Thursday, January 27, 2011
Children and Deficits-Cause and Effect
The childhood shows the man,
As morning shows the day.
— John Milton, Paradise Lost
Republicans have begun describing how the United States of America at the state and national level can become a better place by spending a lot less money and not raising taxes. Congress took the first step at the end of 2010 when it dealt with the tax law. It decided to extend income tax rates in effect in 2010 for another 24 months, a benefit for rich and poor alike, although in absolute dollars the rich benefitted somewhat more than the poor. Those earning $10 million who file joint returns will pay approximately $368,794 less than if the existing law had not been extended and those earning $1 million will save approximately $29,962. Those earning $60,000 will pay $1118.40 less and those earning $20,000 save $51.60. An incidental benefit of the legislation went to the unemployed who were given an additional thirteen months of unemployment benefits. Lower taxes for the rich were extended beyond the time benefits were paid the unemployed because the rich became rich because of hard work and many members of Congress must think if the unemployed worked as hard at seeking employment as the rich did at becoming rich they’d be employed within 13 months. Other ways money is saved are becoming apparent at the state and national level.
Colorado, a state with a large budget shortfall, has given low-income students the opportunity to participate in helping the state ameliorate its financial crisis by foregoing free breakfasts. As a result these students will, (unless the entire legislature overrules the actions of its Joint Budget Committee), forego free breakfast and begin paying $.30 each day for it, thus participating in a meaningful way in helping the state out of its financial bind. The Joint Budget Committee acted even though there was $253,547 available from previous years when the program, known as the Smart Nutrition Program, came in under budget. One of the Republican lawmakers objected to the fact that Democrats were saying Republicans didn’t care about children. She said: “We care about the children. It’s not a moral issue, it’s an accounting issue.” That explanation will help relieve hunger pangs felt by the young who are no longer getting free breakfasts.
The Colorado decision was made during the same week that Sargent Shriver died. It was a bit ironic. Among Mr. Shriver’s many accomplishments was the creation of the Headstart Programs. As Bob Herbert observed in a recent op-ed piece in the New York Times commenting on Mr. Shriver’s many accomplishments: “In 1964, as leader of the Office of Economic Opportunity in the Johnson administration, Mr. Shriver came across studies that showed connections between poor nutrition, lower I.Q. scores and arrested social and emotional development. He wondered whether early childhood intervention ‘could have a beneficial effect on the children of poor people.’ Head Start followed in incredibly short order.” The Colorado Joint Budget Committee’s action was not the only irony in the week that Sargent Shriver died. The report of house conservatives in the U.S. Congress was another.
The Republican Study Committee wants to bring domestic agency budgets down to 2006 levels which is about a $175 billion cut from current levels. The White House said that if cuts of that magnitude were imposed by Congress, 400,000 children would be forced from Head Start programs. One of Headstart’s concerns is for nutrition for young children. Children in a part-day center based setting must receive meals and snacks that provide at least 1/3 of their daily nutritional needs and those in full-day programs must receive ½ to 2/3 of their daily nutritional needs, depending on the length of the program. Children in morning based centers who arrive not having eaten breakfast must be given a nourishing breakfast. That is only a brief description of the requirements pertaining to nutritional services that Head Start programs must address. If the Committee’s recommendations are adopted, 400,000 small children will participate in democracy in just the same way that Colorado children are participating.
It is not only young children who are given the opportunity to participate in democracy in action. Post secondary education students are given a similar opportunity. The committee’s recommendation would reduce Pell Grants for low-income college students by an average of $1,000.
A suggestion that Pell grants be reduced comes at a time when tuition for students throughout the country is rising. According to a report in the New York Times, tuition at the University of South Carolina has doubled in the last ten years. California has raised tuition by 30 percent in the last two years. Texas legislators have proposed eliminating financial aid for freshmen. The net effect of those changes will be to deprive many of the less fortunate students the opportunity to get an education.
It is a strange Congress and legislature that protects a country’s future by taking money from programs that nourish undernourished children and makes it more difficult for its older children to receive an education.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
The Executioner and the FDA
For want of a nail the shoe was lost,
For want of a shoe the horse was lost;
[For want of a drug a life was prolonged-briefly]
A Proverb
It is easy to lose sight of one’s mission and we should be sympathetic and not critical. After all, its employees are busy people and that probably helps explain why the Food and Drug Administration has momentarily gotten confused as to its purpose. On its website it says the FDA” “is an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services . . . [that] is responsible for protecting the public health by assuring the safety, efficacy, and security of human and veterinary drugs. . . . “ It is “also responsible for advancing the public health by helping to speed innovations that make medicines and foods more effective, safer, and more affordable; and helping the public get the accurate, science-based information they need to use medicines and foods, and to reduce tobacco use to improve health.”
An example of its good work was the announcement last November that it was going to make cigarette companies put really awful pictures of people adversely affected by tobacco on each pack of cigarettes to discourage those offended by such gruesome pictures from smoking. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said at a news conference: “We want to make sure every person who picks up a pack of cigarettes knows exactly what the risk is they are taking. ”
In January the FDA announced new restrictions on some of the most popular prescription painkillers because they caused “many patients to poison themselves with overdoses of the drug acetaminophen.” This was yet another example of the FDA looking out for the best interests of the public that it is charged with safeguarding. Helping the general public enjoy better health is not all it has been doing, however. It has also been helping penitentiaries in California and Arizona execute their death row inmates by providing sodium thiopental.
