Afternoon read: Head Start and the sequester
OK. We all get it. The sequester is a big deal. Not surprisingly, whether it’s an unmitigated mess or a “tough love” measure in a much-needed move toward austerity seems to depend largely on your views on the ideal size of government.
I do believe, though, that it’s safe to say no one wants to be standing in the middle of the road when the sequestration 18-wheeler comes hurtling down it.
But now the rubber from that 18-wheeler is on the road, and unfortunately, that’s where many organizations are finding themselves. Earlier this week, I blogged about how Fort Drum would be impacted by the sequester (Joanna Richards also looked at this question in a late-February report) and, before it kicked in on March 1, we saw predictions of how it would impact New York state.
One program that’s standing right smack on the yellow line is Head Start. The Watertown Daily Times reports today that Head Start in Northern New York stands to loose more then $300,000 under sequestration. While local agencies don’t know the details yet, it seems programs will be cut by five percent, and they’re trying to figure out just how to deal with that.
There has been an awful lot of discussion lately about Head Start, which I had thought, until recently, to be a fairly non-controversial program. As a reminder, its mission (this from the paper) is to “promote…school readiness of children from birth to age 5, from low-income families.” In other words, it helps kids be ready for school when it’s time for them to go to school, giving them a “head start”, if you will.
Marie Ambrose, the director of Head Start in St. Lawrence County, said these cuts were exceptionally deep: “I’ve been with the agency for 27 years, and I don’t remember a cut like this…It’s our hope we will not have to reduce enrollment or staffing, but that’ll be very difficult to do.”
Pish pish.
Obama is cutting where it hurts the most and makes the biggest news.
Ask the elementary kids who won’t be going to tour the White House.
The sad part is, Marie Ambrose, and most of the headstarters will probably still vote for Democrats.
Just use 300K that we were planning on spending on new Forest Preserve land that we don’t need to make sure that head start isn’t impacted. In fact take a million from this one and give it all to head start. These decisions are not that complicated if you ask me. They can’t find 300K or a million bucks in this almost 50 million dollars? Weird priorities for sure.
http://www.governor.ny.gov/press/080512adirondackfinchpruynland
They don’t have to do this, and they will not, but they should at least stop whiling about it and saying that there is nothing that can be done to avoid the oncoming truck.
Marie Ambrose will be right to vote for Democrats because it was the refusal of the Republicans to raise the debt ceiling and/or agree to Obama’s $1.1 trillion in cuts that led to the sequester.
http://money.cnn.com/2011/02/14/news/economy/obama_budget/index.htm
JDM – The sequester cuts are across the board, no one gets to choose what to cut. That is why they are stupid. They are not strategic just dumb.
“Marie Ambrose will be right to vote for Democrats because it was the refusal of the Republicans to raise the debt ceiling and/or agree to Obama’s $1.1 trillion in cuts that led to the sequester.”
The blame game is pointless. It is the governments fault. They are a lost cause. I am glad to see the markets are paying less attention.
We need Head Start I hope they can find a way to absorb some cuts, they have in the past been immune from going through what agencies funded by NYS have been dealing with for the past 5 years.
Hopefully they can come up with other sources of revenue.
No Paul it isn’t “the governments” fault. There are lots of people who work for the government every day who work hard and get their work done. It is very clear that there is a group of people who are supposed to represent the interests of the governed who have refused to cooperate when they can’t get their way. The phrase ‘the Party of No” didn’t come out of thin air.
I thought the Republican Party was dead. How did they force Obama to sign the Sequester into law?
marcusaurelius “no one gets to choose what to cut”.
Not according to the WSJ.
Obama has considerable latitude.
Obviously, if the White House is shut down and the capital is kept open.
Bad move, Mr. President.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323884304578328211144987052.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_AboveLEFTTop
Sometimes I feel so deprived that I never had Head Start. I never even had kindergarden. My first day of school was with a bunch of kids and I knew none of them. Oh woe is me. I couldn’t read until, until I was into Dick and Jane. But then, my mother was at home all the time with my siblings…..
My nephew was reading before he was in pre-school and his favorite game was adult monopoly. But then, one or the other of his parents spent time with him doing things every day…..
The Democrats blame the Republican; the Republicans blame the Democrats; the People blame “The Government”.
Who sent “The Government” – this collection of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents – to Washington, Albany, or any other capital, to govern? The People! More than 90% of incumbents are re-elected by The People. It is time we heed the words of Albert Einstein who said “Insanity is the process of repeating the same actions and expecting different results”. The People need to take responsibility for The Government and stop returning incompetent, selfish politicians, who are solely promoting their own interests, and the interests of their particular Party back to the halls of leadership. The People need to begin choose only those who demonstrate the will and the ability to serve The People.
All this noise about cuts, but not a single large scale program cut at the Pentagon. We’ve got more ships, planes, and missiles than the next 10 largest military nations, but no schools for our kids. We’ll fight ten trillion dollar wars in the Mid-East, but we won’t spend what’s needed to build wind, solar, and hydro here.
