Congressional Liberals Mobilize to Keep Social Insurance Out of Shutdown Talks

President Barack Obama announced Monday that he is nominating Lanhee Chen, Mitt Romney’s former top policy adviser, to the Social Security Advisory Board.

The independent and bipartisan board advises the president, Congress and the Commissioner of Social Security on the program, but does not have any decision-making authority. Chen, who served as the Romney campaign’s policy director and is a research fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University, was deeply critical of the president’s management of federal entitlement programs during the campaign.

“On retirement programs, the President’s plan is laughable,” Chen wrote in a memo to reporters two weeks before election day. “With both Social Security and Medicare on the path to insolvency, the President has proposed to do nothing. The Social Security and Medicare Trustees have concluded that doing nothing – the President’s plan – will result in seniors seeing their Social Security benefits cut by 25% in 2033 and that the Medicare Hospital Insurance Trust Fund will be exhausted in 2024. As President-elect Obama acknowledged in early 2009, we can’t kick the can down the road any further. But rather than offering an honest proposal to protect and strengthen these programs, the President offers just more empty promises.”

Chen’s nomination follows Obama’s decision to appoint former Romney campaign counsel Ben Ginsberg as co-chair of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration, which is reviewing ways to make voting easier

Pennsylvania Department of Health officials are reminding residents that Women, Infants and Children (WIC) offices throughout the state are open and providing services despite the federal government shutdown.

The Pennsylvania WIC program is expected to be able to continue normal operations “for a few weeks” because of funds that were carried forward from the previous year and additional food funds, including rebates, department Secretary Michael Wolf said in a news release.

Wolf said the department is working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Gov. Tom Corbett’s office to develop a plan to avoid major service disruptions in the event of a long-term federal government shutdown.

As part of the long-term planning process, local WIC agencies were asked to submit an outline to the department that details steps to minimize administrative spending and ways to ensure minimal reductions to participant food benefits should the shutdown continue. The department will then coordinate plans and submit them for review to the USDA.

The Pennsylvania WIC program provides services including nutrition services, breastfeeding support, health care and social service referrals, and healthy foods, to about 250,000 recipients per month. The program’s 2013-14 federal budget was about $208 million.

WIC operates local offices in Aliquippa, Ambridge, Beaver Falls, Freedom and Midland.

Additional information is available online at www.pawic.com or by telephone at 800-942-9467. Local offices can be reached at 866-942-2778.

Banks pushing for repeal of credit unions’ federal tax exemption

Bankers say the tax break is an unfair advantage for large credit unions. Now they see an opportunity to get rid of it as lawmakers begin work on a major overhaul of the tax code.

• The potential economic gains from TPP amount to a rounding error, according to research from the Peterson Institute of International Economics, which is cited by proponents of the TPP. This research projects that the TPP would generate only a 0.13 percent increase in GDP by 2025, about one hundredth of a percent of increased national income per year.

• Taking into account the downward pressure on wages caused by so-called “free trade” agreements, the Center for Economic and Policy Research has calculated that the median U.S. worker’s wages could drop by 0.14 to 0.72 percent by 2025 if the TPP is implemented.

• According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, the long-term loss of GDP, in 2020,  from the ongoing failure to restore full employment in the U.S., is 25 times the size of the potential gains from the trade agreement.  The potential gains to GDP from the TPP are therefore very small as compared with other policy alternatives.

• For the last twenty-five years income inequality has grown enormously while the wages of the typical (median) worker have stagnated, in part as a result of the free trade agreements that the U.S. has signed.  Today the U.S. has a higher rate of income inequality than other high-income countries.  The U.S. inequality gap is set to increase even more if the TPP is passed.
  
• http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/TPP-2013-09.pdf

Death of an adjunct

On Sept. 1, Margaret Mary Vojtko, an adjunct professor who had taught French at Duquesne University for 25 years, passed away at the age of 83. She died as the result of a massive heart attack she suffered two weeks before. As it turned out, I may have been the last person she talked to.

On Aug. 16, I received a call from a very upset Margaret Mary. She told me that she was under an incredible amount of stress. She was receiving radiation therapy for the cancer that had just returned to her, she was living nearly homeless because she could not afford the upkeep on her home, which was literally falling in on itself, and now, she explained, she had received another indignity — a letter from Adult Protective Services telling her that someone had referred her case to them saying that she needed assistance in taking care of herself. The letter said that if she did not meet with the caseworker the following Monday, her case would be turned over to Orphans’ Court.

For a proud professional like Margaret Mary, this was the last straw; she was mortified. She begged me to call Adult Protective Services and tell them to leave her alone, that she could take care of herself and did not need their help. I agreed to. Sadly, a couple of hours later, she was found on her front lawn, unconscious from a heart attack. She never regained consciousness.

Meanwhile, I called Adult Protective Services right after talking to Margaret Mary, and I explained the situation. I said that she had just been let go from her job as a professor at Duquesne, that she was given no severance or retirement benefits, and that the reason she was having trouble taking care of herself was because she was living in extreme poverty. The caseworker paused and asked with incredulity, “She was a professor?” I said yes. The caseworker was shocked; this was not the usual type of person for whom she was called in to help.

Of course, what the caseworker didn’t understand was that Margaret Mary was an adjunct professor, meaning that, unlike a well-paid tenured professor, Margaret Mary worked on a contract basis from semester to semester, with no job security, no benefits and with a salary of between $3,000 and just over $3,500 per three-credit course. Adjuncts now make up well over 50 percent of the faculty at colleges and universities.

Continue reading Death of an Adjunct →

HARRISBURG, Sept. 12 – State Rep. Rob Matzie, D-Beaver/Allegheny, is pleased that Treasurer Rob McCord has continued to deny payment on $3.4 million worth of invoices for a supposedly no-cost contract with Pennsylvania Interactive LLC., but he still has concerns over privacy implications, possible fees assessed to the public and the no-bid nature of the contract.

In April, Matzie wrote to state Treasurer Rob McCord asking him to halt the payments requested by the company. NICUSA, which is the parent company of Pennsylvania Interactive LLC, which has since amended its Securities and Exchange Commission filings  to remove $5.1 million in estimated revenue generated from the state and writing off amounts due from the commonwealth.

“Pennsylvania taxpayers should be pleased that more than $5 million was not diverted from the Department of Transportation when our roads and bridges need repair,” Matzie said. “The company’s recent SEC filings show they have concerns about the contract. How often does a government contractor turn down an offer to be paid millions of dollars if it actually believes it is legally owed the money?”

The Corbett administration awarded a no-bid contract last year to the company for the renovation and management of Pennsylvania’s state websites. Despite the millions of dollars invoiced by the company, the contract was supposed to use a self-funding model that would cost the state nothing.

Continue reading Rep. Rob Matzie helps PA taxpayers save $5 million →