Proposal Offers Important Protections for Consumers But More Safeguards Needed To Rein In Abusive Practices

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The Federal Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) announced today that it has approved for public comment a proposed rule to prohibit savings associations from engaging in certain unfair and deceptive practices. The proposed rule offers important new protections for credit card consumers, but more safeguards are needed, according to Consumers Union, nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports.

See also:

Office of Thrift Supervision, Press release

Rule summary

From the overview:
Employer-sponsored insurance coverage forms the backbone of the U.S. health insurance system, yet there are crucial weaknesses that have contributed to a growing number of uninsured Americans. Ultimately, the lack of employer-based coverage generates public costs in the form of taxpayer bills to fund public insurance or uncompensated care programs for care that would otherwise be paid for through insurance. This report quantifies those costs, using data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Surveys to estimate public program spending and uncompensated care costs for uninsured workers and their dependents. In 2004, uninsured and publicly insured workers and their dependents accounted for $45 billion in public costs. This includes $33 billion associated with public program insurance costs and $12 billion in uncompensated care costs. Public costs associated with uninsured and publicly insured workers and their dependents were 45 percent greater in 2004 than in 1999. All costs are reported in 2004 dollars.

See also:

The Widening Health Care Gap Between High- and Low-Wage Workers

Congressional Testimony--Widening Gaps in Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: The Need for Universal Coverage

From the summary:
Despite the fact that one-third of all Americans--representing 36 million households--live in rental housing, rental policy often takes a back seat to home-ownership policy in Washington. To ensure that low- and moderate-income Americans can afford rental housing, Bruce Katz says that the next president needs to help supplement incomes through tax credits, empower local governments to expand and preserve the supply of affordable housing and deal with the subprime mortgage crisis.

See also:

Position Paper
Fact Sheet

From the press release:
America's richest 1 percent now holds more wealth -- over $2 trillion more -- than America's entire bottom 90 percent. Might America need a 'maximum wage'?

FDR once thought so, and so does Sam Pizzigati, the veteran labor journalist whose new Greed and Good makes vividly clear why inequality remains our nation's most crushing burden.

The popularity of 401(k) plans has grown in recent years. According to the Employee Benefits Research Institute, almost two-thirds of employers offer such plans and millions of employees now contribute to them. These defined contribution plans allow workers to set aside part of their earnings in tax-deferred retirement accounts that are invested in stock and bond funds. A worker can begin to withdraw funds from the account without penalty at age 59 and one-half. All contributions, as well as accumulated dividends and interest, are subject to income tax when the funds are withdrawn.

Dark clouds are now looming over America's economic future. As first the stock market boom and then the housing boom have come to an end, along with the fountains of cheap credit that were their mainspring, the perennial gale of unemployment is blowing in. The president and Congress have addressed the downturn with tax rebates and talk of "debt relief." Meanwhile, public infrastructure is crumbling. Workers' wages are stagnating while their work hours are rising. Health insurance is becoming less and less affordable for the typical family. And as U.S. military spending escalates, government spending on essential services is drastically reduced.

All of these facts serve to remind us that capitalist economies are inherently unstable and structurally incapable of creating full employment at decent wages and benefits. While tax rebates and debt relief may provide some minor protection from the coming economic storm, these measures are temporary--and inadequate--responses to a perpetual problem. As an alternative to these ad hoc policies or, worse yet, the free-market fundamentalism still widely preached in Washington, some economists and policymakers, in the United States and abroad, are touting a policy that seeks to end unemployment via a government promise to provide a job to anyone ready, willing, and able to work.

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For three decades, the supply of good jobs has been dwindling. The causes include globalization, deregulation, and weaker worker protections, such as minimum-wage laws and government defense of the right to unionize. Now, after three decades of stagnant incomes, we are heading for a severe recession. Higher unemployment will reduce worker bargaining power even further. The cure will require a much more active government role in the economy -- both as a regulator and as a source of funds.

In the same 30 years, the service sector has exploded as a source of jobs. The American work force has gone from 28 percent factory workers and 72 percent service workers in 1978 to 16 percent factory workers and 84 percent service workers today. But the service sector encompasses tens of millions of bad jobs -- in routine clerical work, retail sales, fast food, low-end human services -- and a relatively small number of very well compensated professional positions, among them doctor, lawyer, scientist, and investment banker.

Here is a very straightforward proposal. Let's have a national policy to make every human-service job a good job -- one that pays a living wage with good benefits, and includes adequate training, professional status, and the prospect of advancement -- a career rather than casual labor.