Why are endlessly willing to pay for a soldier with a weapon, but not a worker with a tool?
I think the tide may be turning on that, I hope so.
I believe in a strong defense, but I don’t believe in a bloated wasteful Defense budget that seems to be dis-attached from reality. I mean why IS our Defense establishment SO much more expensive than other countries?
I think the issue is not necessarily the military itself, but our concept of what we are called to do in the world. If we really do want to maintain a world wide empire which is what we have right now it will indeed be expensive. But we have to realize that we are giving up a lot to maintain this empire, we are losing ground competitively to other countries who are free-riding of the security services they get from our military. Germany knows they don’t really have to worry about Russia, they know that we will defend them, the same goes for the rest of continental Europe. Consider that they could not even stop a genocide a couple of hundred miles from their own borders, that our air force effectively had to bomb the serbs into submission (along with the crazy Croats), but how pathetic is that? Its time we demanded that these countries step up to their own defense needs. Of course we don’t say that we actively encourage them to rely on us, it is a VERY strong lobby.
It would be interesting to know how many of the big military contractors fall in the 1% bracket that we saw on that graph a couple days ago. Are these, who pay for the “very strong lobby”, also the ones who live in unimaginable comfort, and hide their money offshore? I’m betting that their kids don’t get shot up in foreign lands either.
Jeff says: “my mother was at home all the time with my siblings…..My nephew was reading before he was in pre-school and his favorite game was adult monopoly. But then, one or the other of his parents spent time with him doing things every day…..”
Hey me too. That was back in the day when the earnings of one parent could support a family 1940’s, 50’s 60’s and 70’s; then Herr Regan became POTUS in the 80’s and Republican/conservatives guided him to the vaunted “trickle down” economics boondoggle ; which stopped the socialist redistribution of ill gotten gains from the obscenely wealthy via roughly 70% taxes on incomes over $500,000 in 1980 down to 28% for incomes over $57,000 and of course to make up for decrease in the high roller taxes he started taxing the lowest income earners more. The upshot of all these tax reform shenanigans is that single worker families became as rare as hens teeth in 90% of families but flourished in the upper 10% of income families; ultimately culminating in the economic collapse of 2007/8, hell-of-a-deal.
Actually my brother and I never went to preschool or kindergarten but we did learn to read at our fathers knee, before we started 1st grade, when he was working in the Baltimore shipyards 1945-47; was not much else for him to do after work back then.
” It is very clear that there is a group of people who are supposed to represent the interests of the governed who have refused to cooperate when they can’t get their way”
Good point. You have made it better than me. That group is the folks on the hill and in the white house.
Pragmatist: A-bloody-men. That is the reason I quit the Democrats and became a Green. People complain government is dysfunctional or corrupt or whatever negative adjective they prefer. Democrats and Republicans have run the government almost exclusively for 150 years, yet those two parties are elected to far more than 99% of elected offices in this country. The overwhelming majority of voters won’t even CONSIDER — not vote for but consider — a candidate from outside the two parties those same voters whine incessantly about. They think that they will somehow magically get change by voting for the same old, same old. I don’t know for certain if Greens will be the answer. I do know for absolute certain that Democrats and Republicans are not. Vote Green. Vote Libertarian. Vote independent. But don’t whine about “the system” and then keep perpetuating it.
Ken, I think you’ve misdirected where the wage decline came from. We have substantially more workers in the labor pool since WWII. When there are more workers than jobs management can lower wages. College grant funding has (in my opinion) subsidized colleges and bloated tuition. The tuition where I went to school, a land grant college, is substantially higher than the cost or living or any other index. Yet they’ve built a hotel on campus, a convention center, retirement housing and an arena to name a few efforts.
If trickle down didn’t work, we wouldn’t be reading so much about the empact of the sequester.
If Regan’s impact on the economy was so detrimental, how was it possible to make so much change in Clinton’s years when Clinton said “I think maybe I raised your taxes too much.”
Obama just had to cancel the White House tours for the elementary school kids.
He had to.
Automatic cuts, you know.
Mrs. Obama is not experiencing such difficulties, however.
She is having Adele and Beyonce sing for her 50th birthday party.
Hugo Chavez died with $2 billion of Venezuela’s money.
Low information voters all over the place.
Jeff says: “If trickle down didn’t work, we wouldn’t be reading so much about the empact of the sequester.”
Trickle down economics worked fabulously if you were/are in the top 1-5-10% of the wealth pile in the US; as it enable those folks to garner a head lock an even more inordinate quantity of the wealth than they had before Reagan became POTUS. That it did not work so well for the rest of the citizens is evident from the dearth of single earner families currently able to spend quality time teaching their children to read at home. Additionally the massive quantity of equities loss in their homes, retirements and bank accounts these same lower echelon folks experienced as a result of the greatest economic downturn since the great depression; whilst those in the rarefied nosebleed heights, of the obscenely wealthy not only had their excessive wealth protected at the expense of the lower income folks but they have been increasing their ill gotten shares at even greater rates than before the collapse. I think the sad state of the economy in the US decisively points to the failure of “trickle down economics”, unless of course you are a Republican/conservative.
