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Ad Campaigns Compete as Health Law Rollout Looms

September 21, 2013 by

Starting this week, the White House will kick off a six-month campaign to persuade millions of uninsured Americans to sign up for health coverage as part of insurance marketplaces that open for business on Oct. 1. If too few people enroll, the centerpiece of the president’s Affordable Care Act could collapse.

But instead of offering the kind of grudging cooperation that normally follows even the most bitter of legislative battles, Mr. Obama’s foes have intensified their opposition, trying to deepen the nation’s anger about the health insurance program, which both sides often call Obamacare.

Across the country, Republicans are eager to prevent people from enrolling, fearing that once people begin receiving the benefit they will be loath to give it up. And in Washington, lawmakers have cast the law as the evil villain in a legislative melodrama about the budget that is barreling toward another government shutdown.

One group called Generation Opportunity distributed a Web video last week showing a creepy-looking Uncle Sam peering between a woman’s legs at a gynecologist’s office.

“Don’t let government play doctor,” the video says at the end. “Opt out of Obamacare.”

In the face of the intense opposition, the White House is pushing ahead with a vigorous public relations effort that will begin accelerating Monday, according to top White House aides in charge of the program.

Officials said the rollout would include a presidential event this week in New York with former President Bill Clinton and a health care speech by Mr. Obama on Thursday in Maryland. Michelle Obama will urge mothers and veterans to enroll their families. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. will host a nationwide conference call with nurses to enlist them in the effort to spread the word. Members of the president’s cabinet will fan out across the country, lobbying constituent groups to prod their members into action.

Those efforts will eventually be augmented by a Madison Avenue-style advertising campaign by insurance companies, which officials say are poised to spend $1 billion or more to attract millions of new customers. Some of the ads are likely to be aimed at young people, many of whom are uninsured but healthy — and great for the insurance companies’ bottom line.

Liberal advocacy groups have also begun to organize door-to-door canvassing, much as they did on behalf of Mr. Obama’s two presidential campaigns.

The overarching goal is to persuade many of today’s 48 million uninsured to sign up for insurance on the new exchanges created by the law. Crucially, officials need to woo older, sicker people without insurance as well as younger, healthier people, whose payments effectively subsidize those who will end up using more health care. Mr. Obama’s organizing strength among young adults — whom he won by a wide margin in 2008 and 2012 — may aid the campaign.

“We will have to create buzz and engagement and adjust and reach people in a sustained way from October to the end of March,” said Tara McGuinness, who is leading the health care communications effort inside the White House. “This is about what makes sense for families, what’s affordable for them.”

But even as Mr. Obama’s campaign accelerates, Republicans at all political levels are working against the law.

The Republican National Committee has begun what it calls a monthlong awareness campaign, with a television booking operation to make sure that pundits opposed to the law are always available to counter its boosters. The committee’s effort has already booked local and national politicians on radio programs like “The Hugh Hewitt Show” and cable TV programs like “The Mike Huckabee Show.”

A Republican committee Web site counts down the days, hours, minutes and seconds until what it calls the “Obamacare Train Wreck.”

Other conservative groups are broadcasting television advertisements that urge people not to sign up for coverage under the health care law. Americans for Prosperity began broadcasting an ad last week featuring a cancer survivor who warns about the dangers of the law. It is the latest in a series of commercials featuring women criticizing the law.

“Obamacare is dangerous — it can’t be implemented,” Tricia, the cancer survivor, says in the ad. “Your well-being judged by a bureaucrat in D.C. is devastating.”

Republican state and local officials are trying to thwart the administration’s enrollment efforts by imposing restrictions and requirements on volunteers seeking to inform people about how to enroll in coverage plans under the law. The Heritage Action Fund organized a Defund Obamacare bus tour this summer that helped convince House Republicans that no federal budget deal should be made without stripping the money from the health law.

And in Congress, House Republicans are threatening to shut down the government and risk a default unless Congress eliminates all of the financing for the law, effectively killing it.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/22/us/politics/reignited-battle-over-health-law.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Economix Blog: Getting More Bang for the Buck in Higher Education

June 14, 2013 by Leave a Comment

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Laura D’Andrea Tyson is a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and served as chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Bill Clinton.

