On Social Security reform, the daring policy is best

In case you missed it...

On Social Security reform, the daring policy is best

By Newt Gingrich and Peter Ferrara

History is repeating itself. The same so-called "experts" who were wrong about President Reagan's tax cuts are now wrong about personal Social Security accounts.

Many bond-market analysts were opposed to Reagan's 1981 tax cuts because they feared massively increased deficits. They argued such deficits would swamp the bond markets with federal debt, causing interest rates to soar and further weaken the economy.

Just the opposite happened. Interest rates fell throughout the 1980s, and the Reagan tax cuts produced one of the greatest booms in American history.

Today, bond-market savants are raising similar questions about allowing workers a personal savings account option for Social Security. They argue that the government would have to issue trillions of dollars in transitional debt to cover promised benefits to today's retirees while workers pay part of their payroll taxes into their personal retirement savings accounts. That debt, they again argue, would cause interest rates to soar, tanking the economy.

What these pessimists ignore is that the personal retirement savings accounts would guarantee huge sums in new investment funds moving into the markets as workers buy bonds and stocks for their accounts.

Consider the Social Security reform bill introduced by Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Sen. John Sununu (R-N.H.). The American Shareholders Association estimates that, under the Ryan-Sununu personal retirement savings account plan, if workers invested half their savings in bonds and the other half in stocks $85 billion would flow into the bond markets in the very first year alone. An increase of this size would double current annual investment flows into corporate bonds.

Moreover, the chief actuary of Social Security estimates that, after the first 15 years of personal savings under Ryan-Sununu, workers would have accumulated $7.8 trillion in today's dollars in their personal retirement savings accounts, which is roughly the same amount invested in the entire mutual-fund industry today.

After the first 25 years of personal savings under Ryan-Sununu, the chief actuary estimates, workers would have accumulated $16.6 trillion in today's dollars in their accounts. Yet, under the policies specified in Ryan-Sununu, the government would have issued only $1.25 trillion in new federal bonds at that point. Even that would be paid off during the following 15 years by the surpluses that would then be generated by the reform, according to the chief actuary's official score of the proposal.

All those funds from personal retirement savings accounts invested in the capital markets will substantially increase the demand for bonds and, almost certainly, reduce interest rates, not increase them. The new capital would also significantly increase wage growth by giving American workers the most modern technology, the best tools and the best financing for startups in the world.

Bond-market analysts wedded to historically failed economic models are telling the president that to save the economy he needs to propose massive reductions in future promised Social Security benefits. They want the president to change the calculation of Social Security benefits to reduce future Social Security payments. Their proposal is both unnecessary and politically undoable.

Even under the current benefits formula, the redistributive, pay-as-you-go, non-invested Social Security system pays very low, below-market returns, zero or even negative for many workers. If benefits are cut, all workers will be driven into negative returns that only get more negative every year into the future.

This new benefit-cut proposal is politically indefensible.

The official score of the Ryan-Sununu plan by the chief actuary of Social Security shows that large personal accounts equal to about half the total Social Security payroll tax would eventually shift all Social Security liabilities for retirement benefits to the accounts, where workers would get much better benefits than promised by Social Security today. This would eliminate all Social Security financing problems permanently.

The president should propose large personal accounts with the goal of eventually phasing in the full Ryan-Sununu plan and forget about any cuts in future promised Social Security benefits. This would ultimately solve all the problems of Social Security and, in the process, provide enormous gains for working people, as well as the capital markets.

Former Speaker of the House Gingrich is the author of Winning the Future: A 21st Century Contract with America (Regnery). Ferrara is a senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Innovation and a senior adviser to the Free Enterprise Fund.

Five Threats the American Way of Life

In case you missed it...

Five Threats the American Way of Life

By Newt Gingrich

Ten years ago last month, the 104th Congress was sworn in. I was honored to be elected by my colleagues to serve as their speaker. A key to our success, the Contract with America, was not only a remarkable political tool, but it served as a blueprint for governmental change. The House Republicans bound ourselves to do something, not simply to be for something.

Since leaving the speakership in January 1999, I have been intensely studying the major policy issues that affect our nation and, indeed, its survival. What I have learned should challenge all of us. The American way of life is vulnerable to five major threats as difficult as any America has faced.

