High-quality child care is a good investment

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The United States is sitting on a vast, untapped economic development tool that has received too little notice: our children.

Investing in children before they enter school pays dividends, and yet child care subsidies are at risk as Congress mulls questions about how to reduce the federal deficit. Before you tune this out as the same old "it's for the kids" chorus, consider:

--Children in high-quality programs are more likely to be employed -- and paying taxes -- when they reach adulthood.

--Parents who receive child care subsidies are less likely to need other forms of public assistance. A 2006 report by the Department of Health and Human Services noted that the subsidies are associated with the largest increase in employment for people formerly on welfare.

--Children who receive high-quality care, either at home or outside, are ready to succeed in school, showing a reduced need for special education programs and increased graduation rates.

--Bad child care is more likely to produce juvenile criminals. A Chicago study showed that at-risk children not enrolled in early care and education programs were 70 percent more likely to be charged with a violent crime by age 18.

This last point prompted more than 600 police chiefs, sheriffs and prosecutors -- calling themselves Fight Crime: Invest in Kids -- to write to Congress this spring, urging continued funding for Child Care Development and Block Grants. The grants are the federal government's primary child care assistance to states.

Despite a sizable budget -- $19 billion in federal and state spending in 2008 -- child care subsidies have never kept up with the need. Only a fraction of eligible families received any subsidy that year, according to the Urban Institute; most were stuck on long waiting lists.

In February, Republicans in the House proposed cutting the child care block grants by $39 million. That didn't happen, but the funding is still at risk. In the name of deficit reduction, Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's (R-Wis.) plan for 2012 would reduce spending to 2008 levels. Democrats say that would cause 170,000 families trying to find or keep jobs to lose child care.

To be sure, we must get federal spending under control. But it's fair to ask our leaders to responsibly weigh the value of programs they want to cut.

Child care costs are mind-boggling. A survey by the National Association of Child Care Resource & Referral Agencies found that, in every region of the United States, the average child care fees for an infant were higher than the average amount that families spend on food. In New York, infant care at a center averages $13,630 a year.

One culprit in underfunding child care is the culture war. Often, those who believe that a parent -- a mom -- should stay home and raise children oppose child-care subsidies. But given modern economic realities, parents will work. Seventy percent of mothers with young children are employed outside the home. And census officials are predicting a boom in the number of single mothers on Long Island, as figures are released this week.

Besides, 50 years of research has found that children of working parents don't turn out to be much different from those with stay-at-home parents, at least when it comes to academic achievement and behavior. That's according to an analysis published in January in the journal Psychological Bulletin, which examined 69 child care studies conducted between 1960 and March 2010.

It's the decent thing to do to help families get on their feet and stay there, not to mention to raise a generation of kids who are prepared for success. But if decency isn't persuasive, think of all the money we'll save on special ed, public assistance and juvenile incarceration.

First published in Newsday

Lobbyists hover over Wall Street rules changes

For those of us who wonder whether Washington can erect sufficient safeguards against a future global financial meltdown, the news this week is hopeful.

The Center for Responsive Politics, an organization that tracks spending by big lobbying groups, says that Wall Street and the financial industry spent more trying to influence Washington in the first three months of 2011 than during the same period last year.

Maybe that doesn't sound like a good sign, but where there's cash, there's agita. The $27 million shelled out this year by banks, credit unions, investment firms and their trade groups signals concern that the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 -- also known as Dodd-Frank -- will be strict.

Lobbying is up 2.7 percent, which is remarkable considering how much lobbying was going on last year, when the bill was in the heat of a Congressional debate. Lobbyists' focus has shifted to the regulatory agencies drafting the details -- expected to stretch to 5,000 pages by the time the law takes effect in July.

As the pressure mounts in the next few weeks, Americans should keep a careful watch over the process. This is an industry with a particularly strong influence -- and one that hasn't paid much of a price for the damage it's caused. The industry's intensified lobbying effort doesn't hint at a Wall Street that's chastened. Quite the opposite.

Michigan Democrat Sen. Carl Levin has just produced a report saying that Goldman Sachs executives may have misled Congress about the company's mortgage stock bets at the expense of the firm's clients. Yet the report has sparked little outcry -- save for that of hypercritic former Gov. Eliot Spitzer, now a CNN pundit, who said that Attorney General Eric Holder should resign if he does not pursue criminal charges against Goldman.

For most of Washington, though, it appears sometimes that "saving" the financial industry is more important than equal treatment under the law.

"We're going through Dodd-Frank literally line by line," said Rep. Michael Grimm (R-Staten Island), a freshman who campaigned on now-distant tea party promises to slash government spending and stop economic bailout efforts. "We don't want to be a burden on a sector that quite frankly is extremely important," he said.

Grimm is a member of the House Financial Services Committee, which is considering an industry-friendly bill that would delay implementation of rules on derivatives trading -- that wellspring of toxic assets that were so instrumental in the 2008 housing market crash.

Another bill would water down the structure of the nascent Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, replacing a single director with a five-person commission. The commission would include a maximum of three from each political party. Hello, gridlock.