Republicans and Democrats are hurtling toward another bipartisan standoff, this one over rival plans on the interest rates to be charged on subsidized federal loans to help students and their families pay for postsecondary education. Unless Congress can agree on a plan, the interest rate on new loans will double on July 1 to 6.8 percent from 3.4 percent.

Today’s Economist

Perspectives from expert contributors.

While the interest rate on student loans is important, there are much bigger problems in the financing of higher education: soaring tuition costs, the exploding volume of total student debt and shockingly low college completion rates. Americans are spending unprecedented amounts, both privately and publicly, on higher education. What are the returns? Are there ways to get more bang for the buck on this substantial investment in the nation’s future work force?

Students are already borrowing about $113 billion a year, more than twice as much as a decade ago, and student debt now tops $1 trillion. The federal government accounts for nearly 90 percent of all student loans and the Congressional Budget Office estimates that students will take out $1.4 trillion in new federal loans over the next decade.

For young college graduates the unemployment rate is 8.8 percent, and the underemployment rate, which includes those who have given up looking for a job or who are working part time because they cannot find a full-time job, is about 18.3 percent. In addition, many college graduates have been forced to settle for low-paying jobs that do not require a college degree.

Not surprisingly, the default rate on student loans is increasing: more than 13 percent of students whose loans came due in 2009 were in default as of September 2012, meaning that they had missed payments on their loans for more than 60 days.

The rising cost of college and the soaring student debt burden have led some to conclude that a college education is a bad investment for young Americans. Don’t believe the naysayers. The value of a college education as a way to improve lifetime earnings is near an all-time high. The returns to a college education outpace the returns to other investments — stocks, bonds, housing and gold — by sizable margins. A college graduate is almost 20 percentage points more likely to be employed than someone with a high-school diploma. Although the cost of a college degree is 50 percent higher than it was 30 years ago, the increase in lifetime earnings associated with a college degree is now 75 percent higher.

Higher education is also a good investment for the country. In a recent study, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development compared the fiscal costs and fiscal benefits of higher education. The fiscal costs include government spending on higher education and forgone tax revenues while students are not working. The fiscal benefits include higher tax revenues from college graduates because of higher incomes and lower outlays for safety-net programs. The bottom line: on average across O.E.C.D. countries, the public return from higher education is about four to one — with a net public benefit of $100,000 per man and about $52,000 per woman. In the United States, the net public benefit is more than $250,000, or five to one for men and about three to one for women. A college degree has not closed the gender pay gap, but it does generate sizable returns for both men and women.

From a fiscal standpoint, cutting government spending on higher education may be penny-wise but it is undoubtedly pound-foolish. That said, there are certainly ways to improve the returns to both private and public spending on higher education, starting with our dismal performance on completion rates.

Almost half of all students who begin college at a two- or four-year institution — about 60 percent of Hispanic and black students — will not get a degree within six years. When students leave college with no credential and huge debt, they are often worse off than when they entered. The average default rate for those with no credential is more than four times the rate for those with a bachelor’s degree.

College is supposed to be the great social equalizer, and the share of low-income students entering college has climbed sharply as a result of federal and state assistance. But despite successful public investment in improving access to higher education, the gap in college completion rates between students from the bottom and top fifths of the income distribution has doubled since the early 1970s. Today, students from the top 20 percent of the income distribution are seven times more likely to graduate than those from the bottom 20 percent. Low-income students are much more likely to end up with crushing debt and nothing to show for it.

What can be done? A report just released by the Center for American Progress contains several worthwhile recommendations. (“300 Million Engines of Growth: A Middle-Out Plan for Jobs, Business and a Growing Economy,” Center for American Progress, June 2013). The first step is greater transparency, and technology as well as disclosure can be helpful here. For students to make wiser choices among competing postsecondary institutions and programs, it must be easier to compare costs, average debt loads, completion and graduation rates, and placement rates after graduation. A bipartisan bill, whose backers include Senators Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, and Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, would require the Department of Education to provide easy access to clear, current and verified information on every college and university whose students receive federal support.

Transparency isn’t enough, however. A second step is the use of such data by the federal and state governments to hold postsecondary educational institutions accountable for their performance. The federal government has an immense potential stick to influence performance: it could withhold financial aid and student loan support for institutions that do not prove their value.