The first threat is the potential for Islamic terrorists and rogue dictatorships to acquire and use nuclear or biological weapons. The second is the effort to drive God out of American public life. The third is the possibility that America will lose the patriotic sense of itself as a singular civilization. The fourth is that America's economic supremacy will eventually yield to China and India because of failing schools and weakening scientific and technological leadership. The fifth is that an aging America's demands on Social Security, Medicare, and related government programs will collapse the current system.

Each threat can be overcome, but standing in our way is an entrenched political system and news media that refuse to confront these threats seriously. Just as previous American generations have met the challenges of their times, however, so can we.

To succeed, we need a 21st-Century Contract with America to "win the future." The new contract would be not a political tool but rather an agenda that can be embraced by any American concerned with securing America's future. It is designed to build a grassroots movement large enough to implement the large-scale, transformational changes necessary not only to ensure America's survival as the freest, most prosperous nation on the planet, but also to create a stable governing majority of elected officials - both Republicans and Democrats - who embrace those values.

Over the last four decades, America has divided into two camps. Most Americans believe that 9/11 was evidence enough that we have real enemies who hate us and who would kill millions of us given the chance - yet our national security bureaucracies continue to operate within a peacetime framework. Most Americans support a strong military capability to keep America safe - but our liberal national security elites advocate gaining the approval of an ineffective United Nations and a skeptical Europe before defending ourselves. Most Americans believe that America was founded as a nation in which people are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights and that we rightly pledge allegiance to one nation under God - but an arrogant judiciary continues to drive God from the public square.

America is a good and decent country created by heroes worth studying - yet schools teaching young Americans and American immigrants have replaced their stories with politically correct, multicultural drivel that fails to teach American history. Worse, they ridicule what little they are required to teach.

Most Americans believe that hard work will keep America's economy second to none. But our efforts are hampered by trial lawyers who seek their own enrichment and not justice. Labor unions get away with special deals and protection from competition by bureaucracies that value process over achievement.

For this generation to pass on our nation's blessings, we need a grassroots movement that demands profound change to defeat fundamental threats to our way of life. This movement must be focused on values, solutions, and on telling the truth even when it is controversial.

The first Contract with America proved that it was possible to bring together people from all across America to forge a strong majority that would implement the promised program. If we have the same persistence and courage, we can win again.

Getting the Lessons of Iraq Exactly Right

In case you missed it...

Getting the Lessons of Iraq Exactly Right

by Newt Gingrich

The report of the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction teaches the wrong lessons about the Coalition Provisional Authority and the effort to rebuild Iraq after the war. As Congress begins to hold hearings on the report's findings, it is my hope that our lawmakers will rethink the self-destructive peacetime rules, regulations and petty bureaucracy under which we are trying to win the war on terror.

In the summer of 2003, Ambassador Paul Bremer was assigned the extraordinary challenge of establishing a Coalition Provisional Authority in a country whose dictatorship had systematically ruined the government and the economy. There were no records that were reliable. There were no coherent payrolls. The scale of corruption and dishonesty was staggering.

Accomplishing this task within the American peacetime system of bureaucracy, red tape, micromanagement and negative oversight would have been a daunting task even in the most ideal of environments.

In a rapidly shifting wartime environment, speed and flexibility are the most important requirements for success. However, every military commander I have talked with encountered too much bureaucracy, too much red tape and too much centralization.

The Iraqis themselves have shown that they can move faster than the American peacetime bureaucratic system. In 1991 after the first gulf war and despite the UN-imposed sanctions, it took Iraqi engineers less than 100 days to restore electricity in the country back to pre-war capacity. Now, a year and a half after Saddam Hussein's statue fell, Iraq's power sector still is only producing less than half of its pre-war capacity and nowhere near what is needed for growth and prosperity.

Bremer was also weakened by personnel and budgeting and contracting systems that did not work. The CPA never received the people it needed due to outdated rules that prevent civilian personnel (such as employees of the State, Treasury and Justice Departments) from being properly trained and organized to do jobs that, while difficult, are non-war-fighting roles best suited for civilians.