The most pitched battle is over a cap on debit card swipe fees, a business that ballooned to $16.2 billion in 2009 as people have come to rely on plastic for everyday purchases. Banks and credit card companies charge retailers a fee every time someone uses a debit or prepaid card, and businesses pass those costs on to consumers through generally higher prices. All in all, it has a depressing effect on an already sluggish economy.

The average debit card transaction costs only about 4 cents to process, yet banks, MasterCard and Visa charge store owners about 44 cents per transaction. Regulators recommend a 12-cent maximum fee, which they believe is "reasonable and proportional" to the actual cost.

But reasonable and proportional may be alien concepts for people who are spending $9 million a month in campaign money, constituent visits, endorsement letters and media campaigns in legislators' home districts. Brazen -- now that's more like it.

First published in Newsday

Home-sharing's time returns

Pushed along by those twins of the Great Recession -- unemployment and foreclosure -- America may be moving back under the multigenerational roof.

At a recent reunion of high school friends, I talked to one who had returned to her mother's house, along with her brother and sister. The whole family was back together again, this time with grandchildren added to the mix. It was a disaster. The siblings were fighting as much as they had in high school.

Another friend's son was enlisting in the Army to avoid moving back into her home after graduation. The Census Bureau says that 54 million Americans were living in multigenerational families in 2010, up from 49 million two years earlier. That's the highest count since 1968.

Of course, it's nothing new for large extended families to live under one roof. In many parts of the world, it's the norm. In this country, Asians and Hispanics have higher rates of multigenerational living, perhaps reflecting greater cultural acceptance.

But for the most part, since the 1950s, the American middle class has assumed that one is up and out at 18. Each nuclear family, according to this standard, had its own home.

And that attitude can make moving back in together -- or "doubling up" in demographers' terms -- feel like a step backward. It can be a sign of financial desperation, a response to unemployment, lack of child care or health care, or affordable rents.

But there are many advantages that generations can offer one another: care-taking for the young or old, emotional support and the sharing of life lessons. Those benefits -- as well as the financial considerations -- are what led the Huntington-based Family Service League, a social services agency, to create its HomeShare program, which matches older adults with someone who could use their spare bedroom.

Artist Milton Colón, 47, heard about the program through Fountainhead Church in East Northport. He is sharing the Smithtown home of Meinhard and Aino Joks, who are 86 and 85. Colón does the laundry, cooking, bed-making and errands, allowing the Jokses to stay in their home even though their home health care benefits have run out.

In turn, the Jokses have given him shelter and stability. Colón's wife of 22 years died in 2008, of an accidental overdose, and he fell apart. He began living out of his car.

While she was alive, Colón had made a living painting portraits. He was as busy as he wanted to be -- before the recession drained his Brentwood business of customers.

The Jokses are from Estonia and Finland and tell him stories of their emigration after World War II. "I'm a World War II history buff," Colón says. "So, that's something we share. I love history. I could take it in all day."

In the evenings, he works at a basement desk on a comic strip that he's developing. It's about a proud Puerto Rican father named Flores who moves his family from Brooklyn to the suburbs -- "Flowers in Blue," Colón's own story. His new home with the Jokses not only tethers him back to family life, it gives him an artist's freedom from financial worries.

That's the facet of multigenerational living that is not often expressed. We all know about the tensions and bickering -- the fall from the ideal after having somehow slipped off the path to the single-family home. But there is sweetness, too.

So why not make the best of what, for some, has become the new American reality? With 8.8 percent unemployment and 2.36 million homes foreclosed by banks between 2007 and 2010, the middle class is struggling. Independent living may be an American value, but so is helping each other through hard times.

First published in Newsday

Shriver launched a Peace Corps that broadened Americans' lives

Although it's been more than two decades, I remember very clearly how nervous I was before stepping out onto the streets of Togo, West Africa, as a newly minted Peace Corps volunteer.

At dinner during our first night in the wet sub-Saharan country, we 40-some volunteers were dining on avocado halves when the lights went out. As our hosts worked to start the backup electrical generator, the sudden darkness jarred me into thinking how far out of my element I was. What if the Togolese were nothing like the people I had known back in my insular, white Massachusetts suburb? What if they were completely alien? I felt a little panicky.

But the lights came back on. I picked at my avocado, and the following day I began a journey - making many good Togolese friends and learning valuable lessons about the universality of human frustrations, dreams and endurance.

Sargent Shriver, the man whose leadership made that journey possible for me and more than 200,000 other Americans, died Tuesday at 95.

President John F. Kennedy launched the organization in 1961, as a way of introducing Americans to the rest of the world. He thought that our reputation abroad was "ugly" and arrogant. In his inaugural address, given 50 years ago today, Kennedy reminded us that we were in the historic position of being able to abolish all poverty or abolish all life.

"To those peoples in the huts and villages across the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required," Kennedy said. "If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich."

Shriver, a former Kennedy family employee married to the president's sister, Eunice, was named the Peace Corps' first director. The organization helped Americans grow from our insular 1961 world into the globally engaged nation we are today. The Peace Corps took us by the hand on that adventure. It provided a way to see the world for middle-class people - those who could afford to take a couple of years away from establishing their careers, but wouldn't necessarily be able to travel otherwise. It was an outlet for the tumult of the 1960s, growing quickly to 15,000 volunteers serving in more than 44 countries by 1966.

