We have all seen the photos and reports after a disaster when an aid truck shows up and is mobbed by people pushing and shoving to get some of the aid….but there is one place on earth that you would not expect to see such a mob action….CNN has a great report and be sure to watch the video carefully…….
These are the people that the GOP is ignoring completely in their pursuit of the almighty majority……I fear for my country and I fear for the Middle Class……
As usual I try to lighten up the tone on Sundays, a least a bit, we are bombarded daily with the politics of NOW…there are other things happening; just not as covered as the bitch slapping of politics……It’s Sexy Sunday and Franco is still dead!
Tina Jordahl, a former Iowa State HDFS and public policy graduate student who is now a market research specialist with Hospice of Central Iowa, collaborated with Lohman on the study. It analyzes data from the “Welfare, Children and Families: A Three-City Study” — a six-year longitudinal investigation of low-income families living in Boston, Chicago and San Antonio. Their paper, titled “A biological analysis of risk and protective factors associated with early sexual intercourse of young adolescents,” was posted online in the Children and Youth Services Review and will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal.
Interview data for the study was first collected in 1999 on youth between the ages of 10 and 14, and again in 2001. Lohman says she also has data collected in 2006 from the same subjects, who were between 16 and 20 by that time.
In the study, boys reported their first sexual intercourse at younger ages (averaging 12.48) than girls (13.16). Boys also had nearly 10 percent higher frequency of intercourse than girls and were also more likely to experience sexual debut (20 percent to 14 percent) between the two years when the first two waves of data were collected.
Recent national research has found that 13 percent of girls and 15 percent of boys have had sex by the time they’re 16. Lohman says that means the rate of sex among her low-income sample is only slightly higher among the girls, but almost double among the boys
African Americans also had 12 percent more early sexual intercourse than whites (29 to 17 percent respectively), although racial differences did not change the age of their first intercourse.
The authors report that periods of instability in family structure and welfare use serve as risk factors for early sexual activity. They found that additional maternal education — beyond a high school level — was found to inhibit some of that activity.
For that reason, the researchers propose allotting public funding to increase maternal education as a way to reduce early sexual promiscuity among their children.
The study also found the youths’ involvement in delinquent acts drastically increases the chances of early sexual activity.
Because of the gender differences in sexual debut, the authors also urge more gender-specific prevention programs that are implemented at earlier ages, especially among high risk populations.
Study after study on all sexual titles have been done, results tabulated, funds allocated and yet we as a nation cannot figure out how to education the kids on what is good and what is bad with sex. Parents are shy about the talk, government is just plain stupid about the subject and worst of all funds a squandered on programs that are totally ineffective…..and the beat goes on…..what will be the next great program to teach the children?
The health care debate has turned from informative to one of hate and bashing. All on the Right have used many analogies to downplay the effectiveness of the government to run a health care system. Their arguments have been that the government is not a reliable manager because of the stimulus plan or the cash for clunkers or yada yada.
First of all, the economy is looking minutely better, but there is a far way to go. Cash for clunkers is creating a demand that the industry desperately. Unfortunately these “good” signs are just show or a hiccup, if you will, unfortunately, there is no economic engine right now to feed the economy.
Maybe the Dems should try using a success to make their case and stop trying to dazzle us with lots of information that we cannot use and seldom understand.
That out of the way, the Right has said many, many things about the Dems health care proposals, but the loudest has been that the government is incapable of running health properly. Is that really true? Or is it just politics and the game?
The GOP has used a report by the CBO that says that proposals on the table would be disastrous for the future economy of the country. Repubs like the CBO…why?…it is because it is a non-partisan group and they have no stakew in the debate. At least that is their reason for quoting the CBO reports on numerous occassions.
Since the government is being accused of being ineffective in actually running a health care plan, let us look at a report by the CBO on the program of health care for the Veteran’s Administration.
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“Safe—avoiding injuries to patients from the care that is intended to help them.
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Effective—providing services based on scientific knowledge to all who could benefit and refraining from providing services to those not likely to benefit (avoiding underuse and overuse, respectively).
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Patient-centered—providing care that is respectful of and responsive to individual patient preferences, needs, and values and ensuring that patient values guide all clinical decisions.
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Timely—reducing waits and sometimes harmful delays for both those who receive and those who give care.
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Efficient—avoiding waste, including waste of equipment, supplies, ideas, and energy.
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Equitable—providing care that does not vary in quality because of personal characteristics such as gender, ethnicity, geographic location, and socioeconomic status.”
These were the suggestion of the Institute of Medicine made to the VA and in turn has incorporated into the care plan. The CBO went on to say:
Department of Veterans Affairs provides a large integrated delivery system financed primarily by public budgets.
VA’s experience demonstrates the potential for improving a system’s performance by sustained efforts to monitor indicators of quality, access, and satisfaction. Most of the criteria that VA uses for assessing the performance of senior-level executives, mid-level managers, and even health care providers relate directly to indicators of quality, access, and satisfaction for the facilities or units for which the individuals are responsible. The result has been notable improvements in many of the indicators, suggesting that tracking such indicators closely and consistently may be key to improving a health care system’s performance in those areas.