Those who did get to Iraq were confronted with petty bureaucracy and mindless contracting requirements that made it impossible to effectively spend the money Congress had appropriated. In June of 2004, the CPA had spent only 2 percent of the $18.4 billion appropriated by Congress.

The only truly effective expenditures were made by military commanders through their Commander's Emergency Response Program, a timely and flexible acquisition system designed for immediate humanitarian and reconstruction assistance. It allowed commanders to buy goods and services on the local market rather than through the Pentagon's sclerotic bureaucracy. I was told by one commander that he could order trucks through an Iraqi, have them picked up in Turkey and delivered to local Iraqi police faster than they could process the paperwork for purchasing through Baghdad.

However, that is exactly the type of program that is put at risk by the overzealous, process-rather-than-result-focused auditing mentality displayed by the inspector general's report.

Now that report is tempting Congress to hold exactly the wrong hearings that would create exactly the wrong "reforms" that would make it even harder to recruit patriotic Americans (who will be reminded that you are more likely to become a scapegoat than an honored citizen if you risk serving your government and your country in a dangerous place). These hearings could also lead to new requirements, which could make it even harder for America to manage a transition in the future.

For instance, one of the most widely publicized findings in the report is that more than $400 million given to the Iraqi ministries is unaccounted for due to "weak or non-existent" controls. The report suggests that instead of giving the Iraqi ministers responsibility for their budgets, the CPA should have placed hundreds of CPA auditors into the ministries.

This would have taken the old joke "I'm from the federal government and I am here to help" to astonishingly new heights. Worse, it would have further created the impression among Iraqis that coalition forces were occupiers rather than liberators. What would kind of message would that have sent to the new Iraqi ministers and their staff, if they were being monitored by American "minders"?

The auditors and lawyers whose mindset dominates this report are dramatically out of touch with the practical realities of waging war and setting up a new government in a war-torn country. Bremer needed more flexibility and more authority, not less. He needed to focus more on being effective and not more on being audited. Money is to a successful transition and reconstruction effort as bullets are to a successful battle. No one would suggest that our troops should be audited for every round they fire and every mile of fuel they use in winning a war.

It is my hope that rather than heed the report's findings, Congress uses it to analyze what laws need to be rewritten and what has to be done to make America effective in waging the war against terrorism and for civilization and freedom.

If it leads to that result it will have been a very helpful report indeed.

Introducing www.peterferrara.com

Introducing www.peterferrara.com

The place to go for information on personal social security retirement savings accounts

Some of you may have read today's Washington Post article about Peter Ferrara, who for over 20 years has been the intellectual force behind personal social security retirement savings accounts.

I believe Peter to be the source of the most intelligent commentary and analysis on personal social security accounts and have written op-eds with him in the past on the topic.

Peter Ferrara has started a blog to provide rapid insight and analysis on the effort to make personal social security accounts a reality. I encourage each of you to visit it daily.
Visit www.peterferrara.com

Peter Ferrara's credentials are impeccable.

Before graduating Harvard Law School, Peter wrote a paper that suggested converting the government-run social security program into personal retirement savings accounts. This paper eventually became the first book for the Cato Institute on the topic - Social Security: The Inherent Contradiction (1980) - and Peter has continued to write on that concept in further books, studies and articles for Cato, the Heritage Foundation, the National Center for Policy Analysis, the Family Research Council, the U.S Chamber of Commerce, and a wide range of other institutions and publications.

He is currently a Senior Policy Advisor on Social Security and Medicare at the Institute for Policy Innovation (www.ipi.org). He is also Director of the International Center for Law and Economics. He served as a senior staff member in the White House Office of Policy Development under President Reagan and as Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States under the first President Bush.
Visit www.peterferrara.com

I encourage each of you to visit the site and forward this message to your friends. Thanks.

-Newt
Visit www.peterferrara.com

Thanks for reading. Please share with your email friends by forwarding this message.

Transform It, Don't Reform It

In case you missed it...

Transform It, Don't Reform It
Medicaid Needs a New Structure and the Ability to Tap Technology

by Newt Gingrich

As the discussion about overhauling Medicaid becomes more urgent, there is a grave danger that it will be narrowly focused on money, trapping lawmakers in an unproductive power struggle between federal and state governments. In truth, America's Medicaid challenges reach well beyond finances and budgets. The system is fundamentally broken, ensnaring the most vulnerable in our society in a cycle of dependence and poverty while failing to realize the benefits of emerging technologies and new capabilities in health and long-term care. Medicaid is beyond reform and cannot be fixed with small cuts and waivers from the bureaucracy. It must be transformed with legislation to bring it into the 21st century.