President Obama has called on Congress to incorporate performance standards on affordability, debt loads and completion rates into the accreditation process that determines the eligibility of institutions for federal student support. The administration has created a “score card” to track performance on these measures. And building on the success of the “Race to the Top” competitions in K-12 education, the administration has proposed grant competitions among states and colleges to improve affordability and completion rates. Several states are already experimenting with programs that link aid for higher education to measures of student performance.

A recent report by a coalition of the leading nonprofit higher-education associations identified college completion rates as the top priority, calling for more program flexibility, easier credit transfers and more online courses to enable more timely completion of degrees, especially among nontraditional students juggling the demands of education, work and family. Of course, higher completion rates in themselves do not speak to the quality of the education provided, so attention must be paid to how colleges make it easier for students to complete degrees. For example, the availability of stand-alone open online courses is no guarantee that students will complete their course requirements and get a degree. Online courses and e-mentoring systems must by packaged into programs that include scalable and significant faculty-student interactions leading to meaningful degrees.

Despite its rising cost, college education remains a great investment both for students and for the country. But there is much more that can be done to increase the value of this investment by improving completion rates through greater transparency and accountability, greater program flexibility and the growth of well-planned online courses and degree programs.

Article source: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/getting-more-bang-for-the-buck-in-higher-education/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Today’s Economist: Simon Johnson: Treasury Needs a Tough No. 2

April 4, 2013 by Leave a Comment

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Simon Johnson is the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management and co-author of “White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt, and Why It Matters to You.”

The Obama administration is actively seeking a new deputy secretary for the Treasury Department. Its leading candidate, Ruth Porat of Morgan Stanley, just withdrew, and a new short list is now being floated. But one name is conspicuously absent: Gary Gensler.

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Mr. Gensler is chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the regulatory body responsible for overseeing the business of commodity trading, as well as the critically important area of derivatives. In this capacity, Mr. Gensler has worked hard to make markets more transparent and to push market participants away from activities that can be destabilizing to the macroeconomy.

Gary Gensler, a former Wall Street executive who is chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has won few friends in the financial community with his tough regulatory posture.Simon Newman/ReutersGary Gensler, a former Wall Street executive who is chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has won few friends in the financial community with his tough regulatory posture.

In fact, the only imaginable reason Mr. Gensler is not on the Treasury short list is that he has been so effective getting financial reform in place that he has made powerful enemies on Wall Street.

Mr. Gensler worked in the Rubin-Summers Treasury Department in the late 1990s, when extreme deregulation was in fashion. Almost alone among prominent public figures from that period, Mr. Gensler not only learned the right lessons but is now willing to stick his neck out on re-regulation. (Former President Bill Clinton has also expressed regret for not regulating derivatives, but it’s not clear what he might do about his concerns.)

If you look across the current set of officials, few are really willing to take on the industry lobby in a sustained way. Mr. Gensler stands out in this category. The most visible actions of the C.F.T.C. may have been its pursuit of the Libor scandal – the illegal fixing of benchmark interest rates by employees of Barclays and other major global financial companies. (For more background on the issues at stake, see this commentary by Mr. Gensler.)

Mr. Gensler was also a constructive voice during the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation, and he has been in the subsequent thick of rule-writing in the process of putting the law into effect. This is not glamorous work, but it is absolutely essential if the financial system is to function in a more stable manner (for details, see this speech by Mr. Gensler). Of course, industry people complain that the rules have not been written fast enough, but that is largely because of their diligent delaying tactics.

Independent observers, such as Dennis Kelleher of Better Markets, give Mr. Gensler high marks for his efforts – and for his accomplishments. “Chairman Gensler has done an exceptional job and has been a tireless advocate for implementing the critically important financial reform law designed to protect the American people from Wall Street and another devastating financial collapse and economic crisis,” Mr. Kelleher said recently.

Perhaps this success is a result of the fact that Mr. Gensler is unusual in another way – he is a former senior partner at Goldman Sachs who thinks that Wall Street firms should not be allowed to take and mismanage risk as they have in the past.

As important as his work at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission has been, the deputy Treasury job is bigger — with a broad purview and the ability to jump into all kinds of issues. Under the Dodd-Frank act, the Treasury has become more central to financial issues, and there are a lot of Dodd-Frank reforms still to be carried out.