In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan first cut, then expanded the Peace Corps. The organization has been embraced by Democrats and Republicans alike, with George W. Bush and Barack Obama among its strongest supporters.

Shriver could have settled for Kennedy's original vision of sending some nice, young Americans abroad to charm the Third World. But he insisted on technical skills from the Peace Corps' early days. And he extracted a pledge from every volunteer to not only help host countries meet their needs for trained men and women, but to return to the United States to, in turn, bring the world to Americans.

Former Mali volunteer Anne Kopstein of Huntington takes photos to classrooms and community groups to talk about her experiences. Claudia Hart, who became a teacher in Connecticut, has devoted a corner of her home to Zaire, which her students visit. David Olson, another Togo volunteer, advocates on behalf of global health issues in Washington.

As Sargent Shriver departs for his next assignment, it's worth noting how many lives he touched by seeing the Peace Corps off to a sound beginning: generations of volunteers, their co-workers and friends around the world, and the people at home who are curious to hear our stories.

He made our world larger, just when the globe was shrinking.

Originally published in Newsday

Economy makes more kids homeless

Every year as the cold weather arrives, the U.S. Conference of Mayors conducts a survey of who's living in homeless shelters. This year, it uncovered a troubling statistic: a 9 percent increase in the number of families who are homeless.

These numbers have been increasing - the Department of Housing and Urban Development notes a 30 percent growth since 2007 - and are expected to bump up again next year.

Many of these families, remarkably, continue to function, even as the basic need for shelter is threatened or removed entirely. Wendell Chu, the school superintendent in East Islip, says that more students are showing up for class with their homes facing foreclosure. Many more qualify for free and reduced-price lunch - another measure of families in distress.

"This creates stress for these kids," he says. "It affects how kids come to school, their readiness to learn."

As the country continues to pump billions of dollars into homeless programs, food stamps and other safety-net services, the very people these programs are meant to help - mothers and children - continue to struggle. While the welfare overhaul of the late 1990s was intended to create a path from welfare to work, its effect in the current troubled economy may well be simply dumping people without support.

The mayors were asked to identify the three main causes of homelessness among households with children. The top responses were unemployment (76 percent), lack of affordable housing (72 percent), poverty (56 percent), domestic violence (24 percent) and low-paying jobs (20 percent).

To be sure, we are living through a historic economic catastrophe, and this period will leave a mark on our national psyche. More Americans were poor in 2009 - 43.6 million total - than at any time since the U.S. Census Bureau began estimating the poverty rate 50 years ago. Jobless rates are also very high.

Our social safety net simply has too many holes. While some dismiss the homeless - depicting them as either too crazy, drugged or afraid of the authorities to seek help - surely we're not ready to concede that there's an acceptable level of homelessness for families.

The Long Island Coalition for the Homeless is preparing for its annual count of homeless people later this month. Last year, the group found 1,046 families in Suffolk County and 446 in Nassau living in emergency shelters or transitional housing.

Long Island wasn't part of the Conference of Mayors survey, but the coalition's Julee King says the trends hold true here. In the past 18 to 24 months, the coalition has fielded more calls from families, particularly those being evicted because the homes they're renting are being repossessed.

It's extraordinary that this is happening on well-to-do Long Island. Fortunately, we have a network of charities, religious and secular, that provides temporary housing. But it would be better to prevent homelessness in the first place. The dislocation is disruptive, as the school superintendent points out, and it's inhumane.

Boston is experimenting with banning evictions. Many cities, including Chicago, are expanding consumer credit counseling. Of those surveyed in the mayors' study, 92 percent said housing vouchers to reduce rents would be an effective remedy for homelessness, and 71 percent advocate higher wages for low-end jobs. Given economic realities, that's unlikely to happen any time soon.

Still, these are important ideas. Nobody, least of all children, should have to cope with so much insecurity when it comes to something as basic as shelter.

Originally published in Newsday

Government programs have failed to stem foreclosures

Even as news reports offer hope of economic recovery, the figures on home foreclosures remain stuck in a recessionary winter. When the books close on 2010, banks will have repossessed a record 1.2 million U.S. homes, up 33 percent from 2009.

On Long Island, we ranked a dreadful second in a new measure published last month: Given the current rate of home sales, it would take 30.4 months to sell all the foreclosed and "distressed" properties here. Only Miami has a larger, slower-moving inventory.

The housing crisis is entering its fourth year, yet people are still losing their homes at a disastrous rate. In Nassau and Suffolk counties, 893 new foreclosure cases were opened in November alone. Despite a series of programs intended to prevent foreclosures, lenders and the federal government have failed.

A congressional panel overseeing the federal programs admitted as much earlier this month. The marquee initiative, the Home Affordable Modification Program, will end up preventing only 800,000 foreclosures, at a maximum, vastly fewer than the 3 million to 4 million it initially aimed to stop. Even more worrisome: This is the third foreclosure prevention effort launched by the federal government since 2007, and the fourth overall. The first was initiated by the mortgage writers themselves - an early washout.

The fundamental flaw in every case is relying on lenders to voluntarily reduce a borrower's monthly payments to affordable levels. One would think that keeping the mortgage checks coming would be in lenders' interests. By foreclosing on a home, they recover only a fraction of the value of the loan.