The fundamental problem with the Medicaid system is that its beneficiaries are distinct and separate groups of individuals with radically different needs and characteristics: people with disabilities, the poor and the elderly poor. A 21st Century Responsible Citizen Medicaid Act would divide Medicaid into three distinct areas, each administered separately with its own rules and structures.

First, the act should establish a Capabilities Program to help both Americans with disabilities and those with work-related or other injuries lead the fullest possible lives. The program should provide incentives to people with disabilities to be productive, rather than threatening them with a loss in benefits if they get a job. The program should also allow participants to capitalize on technologies and therapies that maximize their abilities, and that emphasize integration into social, family and work life. This philosophy closely resembles the government's successful approach to rehabilitating and reintegrating amputees and other wounded veterans from the Iraq campaign.

The second area would address the needs of the relatively healthy poor, who have much different needs than people with disabilities or the elderly. Poor individuals should be offered vouchers for health savings accounts that sensitize them to the benefits of prevention, wellness and early detection. This would also encourage a more rational use of health care; prenatal care, for example, is far cheaper than neonatal intensive care. Similarly, a visit to a health clinic or doctor's office rather than to an emergency room will save a significant amount of money. But the rules currently allow for payment for expensive emergency room visits despite the lack of an urgent health care need. Government leaders need to rethink the part of Medicaid serving the healthy poor in the same way we rethought welfare in the 1990s.

Third, the legislation would create a program to serve the elderly that reintegrates the family back into their care. The current system, for example, prevents a daughter whose mother is in an assisted-living facility from contributing financially to her mother's care without losing all Medicaid coverage. This either-or mentality is anti-family and leaves the recipient with a lower quality of life.

The program should also integrate modern information technology systems, home diagnostic equipment, real-time monitoring and rapid health assistance when necessary. For example, a growing company called Living Independently has created the QuietCare home monitoring system, with motion detectors that actually learn an individual's daily habits and routines. The system regularly updates a caregiver on the person being cared for and immediately highlights any atypical patterns. Caregivers use this technology to provide unobtrusive monitoring of seniors in their homes while preserving individual privacy and freedom.

In addition to recognizing the unique needs of Medicaid's beneficiaries, Medicaid legislation must encourage investment and innovation. The Medicaid budgeting system cannot distinguish between costs and investments, making it impossible to introduce new technologies, information systems and quality approaches -- things that have led to a revolution in productivity in most of the private sector. Government budget rules and outdated scoring methods used by the Congressional Budget Office and the Office of Management and Budget keep health in general and Medicaid in particular mired in an obsolete system of paper, regulations and inspections that simply fail to deliver for Medicaid beneficiaries the efficiencies Americans benefit from in the rest of their lives. Passing a 21st Century Responsible Citizens Medicaid Act is achievable. Because Medicaid is equally a federal and state challenge, the first step is for the governors, Congress and the administration to join in establishing a working group that would be charged with fundamentally rethinking Medicaid and developing the enabling legislation. It is vital to integrate the governors' staffs into the process up front, just as we did with welfare reform in 1995.

America's Medicaid program isn't working. A "money only" debate would be an exercise in futility and -- more tragically -- would trap the most vulnerable people in our society in a hopelessly broken system. Transforming Medicaid is a moral imperative.

Discuss this article at the Newt.org blog

Technology and Long-Term Living

In case you missed it...

Technology and Long-Term Living

by Newt Gingrich and Ann Woodbury

(This article first appeared in the March 2005 issue of Provider Magazine)

Dramatic changes in science and technology are under way. Our country will experience as much scientific discovery and innovation over the next 25 years as it did the entire last century, which will profoundly impact our concept of aging.

The development of robotics, expert information technology systems, wireless communications, telemedicine, and videoconferencing will allow more and more Americans to live independently, be happier, and have a much higher quality of life because the technologies will exist to allow people to be in more control of their lives and feel more fulfilled. These technologies will delay the need for nursing facility care. And for those who do need supported living, the new discoveries will create dramatically better system with a higher quality of care and quality of life that would have been impossible in an earlier era.

