – in addition to finding too much month at the end of the money – that limit their sense of self-fulfillment.
Clearly, we provide them some government and volunteer assistance. Equally clearly, it’s not enough. And when money’s tight the support is cut. That is, in part, due to the political power of the “I’ve got mine, Jack,” “Greed is good,” “I built that” persuasion. [Photo credit: St. Elizabeth Catholic Church, Altadena, California.]
Adam Edelen, Kentucky’s state auditor of public accounts, said “it is not Christian” to cut health coverage; “maybe this side of the aisle should put down the books of Ayn Rand and pick up the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.”
The Pope and many religious leaders agree. Others draw similar conclusions from basic ethics and morality.
That ought to be enough. Unfortunately, it’s not. Little rationale beyond trickle-down is required to enact billionaires’ tax breaks. Programs for the 30% have to prove their tax savings – or increased businesses’ profits.
Fortunately, this proof is often available – even if it should not need to be. Most of Senator Bernie Sanders’ proposals are not only supported by 50-to-80% of America’s voters, they have been adopted by most industrialized nations, and found to produce more wealth than they cost.
The 30% are not just homeless drug addicts. Some belong to highly skilled trades, or hold graduate degrees, like a Ph.D. who can’t find a teaching position.
Some cities find the cost of housing for the homeless is less than the total costs of keeping them on the streets.
Mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent crimes cost taxpayers, impact families, and reduce inmates’ education and potential productivity. Tuition-free college education built our nation’s economy after World War II with the GI Bill, California and New York’s later, and Germany’s today. The cost of four years in prison would pay for four years in college. Drug courts are cheaper than prison.
The 30% includes those who can’t afford desperately needed dental and medical care. And yet universal single-payer health care costs less and returns more than emergency room visits – or even health insurance.
Concerned about the economy? It’s 70% driven with consumer spending. Minimum wage increases will be spent immediately. A full employment, federal government as employer of last resort policy, would create substantial improvements to our communities, increase the skills and self-esteem of those now welfare-dependent, and give the economy a boost.
There are similar approaches to other challenges of the 30%. Persons of color who, regardless of socio-economic status, must daily deal with systemic racism. Single mothers earning minimum wage. Persons with physical or mental disabilities. College grads, burdened with debt. Those who’ve lost homes or farms. Those addicted to alcohol or tobacco. Residents of East Los Angeles, without cars, who provide services to those in West LA – after hours on buses.
How do we create a sense of community? We focus first on “doing well by doing good” for the 30%. Then on the “middle class.” And last on the top 1%. Our only problem has been that we had it backwards.
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Nicholas Johnson, a native of Iowa City and former FCC commissioner, maintains http://nicholasjohnson.org and http://FromDC2Iowa.blogspot.com. Comments: mailbox@nicholasjohnson.org
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May 30, 2011, 8:00 a.m.
Allocating Costs; Setting the Price
The Sunday Des Moines Register of May 22, 2011, had a major, page one spread about the rising costs of a college education. Except it wasn't about the cost of education. It was about the rising price of that education, comparing the increase in the share of those costs allocated to tuition with the rising price of peanut butter, milk and eggs. More on the Register's piece on down the blog.
First, here is my 300-word-limit response in the next week's Sunday Register, May 29:
Legislature shifted the cost of education
Nicholas Johnson
Des Moines Register
May 29, 2011, p. P20
"The Challenge for Students, Parents and Schools: Runaway Tuition" (May 22), helped focus attention on the rising price of a college education.
Unfortunately, it conflated the "price" (to the student and parents) with the "cost" (to the universities) of that education.
Can universities do more to reduce the costs of education? Can they increase the quality and utility of that education? Absolutely.
However, it's both unfair and inaccurate to suggest that the sole cause of rising tuition is the increase in costs resulting from poor management by the Iowa Board of Regents and administrators.
A major reason for the increase in tuition is not the cost of education, but the allocation of those costs between taxpayers (who receive a public benefit from a well educated workforce) and the private beneficiaries (the students who go on to better jobs and lives).
When California universities charged no tuition, that didn't mean they had no costs. It meant taxpayers paid those costs.
The most appropriate allocation? That's a debate worth having.
But for now, let's recognize that it is the Iowa Legislature that has chosen to allocate an ever-increasing share of the costs to students' tuition; not
the Iowa Board of Regents, universities' administrators or faculty members.
Here are some early excerpts from the Register story the week before, followed by some comments.
Iowa's two largest universities expect to pocket millions of dollars in extra tuition revenue next fiscal year, with the vast majority going to pay for
additional faculty, programs aimed at lowering dropout rates and other student services, officials said.
That decision comes as the cost of earning a four-year degree in Iowa at a public university continues a steep march upward and pushes students to take on more debt, which, at $26,066 per graduating student, is the fourth-highest average in the country.