VA’s structure as a vertically integrated system that operates on an appropriation may have helped the system to focus on providing the best quality of care possible for a given amount of funds. As noted earlier, for many private providers, fee-for-service payment creates an incentive to perform more billable services and procedures. Although VA’s integrated structure and capitated budgeting alone do not give providers or managers incentives to focus on quality, those attributes may have made it easier for the department to implement its management plan built around tracking and rewarding both managers and employees for improvements in performance.
Improvements in quality might also be encouraged in private settings through the development of more capitated payment systems or a blend of capitation and fee-for-service payment of physicians. Another alternative would be payment systems based on an aggregated physician-hospital unit, in which high volume is penalized. The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission has suggested changes to revamp Medicare’s payment systems in order to improve incentives for quality of care.
But I guess the CBO is only as good as it is when it makes their case for them.
I visited a local VA hospital and talked with several people in the buiulding waiting for their appointments…..I found that not one had anything bad to say about the treatment they were receiving….the only negative thing they had to say was that there was a long wwaiting period before they could get onto the program….but after that there was nothing that they could say negative.
Yep, GOP another badly run government program.
For years I have heard all about the “welfare queens”, you know those people that defraud the government on assistance programs like food stamps, welfare payments, etc. Oh, the outrage at finding one of these offenders. Then more recently it has been the CEOs of banks that have been the target of the people’s rage. You know all those massive paychecks they got for killing a company or the massive benefit packages they got. LOts of outrage from the average person.
I just thought I would add to everyone’s rage with this tidbit.
For anyone who wants to know where underfunding and under-staffing of the Small Business Administration leads, check out this report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
The GAO writes of rampant abuse of the SBA’s HUB(Historically Underutilized Business)Zone program, which awarded $8 billion in federal contracts to some 4,200 certified small businesses in 2007. Specifically, the report details misrepresentation by 19 companies that falsely claimed HUB status to qualify for nearly $30 million in prime contracts and $187 million in federal contracts between 2006 and 2007.
According to the report:
“One Alabama firm listed its principal office as ‘Suite 19,’ but when GAO investigators performed a site visit, they found the office was in fact trailer 19 in a residential trailer park. The individual living in the trailer had no relationship to the HUBZone firm.”
The same company, which performs ground maintenance, received nearly $1 million in HUB contracts between 2006 and 2007, the GAO says.
Small businesses that participate in the HUBZone program must meet various criteria, including having a main office and at least 35% of their employees living in the zone. The report blames lack of SBA internal and fraud controls, including failure to make site visits to a majority of the companies applying for HUB status.
Another excellent program that has fallen into crap. I point this out because I would like to see “fair and balanced” report on ALL fraud not just some little old lady in Peoria that is trying to make a buck extra.
Obama has proposed a massive stimulus package to revive the American economy, only they have outlawed the use of the word “stimulus”. But let us take a good hard look at what this package, whatever they decide to calkl it, will entail.
There are three types of expenditure categories. Income may be used for consumption, for investment, and it can be wasted. Waste is defined as the destruction of goods value other than that planned by the person who earned the funds used. When a fire burns down a building, for example, that is waste, and when a government builds some project that few people find useful or desirable, that is also a waste, a destruction of the utility that could have been gained from alternative spending.
Investment is the creation of capital goods. Net investment is gross investment minus depreciation. In common language, people say they invest in land or in bonds, which can yield financial returns. But in economic terminology, only the creation of new capital goods is investment. When someone buys a bond or land, money simply changes hands, since no new land is created, and a bond is simply a debt.
These categories can now be put together as follows. First, the factors of land, labor, and capital goods are hired from households by firms, which create wealth in the three sectors, primary, manufacturing, and service. This wealth goes to their owners as factor payments by firms in the form of rent, wages, and capital yields, all of which constitute income. Governments obtain some of this income either from rent or from taxes. This income is spent in the three categories, consumption, investment, and waste.
There is also a money side, with the money supply a function of income, interest rates, and other variables, including monetary policy. In a classical model, the amount of money does not matter, since real output is determined independently of money; the price level will adjust to whatever the money supply is. In other models, especially of the Keynesian school, money does influence the real output. Both are right. In the short run, money can indeed influence output, but over the long run, inflation will simply increase prices, distorting relative prices in the process.
Ideas from Foldvary’s book “Science Of Economics”.
Excerpts from an article written by staffers of politicalaffairs.net
The US government has failed to live up to the expectations of its citizens regarding the provision of basic needs, a new international poll released this week showed.
According to the results of the survey conducted by World PublicOpinion.org this summer, American respondents to the poll by high margins stated they believe the US government has a large role to play in the provision of basic food needs, education, and health care.
Almost three in four Americans said the US government has a responsibility to help ensure that people are able to meet their food needs. Almost half, however, indicated that the US government failed to meet these needs “at all” or “very well.”
Even more Americans agreed that the US government is responsible to providing access to education. According to the survey, more than 80 percent of Americans believed the government should play a role in providing education. Only six in 10 Americans felt the government adequately accomplished the task.