Yet, as we are poised to undergo this dramatic transformation in science and technology, most of the current debate over the future of health care for seniors fails to seriously recognize it. Even our language is wrong. We too often use the term "long term care" when we really should be talking about how our seniors should prepare themselves for "long-term living," which is a more accurate term for a spectrum of high-quality services tailored to maximize seniors' freedom and quality of life.

Changing The Discussion

We also too often find ourselves discussing staff retention strategies and Medicaid cuts-topics that are totally legitimate if the goal is to marginally improve the current, inherited 20th century system.

However, these are not the discussions that will help achieve the stunning possibilities of a 21st century intelligent health system. The nature of our current conversation about long-term living would be like convening a conference about the future of transportation in 1903 and all we saw fit to discuss was the latest technology in horseshoes and wagon axles, while we completely avoided the topic of automobiles. We would likely have opinion leaders and industry stakeholders like harness manufacturers, blacksmiths, and relay station owners discussing problems like horsemanure as a major urban challenge. Yet Henry Ford was only two years away from opening his first mass-produced automobile factory. Also, since the first successful flight would not occur until that December, few, if any, would have seriously discussed the aviation experiments of the Wright brothers.

The new scientific discoveries will create entirely new possibilities for long-term living. However, technologies already exist that, if applied today, can dramatically improve the options of senior health care services. In these cases, the lack of progress is not the result of a lack of capabilities or available technologies.

Hi-Tech Models

Consider Living Independently, a company who's QuietCare System converts any home or apartment into a "smart home." The QuietCare home monitoring system is designed around motion detectors that actually learn an individual's daily habits and routines. The system regularly updates a caregiver of the person's activities and immediately highlights any atypical patterns. Caregivers use this technology to provide unobtrusive monitoring of seniors in their homes, preserving the individual's privacy and freedom. This system is affordable, and it is on the market now. It allows people to do in reality what policy makers talk about in theory-"aging in place"-allowing seniors who need a little support to live independently in their homes.

In Milwaukie, Ore., Elite Care is a world leader in using technology to deliver a new transformational model of senior living care. Its Oakfield Estates residents wear transmitters that double as help buttons and room keys to seamlessly communicate with a network of infrared sensors and radio frequency transponders, giving staff realtime access to the precise location of residents around the clock. The remote monitoring system enhances the freedom and security of the residents, which allows even early-stage Alzheimer's residents full, unassisted access to the entire six-acre campus.

Residents' loved ones can access a protected Web site from any Web portal in the world to pinpoint the exact location of their mother, father, or grandmother anywhere on campus.

Each of the 72 suites in the six different houses on Oakfield Estates includes a bed with sensors that detect weight, sleeplessness, and incontinence. If a high-risk resident is out of bed, a special signal is given to the caregiver that personal assistance is needed, without the resident activating a help button. Bathroom sensors notify a caregiver if a resident is in the bathroom for an unusual amount of time.

In-room computers are used by both residents and caregivers to help manage care with medication reminders and electronic health records and also are there for the residents' entertainment and personal use. The electronic health records can be accessed by caregivers, the individual, and family members, if given permission by the resident. Communication between the caregiver, the resident, and loved ones is frequent, which creates a team mentality that improves the resident's quality of life.

Elite Care and Living Independently are glimmerings of what could be routine offerings. This is not science fiction but real working models that are scalable and replicable.

The Move To Electronic Records

At the heart of both of these examples are electronic health records. There is absolutely no way to transform the possibilities for long-term living if our health care system remains a paperbased system. Why? Because a paperbased system will never be able to keep up with growing demands from the government and consumers to have the right to know price and quality information about health services; because a paper-based health system will never deliver the highest quality of care possible, as there is no way of streamlining new discoveries and new standards of care into the workflow; because a paper-based health system simply cannot meet the demands of active healthy seniors, who live in multiple locations and require different levels of care at varying points in their lives, to enjoy the type of long-term living that a scientific- and technology-based 21st century society can offer.