No one is going to intimidate Mr. Gensler with supposed street smarts or complicated algorithms. And as a nation, the United States is desperately short on financial executives who are determined to become really effective regulators.

The revolving door between Washington and Wall Street is of course an important concern. In the latest development under that heading, Mary L. Schapiro, former head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, has joined the Promontory Group, a prominent force that works on behalf of the industry. (Ms. Schapiro feels she has established sufficient safeguards against anything inappropriate; read the details and decide. You should also review the case of Lanny Breuer, formerly of the Department of Justice, and now at a prominent law firm.)

Jeff Connaughton, a leading critic of the revolving door (see his book “The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins”), thinks Mr. Gensler is an exception to the usual rule that industry insiders make ineffective regulators. In Mr. Connaughton’s assessment, “It would be difficult to find someone better suited than Gensler — who now has consistently shown determination and exceptional capability — to be a more effective regulator of complex banking and derivatives issues.”

Mr. Gensler is not working in government with an eye to his future prospects in the private sector; he burned those bridges a long time ago.

In contrast, Mr. Gensler has good relationships on Capitol Hill, having previously served as an adviser to Senator Paul Sarbanes, Democrat of Maryland (and having a hand in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which seeks to strengthen corporate governance).

Not all Republicans like Mr. Gensler. They should get over this. As the Republican Party modernizes, it has to do more than pay lip service to transparency. Jon Huntsman put it well during his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination: the United States needs markets to function properly, and this is possible only when the rule of law is in effect for everyone, without exceptions for the big and powerful.

The Obama administration has apparently asked Mr. Gensler to stay at the C.F.T.C., and one downside of his departure would be that his most obvious potential successors are not likely to push so hard for reform, and some might even allow a rollback of gains already achieved. But given that only a limited number of experienced and proven reformers can get jobs with this administration, we should want them in places where they can have the most impact.

Brooksley Born, whose credentials as a reformer are second to none, hopes that Mr. Gensler will stay at the C.F.T.C. for another term. I agree that would be a good outcome. But with regard to financial reform issues during the second Obama administration, the position of deputy Treasury secretary looks set to be highly influential – and able to engage across the board on financial sector issues.

Mr. Gensler should get the job.

Article source: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/04/treasury-needs-a-tough-no-2/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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William H. Ginsburg, 70, Represented Monica Lewinsky

April 3, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The cause was cancer, his wife, Laura Yudell Ginsberg, said.

Mr. Ginsburg had spent three decades practicing law in Southern California when a friend and client, Dr. Bernard Lewinsky, a radiation oncologist, asked him to help his daughter. Ms. Lewinsky, 24, was embroiled in a stunning scandal over accusations that she had had an affair with President Bill Clinton and that he had urged her to lie about it.

In the five frenzied months from Mr. Ginsburg’s arrival in January 1998 to his departure in early June, his public image evolved from fresh-faced truth teller in a truth-challenged town to publicity hound lacking the necessary legal skills. Mr. Ginsburg failed to secure an early plea bargain or immunity agreement with prosecutors. His public statements sometimes prompted questions about whether he had his client’s best interests in mind.

“No one ever lies,” he told one interviewer. “People often do what they have to do to make their story sound right.”

At one point he wrote a letter to Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel, accusing him of prosecutorial misconduct.

“Congratulations, Mr. Starr!” Mr. Ginsburg wrote. “As a result of your callous disregard for cherished constitutional rights, you may have succeeded in unmasking a sexual relationship between two consenting adults.”

That assertion appeared to threaten Ms. Lewinsky’s legal position; she had denied that there was a relationship. After the letter was made public, another lawyer for Ms. Lewinsky, Nathaniel Speights, quickly asserted that “nothing has changed” in her position.

Mr. Ginsburg once appeared on five Sunday talk shows on the same day, setting a standard sometimes referred to as “the full Ginsburg.” He reveled in being courted by television anchors seeking the first interview with Ms. Lewinsky, though he never delivered it. Barbara Walters won the contest, in March 1999, long after he had left the scene.

