June 2008
June 26, 2008
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers June 23, 2008)
New math for teachers?
Something interesting is happening as school districts start to consider just what to do when a sizable number of their schoolteachers retire.
That’s going to be happening over the next few years as thousands of schoolteachers reach retirement age; not too old to teach, not seeing their skills at teaching our children the important things they need to learn evaporate, but just retiring because it pencils out as the financially intelligent thing to do.
Somewhere in the back of our minds we’re figuring if it makes more economic sense for teachers to retire than to continue teaching under current pension laws, well, then are those teachers smart enough to do the right thing? Would you want your kids taught by people who aren’t smart enough to look after themselves? Probably not.
It’s a complicated business this teacher retirement. About 20 years ago, when Kansas was overrun by fresh-faced graduates who had majored in education, the concept was simple. Make it possible for teachers to retire under the “rule of 85” which means when their age and length of service total 85, they can retire and get the full Kansas Public Employee Retirement System pension they’ve earned. As long as there are plenty of new teachers, those retirees—who are at the top of their pay range—retire, and districts just hire newly minted teachers at lower salaries.
That works out well—or did.
Except now, there are thousands of those near-retirement schoolteachers and not many young new teachers ready to take their jobs. And, remember, if a teacher started teaching just after college graduation, say, at 23 years old, taught for 31 years, he/she would be eligible for his/her pension. That makes that teacher 54 years old and eligible for retirement checks from the state’s pension system.
There’s, of course, still plenty of tread left on that tire for a 54-year-old, but current KPERS rules encourage retirement then, and at the same time make it devilishly hard to keep teaching after retirement, when the full pension would add to income from continuing to teach. The teaching-after-retirement system in Kansas limits those returning to work in their same school district (after taking a mandatory 30 days off) to making just $20,000 a year without their pension being reduced.
That made sense years ago, but doesn’t now, when there is a severe shortage of young, cheap teachers to be hired by districts to teach Kansas kids.
Something that is just starting in Kansas now is a work-around for the problem for retiring teachers and for the school districts that need them to keep teaching. Instead of a district rehiring that relatively young retiree with proven skills and links to the community, a handful of districts are contracting for those teachers’ services. They aren’t hiring the teachers; they are contracting with companies to provide teachers. It’s likely the same teachers who retired, but they don’t technically work for the district anymore, they work for contractors who contract with the district to provide teachers.
The result? No $20,000 a year lid on salaries for those returning teachers, no KPERS payments made on behalf of those contracted teachers, no special KPERS penalty for districts which rehire post-retirement teachers.
It works, but legislators are starting to feel just a little uneasy with the situation. Just 33 teachers are believed to be working for contractors—teaching our kids, but not working for the school district, working for labor contractors who negotiate with districts to fill teacher slots with certified, qualified teachers.
It works out for the teacher, who gets to continue teaching and receive his/her full KPERS pension, it works for the school district which needs teachers, and it works—we’re certain—for the contractor who gets a percentage of the transaction.
But it has a strangely troubling aspect to it. Not sure whether it is just untraditional, or new-fangled, or what, but it feels not-quite-right, just not quite like we’re used to doing business.
Watch this get studied by the Legislature next session, and we’ll see where it goes…
June 19, 2008
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers June 16, 2008)
Yada, yada, yada: I’m not a politician, I pledge a clean campaign, I’ll change government as we know it…
It’s the start of the campaign season: The players have filed for office and know that they’re going to be on the ballot.
Because there is no simple quiz that candidates for public office take, there will be some fairly dumb campaign ploys and some rather ineffective pitches made in order to woo votes.
Now, nobody who ponies up the money for a filing fee and gets a bunch of friends to help him/her campaign wants to lose, or appear foolish, but for us voters, there are some tip-offs that the candidate probably doesn’t understand what he/she is doing or just how to win our hearts and our votes.
Look for challengers to incumbents to maintain “I am not a politician.” That’s supposed to be a selling point. Now, that’s comforting, isn’t it? We’re hoping that people who run for public office become politicians. Politicians do government in Kansas. Imagine how comfortable you’d feel leaving the drain clog to a guy who maintains “I am not a plumber” or your heart bypass operation to someone who proclaims “I am not a surgeon.”