But apparently there are financial incentives working in the opposite direction. In our system of bundled, resold mortgages, the companies that service the loans can sometimes make more money by charging fees throughout the foreclosure process.

One way around this would be to make loan modifications mandatory. The House voted in 2009 to give bankruptcy court judges the power to reduce mortgages so that people could afford to stay in their homes. Regrettably, the Senate refused to pass this measure. It should be reintroduced.

The government's half-steps to date reflect an unwillingness to "reward" people who foolishly signed up for mortgages they couldn't afford. But many who are struggling have fallen on hard times for unforeseen reasons, often because of job loss. It's a Catch-22 that some people could relocate for new jobs - if only they could sell their homes in this terrible market.

To be sure, it would be better if the housing market recovered and the value of people's homes came back. Some believe the quickest route is to allow the foreclosures to proceed. But blaming homeowners ignores the culpability of lenders, who duped many buyers with teaser rates, balloon payments and outright lies about the loan terms - to say nothing of recent revelations that lenders couldn't produce paperwork to prove they hold the loans. Bankruptcy court judges should be given discretion on whether a lender acted in bad faith.

A new law taking effect Jan. 22 in New York will allow bankruptcy filers to retain up to $150,000 in home equity, or $300,000 for a couple, potentially allowing many to keep their homes. Time will tell if this will be adequate.

It's striking that during the 1930s, the most recent era when U.S. home prices fell so dramatically, President Franklin D. Roosevelt made not only a practical argument to save homes, but a moral plea: The "broad interests of the nation require that specific safeguards should be thrown around home ownership as a guarantee of social and economic stability."

It's time we made this commitment to stability too.

Originally published in Newsday

NY needs to cut special ed spending

Two years ago this month, the Suozzi Commission came out with a startling report. Charged with finding a way to lower property taxes, the group - formally named the New York State Commission on Property Tax Relief - turned sharply off course to detail the escalating cost of special education.

For more than a year, the commission looked for fundamental reasons why New York's property taxes are so high. It asked public school officials who, one after another, pointed to special education.

So, the commission assigned a task force to examine special ed. It found that the state has 204 "mandates" beyond federal rules that make our special education system the most expensive in the country. On average, New York schools spend $9,494 per pupil in regular classrooms, and a prodigious $23,898 for each special education student.

Our state is rightly proud of its generous and progressive history on education. But you have to wonder, as a new administration takes over in Albany next month with a $9-billion deficit chained to its ankle, whether it's time to take another look at the Suozzi Commission's findings. After all, the state Council of School Superintendents called them "the most thorough independent review of New York's special education policies in the more than 30 years since the current basic structure was put into place" - yet they've essentially been ignored.

One problem with special ed is that too many students qualify. Don't assume that these programs serve only those students diagnosed with a severe mental or physical challenge. In fact, more than half the students in special ed simply need extra help in reading or math, speech therapy or other support.

Schools receive extra resources for special ed students, so they have an incentive to label marginal students as disabled. But what if not all of them are really disabled? Not only would that be a waste of money, it would harm the truly disabled students by overburdening the resources meant to serve them.

Also, shifting non-disabled students into special education can stigmatize them and sidesteps problems, like failing schools, that should be addressed head-on.

Once kids are in special ed, schools must meet minimum requirements for them, like drafting an individualized education program every year. Students in speech therapy had to attend at least two sessions a week - no matter what their needs were - until the Board of Regents relaxed that rule last month.

Such regulations may sound trifling, until you consider there are 204 of them, on top of a tome of federal rules.

School officials are also required to hold legal hearings, at an average cost of $75,000, if a parent questions a student's placement. (Parents pay some of the cost.) In the 2007-08 school year, 6,157 hearings were requested. A case for one child on Long Island cost $300,000.

Parents can sue to have the school district pay for private school tuition - as much as $25,000 a year or more - and for bus service within 50 miles of a child's home. In theory, a Mineola student could qualify for door-to-door service to a school in Greenwich, Conn. - although it defies logic that a parent would want that.

Last month, New York's Regents did away with a few of the 204 mandates, but nothing that will cut costs. What's needed is a study of results: which strategies work best to move students on to college or the workforce. Schools should know what leads to success.

Parent advocates for students with disabilities correctly argue that early intervention - say, remedial reading in lower grades - prevents problems later on. And no one wants a child to struggle needlessly. But the spending gap is outrageous. It's time to find a middle ground.

Originally published in Newsday

Out-of-work plastic surgeons a hazard

I've read that elective plastic surgery has taken a big hit during this recession, but I didn't realize that the surgeons have resorted to trolling for work in their old specialties. The problem is, they may no longer be as current as they should be. I have to have a haywire gland (a parathyroid) removed from my neck. The hospital directed me to their ear, nose and throat surgeon. But even as he was giving me the surgeon's name, the medical director said I might want to get a second opinion -- and he offered the name of a second ENT surgeon. I thought, "Whoa, that's weird."