One of our goals is to see telecommunications and information technology utilized to join the resident, the family, and care institutions in totally new ways, including monitoring and reinforcing quality. When loved ones are in nursing facilities, it is frustrating and difficult to communicate on a regular basis with the on-sight professionals who lovingly care for them. Many people would pay top dollar for a daily or biweekly electronic update of their loved one's clinical test results and mental health reports. If the caregivers used an electronic health record, these reports could be automatically generated, or, for an extra fee, they could be more personalized.

A principal reason why the health profession-especially that part that cares for seniors-finds it hard to adopt new technologies is the lack of real market forces. A significant step in facilitating a long-term living system that is rich in technology, fosters independence, and delivers a higher quality of life is to transform the financing system. As long as an untransformed Medicaid program is the principal source of funding for this profession, an intelligent long-term living system will be slow to grow. Even if Medicaid and Medicare undergo dramatic transformations, the government will always be too bureaucratic and too slow to adopt new technologies and new services at the speed of the 21st century.

In fact, if long-term living had experienced the same productivity revolution in the past 30 years as manufacturing and services, it would have virtually no quality problems. Whether the area is financial services, cell phones, computers, or televisions, there is an amazing revolution under way that has not reached the long-term living system.

Individual markets work better than third-party payment systems in increasing choices, fostering innovation, and keeping costs down. The more individuals control their health care dollars, and not a third party, the more market forces will deliver improvements and be able to respond to the changing needs of individuals.

We must increase the percentage of long-term living revenue coming from private payers, shifting resources away from the government bureaucracy and the taxpayer and toward the private sector and personal responsibility. We should pursue incentives for personal saving and personal insurance that would enable the baby boomers to afford the kind of high-quality spectrum of choices they will expect.

Ways To Pursue Incentives

For example, one of the reasons the Center for Health Transformation supported the Medicare Modernization Act in 2003 was its creation of health savings accounts, which allow people to put money aside tax-free to use for health expenses such as nursing facility care and long term care insurance.

Another example would have been the passage of Rep. Nancy Johnson's (R-Conn.) bill to make long term care insurance tax deductible. Other ways the government could improve the quality of care would be to allow individuals and their loved ones to supplement with personal funds the amount the government pays to long-term living providers. These are exactly the types of steps that need to be taken to create a long term care system that is responsive to the needs of the average American baby boomer.

Technology holds much promise. Although technology cannot directly provide health care-at least not yet-it will empower new models of intelligent long-term living that achieve not only a higher quality of care but a higher quality of life, perhaps the most important measure of success for anyone who wishes to lead a longer and healthier life.


NEWT GINGRICH is the founder of the Center for Health Transformation and former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. ANNE WOODBURY is the chief health advocate of the Center for Health Transformation.

Winning the Future:
A 21st Century Contract with America

The dangers are manifold: Terrorism. Judges who think they're God (and who are anti-God). Rising economic challenges from China and India. Immigrants and young Americans who know little about American history and values. Can America survive?

Yes, says Newt Gingrich, and we as Americans can do more:We can create a safer, more prosperous, and healthier America for our children and grandchildren. How? By enacting a 21st Century Contract with America.

The challenges of the 21st Century are great, says Newt Gingrich, but so are the opportunities. The decisions we make over the next four years will determine our future. And no book can be more important for making the right choices than Newt Gingrich's Winning the Future: A 21st Century Contract with America

Employees Bring Own Toilet Paper to Work

Employees Bring Own Toilet Paper to Work

Thu Mar 17, 4:18 PM ET

BUFFALO, N.Y. - It was BYOTP time in Buffalo: Bring Your Own Toilet Paper. A county budget crisis left the bathrooms in a municipal office building with empty soap dispensers, paperless paper towel holders and bare cardboard toilet paper rolls. Employees also complained the bathrooms weren't being cleaned.

"It's almost humorous, but it's disgusting," said Bob Fioretti, who has worked in Erie County's Rath Building for 21 years.

"When people got to bring their own toilet paper and soap to wash their hands, it's like working in another country, a bad country," he told WGRZ-TV. Fioretti said there was waste piling up in some of the toilets.