Unless running for public office and proposing to make changes that constituents are going to like is part of a 12-step program, most of us would prefer to think that the candidate has at least some political skills or can learn them quickly.
We’d probably like to think that if a candidate with ideas and goals that we like gets elected, he/she would be politician enough to get at least some of those ideas into law. That’s why we’re being asked to elect them.
Another of those ineffective pitches that we’ll hear is that everyone is going to run a “clean” campaign, whatever that means. Now, there’s no problem with a candidate telling us what he/she wants to do and how proud we’d be if that candidate can just get elected.
But there’s nothing wrong with telling voters why the incumbent shouldn’t be returned to office. If the incumbent has voted against the interests of the district, or has been ineffective, or has appealed to just a narrow segment of the district’s voters, well, there’s no harm in pointing that out. That’s not dirty campaigning—as long as the candidate is telling the truth—it’s just salesmanship, which is what most of politics is about.
There’s an old ploy being used in some races, including one for Congress, in which a candidate offers up a “clean campaign pledge” for his/her opponent to sign. That’s a little presumptuous. Chances are good that any candidate who would sign such a pledge has already shown that he/she is willing to be bullied and who wants to elect a representative who can be bullied? I’d like a candidate who can chew nails, not one who meekly decides that the other candidate can choose what’s clean and what isn’t.
If it’s true, it’s clean. It’s not “dirty” because it reflects badly on another candidate. That’s for kindergarten elections, not the rough-and-tumble of grown-up politics.
Oh, and there are candidates out there who vow to change politics and government as we know it—and apparently in just days after being elected. It’s like turning around a car in your garage. It takes time and sometimes almost imperceptible movement. It’s possible, but not overnight. Anyone who believes that dramatic change in government is just a vote away, well, you gotta wonder whether those people ought to be voting…
At best, you can look for a candidate with decent political skills and decent social skills—because politics is largely about convincing fellow politicians that new ideas are workable and politically practical.
Nobody’s going to turn around government, slash taxes, eliminate waste, straighten our teeth and regrow our hair overnight.
But someone with decent skills and who is willing to tell us what those skills are can make things a little better for all of us. It’s just going to take time…
June 12, 2008
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers June 9, 2008)
Drug testing the sick poor
Kansas Republicans recently adopted a new state party platform—generally a risky proposition in any political climate but particularly dicey for this year’s election cycle—that essentially requires drug and alcohol testing of poor people who need health care.
Now, the Republican Party of Kansas at least institutionally believes that Kansans who are down on their luck and who need health care ought to get it. It’s generally accepted that it is the responsibility of the state to provide that health care.
Nothing wrong there, Democrats believe it, too. We’re betting that even folks who haven’t declared a party preference somewhere in their hearts believe that the state has a responsibility to care for the poor.
But, that’s not often an ideal that you see blended with drug testing.
It’s an interesting concept and it is either going to be a big seller among voters who care about party platforms or it will generate outrage or maybe just discomfort among voters who hear about it.
And, at some point, some hapless Republican candidate for the House or Senate is going to wander onto a doorstep where the canny resident is going to ask about this drug/alcohol testing of poor sick people.
You have to wonder how it’s going to play.
The concept, of course, is that government generally tries to help people who help themselves, and if you’re a Kansan and you can’t afford health care that you need, it’s probably a good idea to make sure you are as healthy as possible to minimize the burden that your health care causes your fellow Kansans.
Now, that’s a little high-flown, of course, but it’s probably how everyone wishes that Medicaid and other social services for the poor operated.
But the GOP platform says “…those individuals who utilize public dollars to pay for health care should be required to pass drug and alcohol screenings to receive those benefits.”
There was an attempt in the Kansas House this winter to put something similar into a health-care bill, but it didn’t last long.
Somehow, the drug/alcohol testing has a funny ring to it. Alcohol, of course, is legal, if you’re at least 21 years old, and if consumption of alcohol has something to do with a poor person’s health, he/she sure ought to be warned about it. But to deny services to people with alcohol in their bloodstreams sounds a little grisly.