So, I checked out the doctors on New York State's physician website, and I found that the first doctor described his practice entirely in terms of facial plastic surgery. He didn't even mention ENT work. So, I asked if he did the minimally invasive type of surgery I was looking for. He told me he did not, and then started talking on and on about the different types of scars. Again, a red flag went up for me. This guy was all about the surface.

I made some more calls and discovered that the second ENT surgeon doesn't accept my insurance. So, I ended up finding a third surgeon, one who has devoted himself to this kind of operation, both as a student and now in his specialty practice. I'm not very happy with the hospital staff who, essentially, threw me to my own resources. I'm sure there are rules and professional courtesies involved about who gets a referral, but I can't see where this process has the patient's best interests at heart.

Two days later, the first ENT called me to schedule the surgery. I told him that I had chosen someone else who offered the newer technique. For one thing, it means the difference between going under general anaesthesia or having a local pain blocker. "It's all marketing!" he practically shouted into the phone. When I argued with him, he offered to repeat what he had just explained to me, "but this time very slowly." Charming.

I have to think there was karma at work here.

Flexible work: Twenty years of progress lost

In July, a Congressional committee, the Joint Economic Committee, heard from work-home experts about the disappearance of flexible work arrangements – a hazard of the economic recession. Cynthia Thomas Calvert, deputy director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California said callers to the center “unanimously expressed their needs for flexibility and feelings of near desperation at facing unemployment because of their inability to work a standard schedule.” Calvert went on to say that employers may be using the recession as an excuse to terminate family caregivers. Between January 2008 and July 2009, the center had heard from 45 women who were fired shortly before, during or shortly after their pregnancies. In many cases, supervisors had expressed doubt about their ability to combine work and family.

Thirty percent of working moms, whose companies have had layoffs in the past 12 months, are working longer hours, according to CareerBuilder’s annual Mother’s Day survey taken in 2009. Fourteen percent or working moms had taken on second jobs in the past year.

In good times, workers frequently seized the opportunity to use “flex time” and family leave, to telecommute and to take paid sick days. But the recession has brought with it a "silent fright" among workers, Joanne Brundage told the Washington Post in March. The executive director of a mothers’ networking group, Mothers & More, Brundage said the current mindset is to "work as many hours as you can. Make yourself indispensable. Don’t ever complain. Don’t ever ask for anything. I’m just horrified. We may as well just forget the last 20 years.”

Joblessness, despair and a way out

I just finished listening to a podcast of Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning." I picked it up because several people I interviewed for my stories on long-term unemployment told me they had read it -- often with a hint that it had helped them overcome despair. It's a very difficult book to read because it begins with the horrific tale of Frankl's three years in Nazi concentration camps. I've actually tried to read it twice before and put it down. The podcast turned out to be a good option for me because it kept me listening. I had several "aha" moments learning about Frankl's ideas. Human anxiety can often be traced back to difficulties in knowing what gives our lives meaning, he says, a theory he developed into a full school of psychiatry called logotherapy. Frankl describes three paths to meaning in life. One is through doing -- finding meaning in creativity and work. The second is through experiencing, either love or art or natural beauty. The third is by being tested through suffering -- unavoidable suffering -- and keeping hold of one's dignity and humanity.

The long-term unemployed people I spoke with were clearly referring to finding meaning through suffering. Frankl discusses the depressing effects of job loss in a couple of places. I got the sense that reading Frankl's book had kept some of the people I met from committing suicide.

I marvel that our society treats unemployment so lightly when it has this sort of consequence for the people who go through it. The business world has fully embraced layoffs over the last couple of decades. It seems like a tragic direction.

Looking the other way on job loss

It shocks me that the media has focused so little on joblessness in America. Having weathered it repeatedly with my husband, I know how emotionally difficult job loss can be. My newspaper ran a cartoon this week on the op-ed page that depicted a man who had lost everything in the recent market crash -- including his job and his wife. The implications of this are startling, but I think as a country we are in denial. Job loss is busting up marriages. On the road to that bust-up you'll find the potential for domestic violence, suicide, drugging and drinking to check out of reality. How does no one get this? No one but the people going through it, that is. I read the startling numbers month after month: 263,000 jobs lost in September, for example. The figures are staggering, and mind-numbing. What's worse is the duration: 35.6 percent of the unemployed have been out of work for 27 months or longer. It's not so hard to handle four or six months out of work. But more than two years? A person's self-worth really starts to erode.

I'm surprised that social conservatives -- those who champion families and marriage -- aren't more vocal about these issues.

Each week, as I listen to the big network talk shows, the topics are Afghanistan and health care, Afghanistan and health care. Enough already! The media is hyper-focused on these issues because they are apparently what is occupying President Obama and Congress. A lone exception last week was "Bill Moyers Journal," which interviewed Toledo Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur. She has gone so far as to charge the big banking interests with staging a coup d'etat in America. She claims they have taken over the government, and she urges people to squat in their own homes, rather than allow them to be taken in forecolsures.

So why should any American citizen be kicked out of their homes in this cold weather? In Ohio it is going to be 10 or 20 below zero. Don't leave your home. Because you know what? When those companies say they have your mortgage, unless you have a lawyer that can put his or her finger on that mortgage, you don't have that mortgage, and you are going to find they can't find the paper up there on Wall Street. So I say to the American people, you be squatters in your own homes. Don't you leave. In Ohio and Michigan and Indiana and Illinois and all these other places our people are being treated like chattel, and this Congress is stymied.