A county environmental health crew went through the building Wednesday and said many of the bathrooms were clean and on the way to being restocked. Some toilets, however, looked like they had been deliberately plugged, said Kevin Montgomery, spokesman for the county Health Department. Those bathrooms remained closed while the health department awaited plumbers.

"The Building and Grounds Department has been cut severely," Montgomery told The Associated Press on Thursday. Besides losing money, the department has had layoffs.

"Towels and soap were running out, and that was also due to this fiscal crisis," Montgomery said. Replacement supplies couldn't be ordered until the county shifted money around.

The county, on the eastern shore of Lake Erie, is home to nearly 1 million people and encompasses the city of Buffalo, the weathered city that has struggled to rebuild its economy since the steel and grain mills closed down. Since the 1950s, the city has lost half its population and now numbers fewer than 300,000 people.

The county has had to slash 2,000 jobs and cut services to close a $100 million-plus shortfall in its $1.1 billion budget.

Rather than raise the sales tax, it cut funding for personnel, health clinics, auto bureaus, snowplowing, parks, the arts, school nurses and others services. At one point, it was possible that zoo animals would become refugees, temporarily shipped off to other zoos for lack of funding. The county came up with the money to keep the animals home.
----------------------------
Bill's Comment: Imagine if this was in the State of Florida? I can hear the liberals really clamor for the toilet paper tax. I wonder if the City of Buffalo contemplated such a ridiculous idea as well? They were probably too constipated, which may be a good thing, in this case.

Does that mean if you forgot to bring your roll of toilet paper, and everyone else's is used up, you are shit out of luck?

Parents of school children- watch out! You may be next.

A factoid from Bill: In the early 1990's, New Jersey had a "toilet paper" tax. This led to then-Governor Jim Florio's demise.

Retirement Home Prepared for Prostitutes

Retirement Home Prepared for Prostitutes

3/17/05

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Distressed to find aging homeless women still working as prostitutes in downtown Mexico City, women's' groups are preparing a roomy retirement home to take 65 of them off the streets.

Rejected by their families and stripped of much of their earnings by policemen and pimps, the elderly sex workers say they have no choice but to keep working, sometimes for less than $2 a day or just a plate of food.

"I may have two or three clients a day but I can't charge what the young ones do. Sometimes I just ask for food or a hotel room," said Gloria Maria, a kindly faced woman of 74 who mostly sleeps outdoors in a grimy downtown food market.

Funds raised this week will go toward fixing the roof of a an elegant but crumbling 18th century building donated by the Mexico City government to serve as a retirement home for Gloria Maria and others.

Like many of her co-workers, Gloria Maria was raped as a teen-ager and fell into prostitution soon afterward.

Prostitution is not legal in Mexico but sex workers are tolerated, along with the shoe shiners, orange juice vendors and tamale sellers who clog the streets of big cities, creating a gray economy that absorbs millions of unemployed.

While some of these workers can put savings under the mattress for old age, or hope their children will support them, prostitutes often have nothing after a life of exploitation by pimps and paying bribes to avoid arrest.

Few are in touch with their families or children.

"Other people pay taxes and can retire with a pension. We are exploited by society then thrown away when we get old," said one lithe young prostitute, with long blond hair and funky platform shoes.

"We should have the same rights as anyone else," she said at a fund-raising concert for the retirement home Tuesday.

Organizers are collecting funds from private donors and hoping local companies will provide beds and help with improvements to the retirement home like painting, plumbing and rewiring.

The women will be expected to cook and clean for themselves and earn money through handicrafts to help with running costs.

The home is seen as a pilot project and the organizers realize it needs to be part of a longer-term solution for sex workers.

"Sex workers are doubly marginalized," said Emilienne de Leon, head of a local women's' rights group called Semillas.

"They are rejected by society and by their families. When they get old, either they sell themselves very cheaply or they don't have enough to eat. It's a very difficult world."
---------------------------------------

Bill's Comment: Can anybody learn to take accountability by looking in the mirror? Personally, hearing of seventy year old women as prostitutes makes me want to grab the biggest bottle of the pink liquid available.

ACLU Report: U.S. Drug Laws Harm Women

ACLU Report: U.S. Drug Laws Harm Women

Thu Mar 17, 4:51 PM ET

By DAVID CRARY, AP National Writer

NEW YORK - America's war on drugs is inflicting deep and disproportionate harm on women — most of them mothers — who are filling prisons in ever-rising numbers despite their typically minor roles in drug rings, the American Civil Liberties Union (news - web sites) and two other groups contend in a major new report.