He was replaced on June 2, 1998, by two lawyers with extensive Washington experience, Jacob A. Stein and Plato Cacheris. The Lewinsky family said in a statement that day that the parting was by mutual agreement, but Ms. Lewinsky later railed against Mr. Ginsburg in her memoir, saying he cared more about publicity than her case and had tried to divide her family.

Supporters of Mr. Ginsburg said he had been in an impossible position, trying to protect both his client and the president, and that he deserved some credit for the fact that Ms. Lewinsky was never prosecuted.

“She was a pawn in all this, and Bill went out there and dropped everything for his friend and really put himself in the line of fire and drew it away from Monica,” George J. Stephan, who worked with Mr. Ginsburg for 25 years, said in an interview on Wednesday. “If I were Monica’s father, I would have been very happy.”

Mr. Stephan emphasized that Mr. Ginsburg had represented Ms. Lewinsky for less than five months, and that he had been successful in many high-profile cases.

Mr. Ginsburg was involved in a 1984 case in California that established a patient’s right to refuse medical care. He spent many years successfully representing swimming pool manufacturers against injury claims, defended a cardiologist who had examined the Loyola Marymount University basketball player Hank Gathers shortly before he died during a game, and defended a doctor accused of concealing that Liberace had died of AIDS.

William Howard Ginsburg was born on March 25, 1943, in Philadelphia. His father worked as a lawyer for Lyndon B. Johnson when he was a senator from Texas. Mr. Ginsburg graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and received his law degree from the University of Southern California in 1968.

In addition to his wife, his survivors include a daughter, Sasha Gutstein; two sons, David and Maxwell; two grandchildren; his mother, Sylvia; and his brother, Kenneth Gibbs.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/04/us/politics/william-h-ginsburg-70-represented-monica-lewinsky.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Today’s Economist: Laura D’Andrea Tyson: The Family and Medical Leave Act, 20 Years Later

February 8, 2013 by Leave a Comment

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Laura D’Andrea Tyson is a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and was chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Bill Clinton.

Twenty years ago, just a few weeks after his inauguration, President Clinton fulfilled a campaign pledge and signed his first bill – the Family and Medical Leave Act. The law sent a strong signal of his commitment to provide more opportunities for American workers in return for more personal responsibility.

Today’s Economist

Perspectives from expert contributors.

The legislation covers workers in businesses with more than 50 employees who satisfy additional eligibility conditions, such as hours worked during the last year. About 60 percent of all workers are covered and eligible for leave under the act. Covered and eligible workers are allowed to take up to 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave to recover from a medical condition or to provide care for sick family members or a new child.

The benefits of the Family and Medical Leave Act are real and significant. Although the provided leave is unpaid, it ensures job protection and the extension of health insurance when workers are temporarily unable to work for medical or family reasons. Moreover, a just-published Labor Department survey finds that most employees who take leave for family and medical reasons receive partial pay (17 percent) or full pay (48 percent ) for short leaves (fewer than 10 days), often drawing on paid leave days they have accrued during the previous year. However, workers in low-wage jobs are much less likely to receive even partial pay during a leave than workers in high-wage jobs.

Since its passage, the law has been used more than 100 million times to improve the lives of American workers. Meanwhile, dire predictions by critics that it would destroy jobs and harm business have proven wrong. Employers covered by the law report little or no difficulty complying with its provisions. Indeed, many businesses credit the law with reducing turnover and increasing worker morale.

The Labor Department survey also reveals how American workers choose to use their rights under the law. About 16 percent of covered and eligible workers under the Family and Medical Leave Act took leave last year, a share comparable to that in 2000. About 5 percent reported that they needed leave but were unable to take it, primarily because they could not afford to sacrifice their pay. This is about double the share in 2000 when real median wages and family incomes were higher. About 57 percent of all leaves are taken by workers because of their own medical conditions, with another 22 percent for pregnancy or birth of a child and 20 percent to care for a sick family member.

Most leaves are short – about 42 percent last fewer than 10 days and about 17 percent last more than 60 days. Almost all workers who take leave return to their employers. Less than 10 percent decide not to return to work. The Family and Medical Leave Act appears to strengthen, not weaken, worker attachment to the labor force, increasing employment and income stability over time.