Isn't that just great? I wish I could vote for this woman.

The lure of money for nothing

My dad lost some of his retirement money in the past year's market crash -- which I hope is now behind us, but I'm as much in the dark as anyone. I was silently critical of him, at first, when he told me about his situation. He had left money in stocks -- probably too much for his age (77) and what the financial advisers call his tolerance for risk. After his loss, he moved more money into bonds. He kept some in stocks to try to capture the "upside" -- more investment jargon -- as the economy recovers. But I would soon discover more sympathy for my dad's investment strategy.

Our college savings eroded last year too, even though it was in a slow-growing fund. I was looking at the numbers online last week and wondering why we seemed to have the worst of both worlds: neither the security of bond investments, nor the growth of stocks. I should say here that we have two of those 529 plans -- one for each daughter -- which are run (in most cases, I think) by the chief financial officers of the states where they're available. So, I hadn't had much involvement with choosing where the money was invested, beyond typing in my daughters' expected dates of graduation, 2015 and 2017, and then crossing my fingers and hoping the money will be there. But as I was tooling around on the 529 site, I looked at the range of investment options. One aggressive fund is paying much better than the two I had. So, I moved the money. I can't even believe I'm admitting this -- I am so not a gambler, especially with precious dollars we're setting aside for our kids' future. I was nervous, but not so nervous that it stopped me. I kept thinking about how we're just paying our bills every month, just kind of matching the income and out-go. We're making sacrifices here and there -- cutting down on dinners out and music lessons in the summer. Why should I let this investment fund rob us of what amount we're able to set aside? As I see it, my savings were far worse off than if I had tucked them into a shoebox and stuck it in the back of the closet.

I wanted to risk a little reward.

So far, the new investment is working. I haven't quite recovered our losses, but almost. I'm checking the numbers daily, and it's kind of fun to feel that I've made a good decision, and to look forward to a better total tomorrow. It's addictive. You might say I'm hooked.

So, now I'm telling myself that I'll leave the money in the aggressive fund just until I cover our losses. I guess I'm betting that the world economy has bottomed out.

Anxious all the time

This economy is making me anxious all the time. It doesn't seem as though it should -- my husband and I are two of the lucky ones who have jobs, and our employers seem to be doing OK. No, it's not really my personal situation that has me anxious. It seems like something in the air. First of all, the sheer number of people laid off is astounding -- 663,000 people lost jobs in March alone, and 3.3 million since October. Those are U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers, so they're probably an under-count. The BLS tends to miss informal work arrangements, people who are discouraged and have stopped looking for work, those who would work more hours if they could, and people who used to have higher-paying jobs.

Every time I think of that number -- 663,000 -- I try to picture all of those people out of work. I really can't. First I come up with a vague image of a tractor rusting in a Midwestern field. Then I picture empty Long Island Rail Road seats as Wall Streeters stay home instead of commuting into NYC. And then I think of how hard it is to be home when you want to work, how much tension it creates.

The other cause of my anxiety is that I feel poorer because of what has happened to my retirement and college savings. We are still shoveling money into these funds, and I have no idea whether that's a foolish thing or not. One theory is that we are "buying low" right now. But is my 401(k) administrator really purchasing stocks? The last time I looked, much of the money had been shifted into bonds. Doesn't this mean that I have "locked in my losses?" I know that I should be more diligent, and maybe take over control of this account myself. But I really don't have any expertise in that. I just signed up to be a journalist in this life. Now, I'm supposed to be picking stocks? Or what? No retirement for me! It's overwhelming.

I can't even get into the college savings stuff. Each of my daughters' accounts has lost about $3,000. What happened to the "magic of compound interest" theory that I was raised on? It's not there any more! There is no more magic. I keep wondering how much debt I will be saddling my children with -- and here's the really crazy part. They are both still in grade school.

Like I said, this anxiety thing is insidious.

Working more: the legacy of layoffs

I apologize for being absent. The truth is that I am writing another blog, one that is work-related. And the reason is that the blogger before me was laid off. So, now I'm doing my old job plus hers. Those of us who remain at work after the "downsizing" often work much harder. I'm not working so many more hours -- maybe a few more -- so much as that my mental capacity is drained for anything outside of work. I spend several hours a day burning the battery on high wattage. And when I come home, there's very little left. I'm putting most of what's left toward making sure my kids are on track -- school papers signed, tests prepared for, etc. Seeing them happy gives me a lot of pleasure.

If the women of the 19th century and earlier were often too burdened with housework and field work to write, maybe we women of the 21st century are the same, only bound by a different sort of work. I had always dreamed of hours and energy enough to write something really good. Now I feel that this will happen only if/when I retire. And by then, I might not be up to it. Who knows?

I'm sorry to be self-pitying. These thoughts make me very sad.

Doubting the breadwinner

Today, I read this very honest essay from a woman whose live-in boyfriend has been laid off. He's pursuing his "big dreams" and living on his severance -- while she's wondering if he's ever going to bring in a paycheck again. She's trying not to be "ugly," while at the same time revisiting her hopes for a house and kids some day. The writer, Esther Martinez, concludes:

I hope our relationship makes it through this recession. I wonder how many won't. My boyfriend's layoff has stirred up scary notions about love - that it really might be conditional, and that the conditions are not always pretty.