The report, "Caught in the Net," is being released Thursday as the focus of a two-day national conference in New York, bringing together criminal justice officials, sentence-reform activists and other experts to consider its package of proposed legislative and policy changes. The report recommends expansion of treatment programs geared toward women, says incarceration should be a last resort, and urges more vigorous efforts to maintain ties between imprisoned mothers and their children.

"Drug convictions have caused the number of women behind bars to explode, leaving in the rubble displaced children and overburdened families," the document says.

The number of imprisoned women is increasing at a much faster rate than the number of men, mostly because of tougher drug laws. There were 101,000 women in state and federal prisons in 2003, an eight-fold increase since 1980; roughly one-third were drug offenders, compared to about one-fifth of male inmates.

"Many of the drug conspiracy and accomplice laws were created to go after the kingpins," said the ACLU women's rights project director, Lenora Lapidus, a lead author of the report. "But women who may simply be a girlfriend or wife are getting caught in the web as well, and sent to prison for very long times when all they may have done is answer the telephone."

Lapidus acknowledged that legislation addressing the situation would probably need to be gender-neutral. But she and her fellow authors — from New York University Law School's Brennan Center for Justice and the advocacy group Break the Chains — make a detailed case that existing drug laws "have had specific, devastating and disparate effects on women."

Among their contentions:

_Many women are ensnared in drug investigations despite peripheral involvement, sometimes solely because they failed to turn in their partners to police. Sentencing laws fail to consider factors such as physical abuse or economic dependence that may draw women into drug abuse or deter them from notifying authorities of a partner's drug activity.

_Treatment programs, to the extent they exist, often are tailored for men and prove relatively ineffective for women.

_Black and Hispanic women are imprisoned for drug offenses at higher rates than white women even though their rates of illegal drug use are comparable. Factors include prosecutors' decisions, policing tactics and selective testing of pregnant minority women for drug use.

_Most imprisoned women, and relatively few imprisoned men, leave behind children for whom they were the sole primary caretaker. The separation can be shattering for mothers, who may lose parental rights, and for children, thousands of whom are placed in foster care at state expense.

The report makes an economic case for change, contending that the combined annual cost of imprisoning a mother and placing a child in foster care is seven times the cost of an intensive one-year drug treatment program.

Several mothers jailed for drug offenses are attending the conference, including Dorothy Gaines, whose 19-year prison sentence for cocaine conspiracy was commuted by President Clinton (news - web sites) in 2000 after she served six years. Gaines says her son, Phillip, now 20, was devastated by the separation.

"He was an honor roll student, but when I went to prison, he just lost it," Gaines said in a telephone interview from Alabama. "Even when I finally came home, he tried to kill himself. He's still bearing the scars."

The issues raised in the report are difficult ones for criminal justice officials as their states debate building new prisons or diverting more nonviolent drug offenders into treatment.

"When there's a woman defendant with children, we generally try everything we can to put her into rehab rather than prison," said Michael Arcuri, district attorney in New York's Oneida County and former president of the state DA's association.

"On the other hand, we're supposed to treat everyone the same," he said. "You see more women in prison because you see more women selling drugs. Some of them feel that, because we were softer on women in the past, they'll get some sort of easier treatment."

Bruce Bullington, a Florida State University criminologist, said drug-offending mothers may win sympathy from some activists but often are viewed harshly by lawmakers.

"It's not just an issue of drugs, but of embedded moral values," he said. "We demonize these women, and it comes back to haunt us in a variety of ways."

___

On the Net:

http://www.fairlaws4families.org
--------------------------------------------------

Bill's Comment: I agree with Mr. Billington's assessment wholeheartedly. These women have issues with both moral values and self-esteem. They should have known what they were getting themselves into by associating with these creeps.

Maybe if they thought about the potential consequences before instant gratification, maybe they would not stuck in the bind that they got themselves in. Play with fire, and you eventually get burned.

Another liberal, tearjerking, sympathy drive by the American Criminal (I mean, Civil) Liberties Union.