Not surprisingly, because they bear children and still shoulder much of child- and elder-care responsibilities in families, women are a third more likely to take leave than men, and women with children are significantly more likely than men to report unmet leave needs. Over all, however, it appears that the Family and Medical Leave Act has had a small effect on parental-leave usage by mothers and no discernible effect on parental leave usage by fathers, indicating that there are financial limits on the extent to which families are willing and able to use unpaid leave for this purpose.

Women account for about 50 percent of all workers in the United States, which boasts one of the highest labor-force participation rates for women in the world – about 70 percent for women with children and about 60 percent for women with children under the age of 6 in 2011.

Most children now grow up in families without a full-time stay-at-home parental caregiver. More than 25 percent of American children live in single-parent households, the highest share in the developed countries, and about 75 percent of these households are headed by a woman. In the United States, single mothers work more hours and yet have higher poverty rates than single mothers in other high-income countries. The percentage of children living in poverty in the United States is considerably higher as a result.

Yet the United States is the only developed country that does not provide paid parental leave to women workers (or their spouses) to bear and care for children.

And businesses have not filled the policy void. Only about 25 percent of employers in the United States offer fully paid “maternity-related” leave and about 20 percent offer no such leave whether paid or unpaid. About 46 percent of workers have access to some paid parental leave, sometimes through a combination of earned sick days or vacation time, but access varies by wages and education.

Workers whose average wages are in the lowest 25 percent within their industry are about one-fourth as likely to have access to paid family leave than those whose wages are in the highest 25 percent. According to the Census Bureau, between 2006 and 2008 about two-thirds of new mothers with a bachelor’s degree or higher had access to paid parental leave, compared with only 18 percent of new mothers with a high school diploma or less.

Like other employee benefits, employer-sponsored parental leave programs heighten inequality among American workers and fail to address the daunting problems confronting low-income single mothers and their children. This population is the most vulnerable and least served by the current mix of family-support policies.

Contrary to concerns that paid parental leave is a disincentive to work, access to parental leave, paid or unpaid, increases the likelihood that a woman will return to work after the birth of a child. Among new mothers who work while pregnant and are able to take paid leave, almost 90 percent return to work within one year. And harsh necessity makes these “return to work” incentives stronger for less-educated and lower-income women.

According to research by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the World Economic Forum, paid parental leave programs, along with affordable child care, improve employment levels among women, increase the returns to their education and reduce gender inequalities in earnings and promotion opportunities. The results are faster and more equitable growth and a lower incidence of poverty among children.

The Family and Medical Leave Act has been a success. But its effectiveness at addressing the challenges confronting American workers is limited for two reasons. First, the law is not universal and many of those not covered and eligible are young adults in their childbearing years, are from minority backgrounds and are low-wage workers. Second, many eligible workers are not able to take leave because it is unpaid and they cannot afford to give up their wages.

It is time to consider extending the Family and Medical Leave Act to provide all workers with access to paid family and medical leaves that are job-protected and include some financial support. Researchers at the Center for American Progress have outlined a plan, called Social Security Cares, to achieve this goal. Social Security Cares is a family and medical leave insurance program that would cover all workers for the same life events covered by the Family and Medical Leave Act and offer partial wage replacement. The Social Security Administration would administer the program, which would be paid for with a small increase in the payroll tax. California has had a similar paid family-leave insurance plan for the last decade, and New Jersey and Washington have passed comparable legislation.

Back in 1993, when President Clinton signed the Family and Medical Leave Act after more than 10 years of debate and opposition, it was clear that American families were changing. Change has continued. We should open a new debate about how to modernize the Family and Medical Leave Act to address the needs of modern American families.

Article source: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/08/the-family-and-medical-leave-act-20-years-later/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Wal-Mart Names a Head for Its Corporate Foundation

October 14, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Sylvia Mathews Burwell also will oversee the retail giant’s social, environmental and economic development programs in Africa.

“I feel like this is an exciting time in corporate philanthropy,” said Ms. Burwell, who announced in April that she would be stepping down as president of the Gates Foundation’s global development program. “This offered me the ability to work on problems and challenges at a scale and through the alignment of business and philanthropic interests.”

Ms. Burwell, a native of West Virginia, joined the Gates foundation in 2001 after working in the Clinton administration as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, deputy chief of staff to President Bill Clinton and chief of staff to Robert E. Rubin when he was Treasury secretary.