My first reaction was admiration for Ms. Martinez for her courage in exposing her feelings like this. I remember being so ashamed about how much of my regard for my husband was tied to his bread-winning. Of course, we weren't just dreaming about kids when his joblessness started, we had a 3-year-old and an 18-month-old, as well as a mortgage. So, perhaps I can be forgiven for my anxiety over how we were going to hold this house of cards together. I was freelancing at the time, and shortly went back to full-time work. But my salary didn't come close to covering our expenses.

My second reaction to the Martinez essay was how hard it is to convey these fears to people who have not been through it. I will sometimes tell people that many "social ills" can arise because of a layoff. But that's a euphemistic mask I'm placing over what we went through. Ms. Martinez says it better. By social ills, I mean to hint at domestic violence, divorce, substance abuse, depression, suicide, crime. Those things seemed a lot more possible during the layoffs. A middle-class, Catholic, law-abider, I had never expected the wings of those problems to brush me.

I wasn't the only one who assumed my husband's status as a spouse was diminished, though. I told one man that Dan had just been laid off for a second time, and this man seemed to view it as a come-on, and as an invitation to move in and pursue me. I guess he thought that if my husband wasn't fulfilling his bread-winner duties that we would soon be divorced. Those assumptions run deep in American culture.

I consume, therefore I am

It shocks me how the imperative to consume is worming its way into our intellectual life in America. When I first observed it, I laughed and thought it was passing. I suppose that's how every insidious idea begins. As I watch the discussion now about how to "stimulate" America into better economic health -- a defibrillator metaphor, it seems -- many of our smartest commentators seem to assume that what will lead to long-term health is Americans spending our very last dime. Here's the New York Times' editorial board today, writing about President-elect Barack Obama's economic agenda:

That argument starts with the correct premise that a stalled economy needs all the juice it can get, hence the need for the roughly $800 billion recovery package to spur consumption and create jobs, taking shape in Congress and championed by Mr. Obama.

The need to "spur consumption" is so assumed by these writers that it doesn't even bear explaining. The American economy runs on consumption, I guess, like America runs on Dunkin'. Nobody is questioning the premise that we need to spend in order to maintain the health of our economy.

And here is the New Yorker in "Talk of The Town" this past week, written by Adam Gopnik, with a similarly embedded value that consumption is good:

Consumers have stopped consuming, the papers say, for the same reason that the child has decided to cry: I’m really damaged, we want the world to know; attention must be paid.

As though we, as Americans, don't have a right to be royally pissed off that our retirement and college savings have declined precipitously along with the hogwash that is the investment banking business-as-usual -- a high-risk gambit with the Big Hamptons Home in sight.

So, we American consumers want to save a little money now, as a hedge toward the future, and Mr. Gopnik believes that we are crying babies. If I'm reading Mr. Gopnik's essay correctly, he is attempting to convey to us uninitiated masses that economics is an emotional venture, as well as a social science. It's lovely of him to explain this to us, and I do applaud it as a student of economics myself, who has understood this concept all along. But then, would it not also make sense that we consumers here in America would react to tough economic times, emotionally, by socking a little something under the mattress? This could be expected. And it could be accommodated in econometric models. Disatrous times = people getting frightened and stashing money away. Don't begin to tell me that this is irrational, or worse, unpatriotic.

Which leads us, of course, to the very worst of the worst pleas for Americans to act as consumers, as opposed to something larger. It was the call by President George W. Bush for us to "spend money" as a way to respond to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. We women know what it is to be objectified -- to be wanted for our bodies or our body parts. Imagine the leader of the Free World calling on Americans to respond to the murder of nearly 3,000 of our fellow citizens by advising a shopping trip to K-Mart. Lost is any sense of what we are as humans.

I admit that this Sept. 11 complaint is a long-ago irritation by now. I assumed that, in the interim, it had been identified and observed as completely insane; but now I see that the New York Times and the New Yorker are echoing Mr. Bush's views that we are consumers first, consumers uber alles. Second, maybe we will have to send our sons and daughters to be killed in Iraq.

It's insanity, in the George Orwell "1984" sense, to believe that "consumption" can make us what we need to be. I can get behind railroads buying American steel. But I can't think that I have to have a dazzling new blouse at work every week for our economy to remain vibrant. It's not that I believe that our economy is not organized to need continuous injections of consumer dollars. It may be. It's that I think that it's wrong to set us on a treadmill where everything we own must be new or "the latest" for us to survive as a nation.

When I lived in Togo, in West Africa, people owned so much less. They had one or two sets of clothes. And yet they knew how to find happiness, perhaps in a way that we have forgotten here. Their happiness was based on family and community. Granted, it's an easier task to be happy when the goal is simply survival, not superlative success, as it has become in the U.S., and especially in New York.