Initially I thought your use of the word “empact” was a typo until I found this web site “Welcome to EMPACT-Suicide Prevention Center”, perhaps it is apropos.
This was a story about Head Start and the Sequester, right?
Well it was a typo but that is an interesting aside. The way I see is it is, as in the case of this President’s denigration of business conferences to Las Vegas, or the use of corporate jets, if the wealthy don’t spend it those who provide the products or services can’t earn it. Somebody builds and services and flies the private jets. The people cleaning the rooms and doing the conference service can’t work as much when conferences don’t happen.
The current state of the economy came about by in part by government policy, voiced in part by our governor as HUD secretary to get more people into houses by reducing mortgage barriers and Fed managers at that time encouraging loans with no downpayment. Additionally the uncertainty of policy delays over whether the Bush tax reductions would stay or go, and market pull back over Greece and Spain’s economic issues stalled recovery. The black hole which is the health care bill and its inexplicit regulations which have yet to be completed have not helped. So in the past 3 years it is uncertainty that has been a problem. We don’t do 10 year plans.
I am not ignoring the wealth gap. I see it as a function of investment and the business management decisions can be to the detriment of labor, such as(but merely one example) when a company is taken bankrupt to get rid of legacy retirement costs which the government may or may take over using its underfunded purse for failed retirement plans.
Yes Kent, sequester and one program likely affected by it and sometimes we get off on a rabbit track looking at bigger pictures.
There shouldn’t be a need for Head Start in the first place. Children should be home with their mother at that age. Those first years are important and who better than the mother to nurture her child and get him/her ready?
And yes, I realize there is the exception to the rule.
Kathy, how many working mothers of pre-school-age children can afford to stay home with them? You make it sound like it’s a choice.
tootight, on the military contractors, here is the deal, the employ a LOT of people a lot of middle class and blue collar people a lot of strong union members who are machinists, assemblers etc. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, are not just the 1% er’s, they support a huge employment base (which is also unionized) which is why their lobby IS strong it is not just a bunch of wealthy CEO types who are making their living from the Defense establishment. The other issue is that a large portion of our science/industrial talent is currently employed making high technology weapons. No doubt those weapons are really awesome and actually very cool, it was not a bunch of knucklheads who figured out how to make a true stealth fighter jet.
I wish those talents could be put back into the civilian world and eventually that is what would happen with massive defense cuts. But the initial impact is that we would have whole bunch of unemployed engineers and scientists who we may lose as a talent pool.
We still need to cut, but we should not fool ourselves about the situation and the impact of large scale defense cuts.
Here is what one family had to do to allow the mom to spend more time with her kids.
Both the parents have a graduate level education and have very good jobs. They both had to move across the country to find a job that would allow the mom to have a rewarding career and make a decent salary and have more time to spend with her kids. The father also had to leave his good job where they were and find another good job where they went.
This family is mine.
Kathy if it was that hard for my family, how hard do you think it might be for a single mom trying to raise her children, or a lower income family trying to make ends meet?
Just saying that a mom should spend more time with her kids isn’t a solution. But I agree if you can do it is good.
Walker and Paul, I said there are exceptions to the rule.
kathy, when there are too many exceptions to a rule, it ceases to be a rule.
I have to agree. Today it isn’t a realistic option. It would be nice if it were, and sure my wife would have loved to have been able to do it but things have changed. Probably for the better but adjusting is hard and you deal with it as best you can. These programs are for folks that need help with that adjustment. Like I said it is all about priorities. We all agree on one thing the government spends money on things it should not all the time. We just need to find the right balance.
So if they kick all the little kids out of Headstart, and they lay off all the teachers, then we’ll have to see if the teachers are willing to work for maple syrup or potatoes or something, and take all those kids into their homes for private daycare. Nobody will be happy with an arrangement like that, but the daycare inspector will probably be laid off too. The important thing is that these children need this early education so they don’t end up as stupid as our representatives in Washington.
The more kids are ready for school the better it is for all of us.
The bitter truth is you can’t make “cuts” without someone actually feeling the impact “cut.” A lot of people seem to think that there is a line in the federal budget that says “waste, fraud, and abuse” and that all Congress has to do balance the budget is cut that spending. That simply is not the case.
“You know……, it was my idea, but I don’t think much of it.” Moe Howard
You are correct scratchy. I think part of the issue is that people have been lied to for quite a few years, they really believe that by just reducing waste, fraud and abuse we can substantially cut the budget, but that is what they have been told by a lot of politicians for a long time.