On the issue of health care, Americans expressed the most concern about the government’s responsibility and its job performance. Almost eight in 10 Americans said the government is responsible for providing this basic need, but only three in 10 gave it good marks for its role in this.
Overall, American opinions on these three areas of concern reflect, more or less, typical opinions on the role of government globally. The poll showed, however, wide variations among people from different countries on how well their governments lived up to that responsibility.
Overall, respondents expressing the highest levels of satisfaction with their government’s performance in meeting such needs are found in China, Great Britain, Jordan, and the Palestinian Territories. The lowest levels are found in Russia, Ukraine, Argentina, and Nigeria.
American responses to the survey expressed the third largest amount of dissatisfaction with the government’s role in the provision of health care. While citizens of China, Palestine, and Indonesia expressed greater satisfaction on this issue than Americans by large margins, only Russians, Ukrainians, and Argentinians expressed more disapproval.
Been a slow day on the campaign trail because the two candidates have called a truce during the celebrations of the 9/11 thing. But never fear there is always a good, cheesy story coming out of Washington.
U.S. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne on Thursday said he was “outraged” by department workers who had sex, used drugs and took gifts from employees at regulated oil companies, while one senator called for a Bush administration official to resign over the scandal.
The Interior Department’s inspector general issued a scathing report on Wednesday that found “a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity” at the department’s Minerals Management Service, whose employees handled billions of dollars in oil and natural gas supplies that were turned over by companies as in-kind royalty payments for drilling on federal lands.
“I am outraged by the immoral behavior, illegal activities, and appalling misconduct of several former and current long-serving career employees in the Minerals Management Service’s royalty-in-kind program,” Kempthorne said. “We will take swift action to restore the public trust.”
In response to the inspector general’s report, Luthi had said that “I do not believe Americans have lost financially,” but admitted “it is too early to tell” if government workers gave oil companies financial favors at the expense of taxpayers.
As reported in the NY Times:
Financial conditions are continuing to worsen at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, leading some investors to prepare for a government bailout of the housing giants even as the Treasury Department and the companies say such government intervention will not be necessary.
“The markets are acting like a bailout is inevitable,” said Sean Egan, managing director of Egan-Jones Ratings, an independent credit ratings firm. Mr. Egan said he believed the federal government would need to help pump about $20 billion into each company, possibly through a government guarantee rather than through a direct injection of capital.
Treasury officials have repeatedly emphasized that they do not plan to use the authority, recently granted by Congress, to pump billions of dollars into the firms. Company insiders have begun arguing that the recent stock declines are the work of duplicitous critics conspiring to undermine the firms. Executives at both firms say they are confident they can raise additional money from investors and that the companies are adequately capitalized, with capital in excess of what they are required to hold by their regulator. Government officials note that both companies continue to buy mortgages and that they are borrowing at rates far below what other banks and companies pay.
But as the companies’ fortunes decline, their options are narrowing. Fannie and Freddie are a critical part of the nation’s housing finance system, owning or guaranteeing nearly half of all home mortgages. They have lost more than $14 billion in the last year, however, and are expected to announce further losses later this year. Government officials, company insiders and investors all agree the firms will need to raise more money.
Hence, the smell of a government bailout is getting stronger with each market closing.
It’s a case of the good news being reported right before the ax falls. Providing children with health insurance makes a huge difference in whether kids receive the care they need, especially if they are chronically ill with such things as asthma or diabetes. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation released a state-by-state report today, “A Needed Lifeline.” The report was conducted by researchers at the University of Minnesota.
Insured children are three times more likely to have visited a doctor’s office in the course of a year than are uninsured children, according to the report. About 60% of insured children are covered by private insurance plans, and about a third of children are covered under public programs, such as Medicaid (MediCal in California) or the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). The L.A. Times, on Nov. 26, 2007, wrote about how the children’s program can affect even middle-class families. The new report shows that although 41% of chronically ill kids who had no health insurance skipped needed care, only 10% of those covered under public programs skipped needed care.
Last year, a federal directive with an Aug. 18 deadline came down from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that put some aspects of California’s program at risk. For example, some county programs — with federal permission — that have enrolled children in families earning 300% of the federal poverty level may lose that permission for new enrollees. And all newly enrolled children must be uninsured for a year to qualify, according to the new rules. The old rule said they had to be uninsured for only three months before they could be signed up. Yesterday, the state decided not to comply with the new rules, according to CQ Healthbeat, saying that key requirements run counter to California law.
Congress has voted several short-term extensions of the SCHIP program, the most recent to expire in March 2009. But between now and then — you may have noticed — there’s a general election, and state agencies can’t be sure what will happen to programs for uninsured children. On top of that uncertainty, the new CMS rules have just about everyone scratching their heads.
So the SCHIP program, a success story in dropping the number of uninsured children from 11.1 million in 1998 to 7.9 million in 2004, has just received yet more evidence of its value from the new Robert Wood Johnson study. But with the deadline for the new CMS rules just four days away and no one certain how the feds will respond to California’s refusal to comply, with a change in president certain, and possible changes in every other elective office in the land, is it any wonder that states just don’t know what to do about the millions of children who are still uninsured?