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...But in recent months, almost unnoticed by the mainstream media, the school voucher movement has abruptly stalled. Some stalwart advocates of vouchers have either repudiated the idea entirely or considerably tempered their enthusiasm for it. Exhibit A is "School Choice Isn't Enough," an article in the winter 2008 City Journal (the quarterly published by the conservative Manhattan Institute) written by the former voucher proponent Sol Stern. Acknowledging that voucher programs for poor children had "hit a wall," Stern concluded: "Education reformers ought to resist unreflective support for elegant-sounding theories, derived from the study of economic activity, that don't produce verifiable results in the classroom." His conversion has triggered an intense debate in conservative circles. The center-right education scholar Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and a longtime critic of public school bureaucracies and teachers unions, told the New York Sun that he was sympathetic to Stern's argument. In his newly published memoirs, Finn also writes of his increasing skepticism that "the market's invisible hand" produces improved performance on its own. Howard Fuller, an African American who was the superintendent of schools in Milwaukee when the voucher program was launched there, and who received substantial support from the Bradley Foundation and other conservative institutions over the years, has conceded, "It hasn't worked like we thought it would in theory." From all appearances, then, the voucher movement may not long outlive its founder, Friedman, or its most vigorous advocate and funder, Michael Joyce, who both died in 2006. How did one of the conservative policy world's most cherished causes crumble so quickly?

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...Organized labor has enormous potential to be the pivotal player in raising these economic and moral questions and anchoring a reform coalition that fundamentally reshapes the health care debate. For well over a century now, labor has been instrumental in the development of the U.S. health system. It established some of the first prepaid group practices and health maintenance organizations, was the leading voice for national health insurance up until the mid-1970s, and was decisive in the establishment of Medicare and in the expansion of other major social programs, like Social Security and the Great Society. The employment-based system of health benefits is largely the product of a collective-bargaining regime established during and immediately after the Second World War. That system is under siege today. Without unions to act as a brake, today's downward spiral in health benefits for union and nonunion workers would be even faster. Divided and hemorrhaging members, organized labor still has formidable resources to influence the course of health care reform.

At one pole is Andrew Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the nation's largest union, and arguably the best known labor leader today. He stridently contends that health care reform must be pitched primarily as an economic competitiveness issue, not a moral one. Stern also has indicated that the single-payer approach, for all its virtues, is a political nonstarter. At the other pole is the growing number of national unions, locals, labor councils, and rank-and-file members pledged to the single-payer solution. Somewhere in between is the AFL-CIO, the nation's largest labor federation, which in March 2007 endorsed the idea of "Medicare for All" but carefully avoided mentioning the "s" word, that is, single-payer.

From press release:
In spite of significant fiscal and political challenges, 16 governors and the mayor of Washington, D.C., proposed a total of $261 million in increases for pre-kindergarten programs, according to Pre-K Now, a Washington, D.C.-based education advocacy group, in its annual state-by-state analysis of leadership on early childhood education released today.

The report, "Leadership Matters: Governors' Pre-K Proposals Fiscal Year 2009," reveals that, collectively, these budget proposals would bring total state funding for pre-k to $5.2 billion--a 5.5% increase from last year--and would make pre-k available to nearly 60,000 more three and four year olds across the country. Among the governors recognized in the report for fighting to expand quality pre-k programs in the face of major hurdles are Gov. Phil Bredesen (D) of Tennessee and Bob Riley (R) of Alabama, both of whom joined Pre-K Now for today's release.

Full Report (PDF; 544 KB)

From news release:
In 1983, the national report, A Nation At Risk, delivered a wake up call for our education system. It described stark realities like a significant number of functionally illiterate high schoolers, plummeting student performance, and international competitors breathing down our necks. It was a warning, a reproach, and a call to arms.

Fast forward twenty-five years to 2008. What has changed?

In some ways, we haven't fully learned the lessons of A Nation at Risk, and continue to deal with the consequences. Today, half of all minority students fail to graduate from high school on time. But there's an upside. A Nation At Risk inspired some state-level pioneers to think about standards and accountability in education, and put them into practice. This, in turn, led to the landmark No Child Left Behind Act. Now, across the nation, we're finally measuring the progress of students of every race and income level, finally holding ourselves accountable for their performance, and finally producing and sharing data to determine what works.

Accurate, honest information is helping to show us the way forward, but it's also revealing disturbing realities--like grave inequities between students of different races and income levels. As a result, the accountability movement to raise student achievement has reached a tipping point: will we hide from tough problems or redouble our efforts to help every student achieve their potential?

Full Report (PDF; 941 KB)

The 1983 report (PDF)

From news release:
Office of Personnel Management (OPM)...announced the launch of an enhanced interagency telework website, www.telework.gov. The updated site features a series of user-friendly improvements designed to make telework information more accessible and understandable to Federal employees...and was developed in partnership with the General Services Administration (GSA), OPM's telework.gov partner. Users can read and download recent telework guidance and legislation, reports, and studies. A search database allows users to input telework-related questions, and if answers are not found onsite the questions can be routed to experts who will respond via email. The site offers telework guidance and direction to employees and managers, as well as telework coordinators...Additional features of the updated site include quick links to key pages, online telework training, and easy access to telework-related policies such as reasonable accommodation and emergency closure. Finally, the site displays a green color scheme throughout, chosen to reflect the environmentally friendly aspects of telework. Telework in the Federal Government has increased significantly since 2001, 110,000 employees currently telework according to OPM's latest report to Congress. The report also found that while overall telework numbers were down slightly from 2005, a majority of agencies increased telework over the previous year, and that 42% fully integrated telework into their emergency planning.