Leslie Dach, Wal-Mart’s vice president for corporate affairs, said Ms. Burwell’s international perspective and experience were particularly attractive to the company. “So much of what we’re trying to do is use our size and scale and business model to make a difference on large social issues, and she can help us with that,” Mr. Dach said.

Wal-Mart’s philanthropy is closely watched in the corporate and nonprofit worlds, as well as by the company’s critics, who dismiss it as an exercise in reputational laundering.

Margaret A. McKenna, who became the company foundation’s president in 2007, put it on the map with major, splashy programs, like its $2 billion commitment to supply food and underwrite improvements in the nation’s food banks. Ms. McKenna’s last day is Friday; Ms. Burwell will start in January.

Last month, the retailer announced it would buy some $20 billion in goods over the next five years from women-owned businesses and put $100 million into training and educating women workers.

The Gates Foundation, the largest in the country with some $36.3 billion in assets, is more willing to work with business than many foundations, joining with pharmaceutical companies on programs to get medicines to needy people in the developing world and with media companies to further education programs. “Even in our financial services, some of our work in Tanzania was done with Vodafone, “ Ms. Burwell said. “But it’s something I’ve just dabbled in and still have a tremendous amount to learn about.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=720820fdc99bd83d4879334c08ccbf4d

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Geithner Considers Leaving Treasury Job

July 1, 2011 by Leave a Comment

WASHINGTON – Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner is considering leaving the Obama administration after a deal is reached to reduce the federal deficit, two officials familiar with his thinking said Wednesday.

Mr. Geithner has not made a decision, this official said, and he would not leave before President Obama strikes deal with Congress averting a possible default on the national debt. But he is being guided in part by family considerations, this official said. His son has opted to finish high school in New York.

Bloomberg News first reported that Mr. Geithner, who will turn 50 in August, was weighing his departure. The White House and Treasury declined to comment on the report.

But earlier in the day in Chicago, at a conference organized by former President Bill Clinton, Mr. Geithner said he planned to be in his job “for the foreseeable future.”

“I live for this work, it’s the only work I’ve done, and I believe in it,” Mr. Geithner said in answer to a question from Mr. Clinton about his career plans. “I’m going to be doing it for the foreseeable future.”

Mr. Geithner said his son had decided to attend his final year of high school in New York, which meant that he would be commuting between Washington and New York for a while. Officials said family issues were weighing on Mr. Geithner, as well as the recognition that there was a window of opportunity for him to leave once a deal averting a debt crisis was reached.

If Mr. Geithner does exit later this year, he would be the last member of Mr. Obama’s economic brain trust to leave the administration, after two-and-a-half years of turmoil, during which the White House confronted a financial crisis, a historic recession, near double-digit unemployment, and a recovery that has yet to gain traction. Before coming to the Treasury, Mr. Geithner was president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York where he played a leading role in the bailouts of several financial institutions in 2008.

Austan Goolsbee, one of Mr. Obama’s chief economic advisers, recently announced he would return to his teaching post at the University of Chicago. Lawrence H. Summers, a former Treasury Secretary in the Clinton administration, and a top Obama adviser, left late last year for Harvard, while Christina Roemer, Mr. Obama’s first head of the Council of Economic Advisers, returned last summer to the University of California at Berkeley.

Of all these departures, Mr. Geithner’s would have arguably have the greatest impact. He has become one of the president’s closest and most trusted counselors, attending his daily briefings and coordinating the White House’s strategy on a range of crucial issues, from financial reform to pressuring China on its currency.

The job of Treasury secretary increasingly demands a background in finance, to advise the president on the government’s financial challenges and to shape federal oversight of the financial industry.

Erskine Bowles, former chief of staff to President Clinton and co-chairman of President Obama’s deficit commission, commands respect in Democratic policy circles. So does Roger Altman, an investment banker and former deputy Treasury secretary in the Clinton years. Two current officials regarded as credible candidates are Janet Yellen, the vice chair of the Federal Reserve, and Gene Sperling, director of the National Economic Council, who previously served as a lieutenant to Mr. Geithner. Whomever is chosen, the prospect is good that there will be a contentious confirmation hearing in the Senate as the country heads into a presidential election year and especially so if the economy remains sluggish. 

Binyamin Appelbaum contributed reporting.

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