I wish that we could use this economic crisis to re-evaluate what's right in our lives, and what we hope to live for. That would be a far better lesson, I think, than getting a hybrid Hyundai or an Ann Taylor jacket on the cheap. A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

Living with less

I used to wonder how the people around me could afford the lifestyles they were living -- two new cars in the drive, often Lexis or BMW or Mercedes brand. Kids wearing designer clothes and cashing out with the newest X-Box or Wii systems each holiday. Disney World trips, European vacations. I decided that I just had to ignore it and live my life my way. I made up a fantasy in which everyone else was overextended on car leases and home equity lines of credit with huge penalties for early repayment. And who knows? Maybe the fantasy was true. I had to laugh when gas prices soared and it looked for a while as though flashy SUVs would be impossible to re-sell. My 11-year-old minivan might not impress anyone at the village intersection, but it sure got better gas mileage.

The world has changed since those heady luxury days -- which were the norm just a year ago, really, although the warning signs were upon us by then. I don't believe that we are now in a cyclical downturn. It's more permanent. I don't think we'll ever forget the pain from the risky mortgages that has essentially gutted our financial system in these past few months. We won't return to the long extensions of credit, not in our lifetimes, anyway. This weekend, writing for the New York Times, Peter S. Goodman has uttered the unthinkable for people who are holding out for the return of the good times. He quotes Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital, a Connecticut-based trading house.

Our standard of living must decline to reflect years of reckless consumption and the disintegration of our industrial base. Only by swallowing this tough medicine now will our sick economy ever recover.

Reckless consumption, as Schiff points out, is only half the problem. For the other half, we need to return to my good friend Larry Summers, who is now director of President-elect Barack Obama's National Economic Council. Summers likes to point out that globalization lifts the standard of living for people in poor but industrializing countries. He also says that means that rich countries' living standards will fall. This frankness is part of what makes Larry Summers so unpopular -- but of course, he is right. If he would only temper his doomsaying for the Pittsburgh steelworker a little, he might be heard by more people instead of infuriating them.

In any case. Off the Summers soapbox. Our standard of living has been falling for decades, we have just been in denial about it. We have been able to deny it because...

1. It has been happening to specific industries -- manufacturing, mostly -- of which many of us are not members. 2. Spouses have entered the workforce since the 1970s, so the drop in the living standard doesn't seem so severe. Household income has been maintained, more or less. 3. We've been living on credit, like home equity loans, and higher home values to finance retirements and college expenses.

Now the pain is spreading and eroding 1 and 2. The loss of one job in most households makes the lifestyle unsustainable. And the bubble has burst for No. 3. I can't see any way out but to embrace a new way of life.

Spared the axe

Dan's company let go more than 5,000 people worldwide yesterday. He was spared. I can't say for sure that this is the first time he's kept his job when others have lost theirs. But in the past when a big layoff has been announced, he has been one of the ones let go. So, surviving is a whole new experience for us.

One thing that's different is that several people told him, before yesterday's big announcement, that he was safe. That must be how it works on the non-job-loser side.

Another thing is that he's spent a lot of time puzzling about the people who were let go. A "very nice" woman who had worked there for 20 years. A young woman who was very sharp and was running his counterpart division in another country. It probably really never makes sense except to the bean-counters on the inside.

I suggested that maybe the 20-year veteran was making a high salary, so it saved the company a lot of money to cut her. But Dan says that's not right, because her rank was still pretty low. She was called out of a meeting he was in, then came back teary, grabbed her things and left the room. She could have been any of us.

Job-seekers outnumber jobs, 3 to 1

More bad news this week for people looking for work: The number of job-seekers outnumbers the jobs available by 3 to 1. This is according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute, left-leaning Washington think tank. Don't you wonder where they get the number of jobs available? The figure comes from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey.

JOLTS, the acronym for the department that generates this report, says that it counts job openings once a month, on the last business day of the month. The company must be actively recruiting outside candidates, by advertising or interviewing. But the jobs themselves could be part-time, seasonal or short-term. I think that would tend to undercount the types of jobs that most people need -- so 3 to 1 might actually be a very optimistic number. Scary. Also, it appears that JOLTS collects data from "selected establishments" only. There's no further explanation on the website about how JOLTS chooses which employers to survey, or whether they're reaching out to a small sample and then multiplying to get national numbers. I can't imagine that every employer responds to JOLTS every month. Multiplying a small sample multiplies your rate of error. That doesn't fill me with confidence.

I'll send them an e-mail inquiry and report back.

I offer all of this in case you were wondering whether I'm a data geek. The answer is affirmative.

Layoffs announced for both houses

Both my company and Dan's announced Friday they would be shedding jobs by the end of the year. I understand the fourth-quarter timing, but honestly, it adds so much grim to the holidays. Today, my 6th-grader's school had the nerve to send a note asking which of the kids will be taking advantage of a 4-day, $270 trip in February to the Catskills. It looks like a great trip, teaching kids about environmental issues. The school is getting anxious and wants everyone to commit NOW. Some of us apparently have the bad manners to hold off until we know whether we'll still be pulling down a paycheck.

I wrote on the form that Isabelle will be joining in "unless we lose our jobs first." Their school jobs are safe, and their lack of awareness about the rest of the world galls me.

Yes, I get that their little trip might be jeopardized if not enough kids show up. But do they get that we're fighting to hang on to our homes and retirement plans and college savings? Not likely.