public sector

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Student Loans and Class Mobility

Yesterday the Senate passed the bill renewing the Stafford Student Loan Program at 3.4%.  Now the House of Representatives has to pass the same bill before July 1. So close and yet so far.

Mitt Romney has taken a great interest in employing college graduates, but shows less interest in financing their education. He will not support extending the low interest rates on student loans, but, if students somehow make it through college without that support, he will turn the economy around and find them jobs.

This sums up the the supply-side approach to class mobility. Find a way to be qualified for a competitive job, and we’ll put you to work. If you do not finish college or if you have child care issues or if you need medical care or if you want to work in the public service sector, don’t bother us.  We have productive jobs for competitive applicants, and the rest of you should resign yourselves to poverty.

The students I teach at a public university collectively have all these qualifiers that prevent them from getting jobs. They are living on part time work and student loans. They are depending on child care within their families so they can attend classes. If that child care falls through, they can’t come to class. They are depending on their parents’ health care or they don’t go to the infirmary when they are sick. I ask for medical documentation of their absence from class, but they didn’t see a doctor because they couldn’t afford to.

And finally, they want to be teachers. In spite of the dispiriting narrative in the media about schools, they want to teach, many of them in urban schools. Some of my best students are still waiting for their first permanent teaching job.

But these are public sector jobs, and they are not on the “to-do” list of the supply-slide economists.  They do not respect these jobs, because they do not produce anything tangible. They produce motivated students, public safety, and general health and well being, but nothing to stimulate the economy. They only produce “quality of life,” and who can price and sell that?

The mobile middle class depends on the funding that the conservative policy-makers have denied them.  They are not getting through college or finding adequate day care or minimal medical care without the aid that is being systematically cut from the federal budget. These are foolish economies. Penny-wise and pound foolish.

There are 7.4 million students depending on Stafford loans, who may have fifteen million advocates that want them to graduate.  That is an enormous voting block, assuming each person votes.  If their votes were counted in November, there would be sweeping changes throughout the federal government, changes that would make the 2010 Tea Party coup look like a tea party.

The revolution begins with voter registation. Some students will need absentee ballots and picture identification to vote. July 2 is a good time to start.

Then find out who stands for the upwardly mobile college student. Who is eliminating the life support systems that allow a first-generation college student to move out of poverty or stagnation.

Then inform your friends, your family about who stands for your interests and who is just blustering about a better economy.  Promises are cheap. Action is proof of whose interests are being served.

Then vote with a vengeance and determination. There is no need to give in to the conservative undertow and be swept out to sea. Swim above the rolling jobs rhetoric. Send the word that students, especially the mobile middle class students, are a force to be reckoned with.

 

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The Stigma of Public Service

It was refreshing to read the unvarnished differences between our polarized parties in the columns of David Brooks and Paul Krugman today (New York Times, June 15, 2012).  The rhetoric of the campaign has bombarded us with accusations about spending, deficits, loopholes and tax cuts. One party is maligned as the “spend and tax” party, while the other is labeled the “cut and reduce benefits” party, as if one was the profligate mother and the other the austere father of the nation. Excuse the gender stereotypes, but we are talking about caricatures here, not reality.

In fact, each party has it hands open to its own constituency and closed to those it considers over-compensated.  The question of the next election is who should be satisfied?

David Brooks characterizes our current economy as an obsolete “welfare state,” because government is spending more and more on services, such as health, retirement, education and protection, rather than “productivity.”

 . . . the current model shifts resources away from the innovative sectors of the economy and into the bloated state-supported ones, like health care and education.

Brooks’ assumption is that our society is energized by business and “innovation,” and the resources that we put into public services deny this productive sector its vitality.

The welfare state favors security over risk, comfort over effort, stability over innovation. Money that could go to schools and innovation must now go to pensions and health care.

Oddly he refers to education in one paragraph as “bloated and state-supported,” but in the next paragraph as a partner to “innovation.”  Perhaps he really favors education, but not so much public education.  So his distinction between the “bloated state-supported” institutions and the “innovative” enterprises that drive the economy is really one of public vs. private.  Public sector = wasteful; private sector= productive.

He has a point. After all, what useful products come from the public sector? Alert minds, safe neighborhoods, disaster prevention, disease prevention and healing. None of these make the Dow-Jones’ heart skip a beat.  They do nothing but improve our quality of life. They produce nothing but social welfare. “Welfare” is defined as one of the goals of government in the Preamble to the Constitution, which states, among other purposes, “to promote General Welfare.”  But there is nothing productive about this goal; it merely improves our lives.

As Paul Krugman points out, the public sector does not figure in Governor Romney’s plan for America. In an outburst he later qualified, Romney criticized President Obama’s interest in restoring jobs to the public sector:

He says we need more firemen, policemen, more teachers. . . . It is time for us to cut back on government and help the American people.

Krugman points out that in Romney’s campaign “government” is conflated with public sector jobs, so that waste is associated with the service professions. “Conservatives love to pretend that there are vast armies of government bureaucrats doing who knows what; a majority of government workers are employed in either education (teachers) or public protection (police officers or fire fighters). ”  So if you analyze the jobs that fall under the “public sector,” they are the services that sustain and improve our way of life. Unfortunately these services don’t “produce” anything, so they are demeaned by Governor Romney and David Brooks.

However, Krugman goes on to argue, the public sector does create jobs. Public sector jobs are down 1.4 million, says Krugman, “if it had grown as fast as it did under President George W. Bush.” These jobs alone would have lowered unemployment to 7.3 per cent, if they had not been severely cut by federal, state and local governments.

Public sector jobs are never part of the Republican stimulus equation because the party does not respect the service professions.  Romney’s gaffe about not needing “firemen, policemen and teachers” was no gaffe at all, but the dark subtext of his campaign to reduce government.  The irony of the right wing attack on public services is that while reducing the employees that provide them, it complains indignantly about falling test scores, rising crime rates, and exploding health costs.

Even more ironic is that politicians who complain about the public sector will soon be joining it, if they are elected.  Once in office they discover they can’t accomplish much, because of depleted funding, and suddenly they become the enemy for wanting to raise revenue or decrease the benefits of Social Security or Medicare.

Citizens who work in public schools, public safety, public health, and public administration are not the problem: most of them are gifted and self-sacrificing professionals who work hard for moderate compensation.  Yes, their health and pension benefits have to be recalibrated to balance local budgets, but so have private employees in the auto industry and countless others.  Who has not made contractual compromises to pay for expensive health insurance in the last five years?

Those who serve the public should not be cowed or debased by the ugly subtext of Governor Romney and the right wing.  There is honor in public service and a social vitality that is not measured in profit and productivity.  “General welfare” is a privilege insured by the U.S. Constitution, and those that work for it are valuable citizens, as much as those that innovate and spawn industries.