There’s probably some case to be made for poor people who are using illegal drugs, where a test might be the best way to initiate some sort of counseling or treatment to discourage drug use. But for someone with a chronic health condition, well, it has a bit of an off-taste to it, doesn’t it?
The Republican platform doesn’t mention whether any services should be denied to poor sick people who smoke.
None of this stuff may matter to most Kansans, because it’s hard to remember the last dinner table discussion about facets of any political party’s platform…the wish list of each party’s most annoyingly hidebound members.
But you have to wonder why, just in case a copy of the party platform makes it out of the boiler room, the Republican Party would put the drug/alcohol screening in what is supposed to be the most generalized statement of party-wide beliefs. Unless, it is to further isolate and identify the party’s “true believers” and see whether those true believers can be elected to public office.
The testing is just an interesting little facet of the platform that took more than an hour’s debate to adopt last month and for some party members it is probably relatively important. We’re guessing for most Republicans running for the Kansas House or the Kansas Senate the best way to deal with the platform if asked is to say, “Haven’t seen it. Is there one printed up somewhere?”
June 5, 2008
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers June 2, 2008)
Budget slump here?
It is not quite time for gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, but something very important—or at least what seems important now—is happening in state government.
At the close of business for the month of May, the Kansas Department of Revenue totaled up the tax revenue the state had taken in for the month, and the figure was $613 million. Not a bad month’s work.
But…that revenue from taxes was $51 million less than the state’s budget experts had predicted. It doesn’t mean that the state is broke, that it won’t be able to make payroll or send out state aid to schools and care for the poor and sick next month, but it eats away at the balance in the state’s checkbook.
What probably means most from that drop in expected revenue is where the shortfalls occurred, and what that says about life in Kansas.
It’s just a one-month drop—so far—but it probably means something when personal income tax receipts are $37 million or 9.4 percent less than expected. April’s personal income tax receipts were down $2 million, nothing very serious.
But the drop in income tax receipts—and that basically is the state income tax that is being withheld from your paycheck by your employer—means something is happening.
As a state, Kansans are making less money than they did in April.
There may be fewer people working, which isn’t a good thing, or maybe Kansans are working fewer hours or their pay is being reduced. Whatever’s happening isn’t good for Kansans or the state economy or state government that uses Kansans’ tax money to provide services that we expect from the state.
Does any of this sound familiar? Like the national news stories that say what’s happening in the United States as a whole? It does. But this is Kansas, this is local news.
The drop in income—after all, when income of Kansans drops so does the income tax revenue the state receives—has for the past several months been playing out in another venue of state government.
Sales tax revenues have been dropping for several months.
The numbers are smaller—May’s state sales tax receipts were $4.3 million less than expected, at a still sizable $138.6 million. That means Kansans bought probably $100 million less in stuff in May than was predicted. It means something—think it through for yourself. You know what you pay sales tax on: food, clothes, toys, and books, nearly everything that you buy. And, if Kansans aren’t spending their money on things that they pay sales tax on, they are probably spending it on motor fuel which has a tax, of course, but not a sales tax, or maybe paying down debts or saving the money.
From July 1, 2007, until the end of May, sales tax receipts were $51 million less than the year before. That’s a lot of stuff—figure maybe $1 billion worth—not bought on which Kansans pay sales tax. That says something is happening out there in the economy. Because Kansans probably don’t have all the stuff they want yet, the money is just not being spent in the local grocery, hardware, department stores, or maybe at the car dealerships.
All of that revenue not being received points to next year’s legislature spending less money than we’re used to seeing spent. And while everyone is against big-spending government, when it comes to spending on things important to us—say education or health care for the poor or law enforcement—well, that’s different. Cut the spending on something else, please.
Now, it could be that Kansans in May were just saving their money to spend in June. Or, it could be that Kansans were earning more money than they wanted or needed and retired or quit their jobs or decided to grow their own food and make their own clothes. But probably not.
Something’s happening right here in Kansas, it appears. The trend doesn’t look good, does it?