In the past 30 years, the average cost of tuition and fees at an Iowa public university has jumped 707 percent, more than four times the rate of inflation. College costs have increased each of the past 30 years for students and their families.
Meanwhile, a new survey shows families and students saddled with rising tuition and debt, stagnant wages and an uncertain job market are questioning whether a traditional college education is their ticket to the American dream.
Some universities are trying to respond to the converging forces with innovative classroom approaches and three-year degree programs. . . .
Americans are reassessing what they get for their tuition dollars.
Fifty-seven percent of those surveyed by the Pew Research Center say the higher education system does not provide a good value for the money they spend, and 75 percent say college is too expensive for most Americans to afford, according to findings released last week.
Jens Manuel Krogstad, "Runaway tuition: A challenge for students, parents and schools," Des Moines Register, May 22, 2011, p. A1.
I acknowledge in the response to the Register's report, "Can universities do more to reduce the costs of education? . . . Absolutely." Frankly, I don't know enough to support that "absolutely" judgment. It's based simply on the intuition and experience that virtually every individual, business, government agency, and institution that is willing to address in detail its systems and processes, goals and operations, can probably come up with ways to reduce costs, at least a little -- often while improving quality and outputs.
It may well be that the salaries of universities' personnel, and the other costs of education (as distinguished from the price of education, tuition), have increased significantly further and faster than inflation in the costs of producing other goods and services. If so, that's a matter well worth investigating. If the increases represent necessary costs, held to the minimum, wise investments, and other consequences of skilled, creative and attentive management, that's one thing. If not, if alternative decisions could have produced greater quantity and quality of service at lower cost, that's another.
The point, for purposes of critiquing this Register story, is that it only addresses the increases in the price of education, not the costs of providing that education.
Beyond that, there was another opinion piece in the Sunday paper [May 29] of even greater relevance to America's future than my 300 words.
Robert Reich, the former U.S. secretary of labor, is now an author, columnist, blogger, and professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkley, testifies before Congress from time to time. The Register published as an essay an excerpt from his May 12 testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. It's vey much worth reading in its entirety; indeed it could be characterized as must reading for every American and public official.
To give you an idea of his subject, and thesis, here is is lead paragraph:
How did we go from the Great Depression to 30 years of Great Prosperity? And from there, to 30 years of stagnant incomes and widening inequality, culminating in the Great Recession? And from the Great Recession into such an anemic recovery?
Robert Reich, "How Our Prosperity Became Stagnation," Des Moines Register, May 29, 2011, p. OP1.
In the course of answering those questions, here's what he had to say about the role of higher education:
Government also widened access to higher education. The GI Bill paid college costs for those who returned from war. The expansion of public universities made higher education affordable to the American middle class. . . .
Starting more than three decades ago, trade and technology began driving a wedge between the earnings of people at the top and everyone else. The pay of well-connected graduates of prestigious colleges and MBA programs has soared. But the pay and benefits of most other workers has either flattened or dropped. And the ensuing division has also made most middle-class American families less economically secure.
Government could have enforced the basic bargain. But it did the opposite. It slashed public goods and investments -- whacking school budgets, increasing the cost of public higher education, reducing job training, cutting public transportation and allowing bridges, ports and highways to corrode. . . .
Coping mechanism No. 3: Draw down savings and borrow to the hilt. After exhausting the first two coping mechanisms, the only way Americans could keep consuming as before was to save less and go deeper into debt. During the Great Prosperity the American middle class saved about 9 percent of their after-tax incomes each year. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, that portion had been whittled down to about 7 percent. The savings rate then dropped to 6 percent in 1994, and on down to 3 percent in 1999. By 2008, Americans saved nothing. Meanwhile, household debt exploded. By 2007, the typical American owed 138 percent of their after-tax income.
He concludes:
The fundamental economic challenge ahead is to restore the vast American middle class. That requires resurrecting the basic bargain linking wages to overall gains, and providing the middle class a share of economic gains sufficient to allow them to purchase more of what the economy can produce. As we should have learned from the Great Prosperity -- the 30 years after World War II when America grew because most Americans shared in the nation's prosperity -- we cannot have a growing and vibrant economy without a growing and vibrant middle class.
"To restore the vast American middle class" is going to require, among many other things discussed by Reich, a restoration of affordable post-high school college education -- as well as a reduction in the price of community college education, and skills training in the trades.
Had we been hell-bent on deliberately evolving into a third world country's population, with a statistically insignificant percentage of super-wealthy at one extreme, and 90 percent or more struggling just to get by, we would have adopted almost precisely the policies we have. That's not to say that it was deliberate. Others can explore the conspiracy theories. But that is the result.
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