Executioners in the United States are suffering from a short supply of sodium thiopental. Hospira Inc. of Lake Forest, Illinois is the only American manufacturer of the product and it says that it has encountered supplier issues that have made it impossible to manufacture the drug. As was observed in this space a few weeks ago, although Texas has enough of the drug on hand to dispatch more people on death row than it can possibly use before the expiration date of the drug, it does not want to share with other states for reasons best known to itself. As a result of Texas’s unwillingness to share, Arizona found itself in the position of having the execution of Jeffrey Landrigan delayed due to the unavailability of domestically produced sodium thiopental. Although the drug was available from a British firm, Mr. Landrigan’s attorneys feared it might not measure up to the high quality executioners in this country had come to expect from the domestically produced drug.
Arizona was not the only state that found itself in the awkward position of having people ready to be executed but no available drugs to get the job done. California was in a similar spot. San Quentin was suffering from a lack of the drug and feared that its executions might also have to be postponed until the drug became domestically available once again. And here’s where the FDA came to the rescue. In a report in the Washington Post on January 11, 2011 by Andrew Welsh-Huggins, it was disclosed that Arizona had written the FDA explaining the dreadful dilemma it confronted and asking for the FDA’s help. When the FDA learned of the dilemma facing Arizona and California, one of its officials stepped up to the plate and recommended that a shipment of the drug “be processed expeditiously to us as it was for the purpose of executions and not for use by the general public.” (Why it needed to be processed expeditiously when the general public was not the beneficiary of the effort is hard to understand. Perhaps the official making the recommendation is a supporter of the death penalty and hated see the execution process delayed for lack of a drug that was readily available in England.)
It seems a bit odd to have the FDA expediting executions. As Natasha Minkser, the death penalty policy director for the ACLU’s Northern California chapter said: “The FDA is actively assisting these states, but they’re not enforcing the law, and they’re not doing anything to determine that the drugs are what they’re claimed to be and that they work properly.” It is unlikely that Ms. Minkser would feel better if the FDA tested the drug to make sure it works “properly” before forwarding it to the states. Indeed, it is not clear that the FDA should care a fig for whether the drug works properly. It should not be in the death dealing business. Someone should tell Ms. Sebelius.
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
The Annoying Constitution and the Immigrants' Babies
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. . . .
Inscription for the Statue of Liberty
Rep. Steve King (R-IA) has shown that even though he is from mid-America and far removed from foreign countries, he is inspired by, and hopes to model his proposal after, the legal actions of the Dominican Republic (DR) , a country that was confronted by exactly the same kind of problem that the United States is confronting except the problem concerns Haitians instead of Mexicans.
The problem of Haitians moving to the DR was greatly exacerbated after the January 2010 earthquake that left many Haitians homeless who then fled to the DR seeking better lives. The lure of a better life in the United States is one of many factors that cause Mexican families to move to the United States. Although the reasons for the immigrations differ, Mr. King believes the DR solution is a model the U.S. should adopt.
The island of Hispaniola consists of Haiti, the western part of the Island, and the Dominican Republic, the eastern part. The DR has a problem with illegal Haitians moving to the DR and then having children who by virtue of their birth become citizens just as the U.S. has a problem with illegal Mexicans moving into the U.S. and having children who are then U.S. citizens. On January 26, 2010, in the Dominican Republic, a constitutional provision amending the DR’s constitution was promulgated.
The constitutional change was the result of a case filed by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 2004 in a case involving two ethnic Haitian children who were born in the DR but were denied birth certificates. The DR Constitution provided that anyone born in the DR was entitled to citizenship except for the children of diplomats and people “in transit.” The lawsuit that was filed by the Inter-American Court relied on that provision and in 2005 the two children were awarded damages because the DR denied them citizenship. Notwithstanding that decision, the DR Supreme Court continued to take the position that Haitian workers were “in transit” and, therefore, not entitled to citizenship. As a result, unless they resorted to suing the state, children born to illegal Haitian immigrants were not entitled to receive their birth certificates and without them the children were unable to obtain citizenship papers, enter the university, vote, get free medical care or even get married. On January 26, 2010 new nationality provisions of the constitution were promulgated saying that unless one parent of a child is a legal resident, the child does not obtain citizenship by virtue of being born in the DR. Under the constitutional change a child wishing to get official identification must not only prove his own citizenship but also prove that parents and grandparents were not illegal immigrants.
Peter King was almost certainly influenced by the actions of the DR. On January 5, 2011, the very first day of the new Congress, when some members of Congress were reading the Constitution out loud to prove to a skeptical audience that they know how to read, Steve King introduced a bill to change one of the provisions in the 14th amendment to the U.S. Constitution. As presently written, the 14th Amendment provides that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States. . . are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. . . .” Mr. King would amend the 14th Amendment to provide that citizenship would only be granted to three classes of people: children of U.S. citizens or nationals, children of permanent residents and children of non-citizens in active-duty military service. Children in the last category would, of course, spend at least the first 18 years of their lives as non-citizens since there is no way that three year olds will be able to enter active-duty military service and thus become citizens. Those children will not be eligible for welfare and other state and local benefit programs available to children who are U.S. citizens. They will, however, have something to look forward to when they attain age 18. They can join the army and thereby receive the myriad benefits that are available to their citizen colleagues.
The 14th amendment was Congress’s response to the 1857 Dred Scott decision, which held that neither freed slaves nor their descendants could ever become U.S. citizens and lacked the ability to bring suit in federal court. Mr. King’s proposal is a response to his own unwillingness, and that of his colleagues, to deal with problems posed by the status of illegal immigrants in this country in a responsible way. The fact that it was the solution found by the DR should be of no comfort to anyone except, perhaps, Mr. King.