Fact Sheet: The President’s Plan to Ensure Hard Work Leads to a Decent Living

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary

There’s a basic bargain in America.  It says that no matter who you are or where you’re from, if you’re willing to work hard and play by the rules, you should be able to find a good job, feel secure in your community, and support a family.  President Obama has fought for the middle class, and has made historic investments in making sure that there are ladders of opportunity for those working hard to make it to the middle class.  
The President’s plan builds on the progress we’ve made over the last four years to expand opportunity for every American and every community willing to do the work to lift themselves up.  But there is no one-size-fits-all solution to the challenges we face.  It will take a collaborative effort—between business and federal, state, and local officials; faith-based and non-profit organizations; kids and parents—to ensure that hard work leads to a decent living for every American.  The President’s plan:
• Rewards hard work by raising the minimum wage to $9.00: Right now, a full-time minimum wage worker makes $14,500 a year.  That means too many Americans who are putting in an honest, hard day’s work are living in poverty.  That’s unacceptable.  The President’s plan raises the minimum wage from $7.25 to $9.00, which would directly boost wages for 15 million workers and reduce poverty and inequality.

• Provides high-quality preschool for every child: Let’s give every child the fair shot he or she deserves.  For America to succeed in the 21st century, we must have the most dynamic, educated workforce in the world, and that education has to start early in life. But today, most four-year-olds aren’t in a high-quality public preschool program.  The President’s plan partners with states to expand high-quality preschool to every child. 

• Partners with communities to help them rebuild and put people back to work: A child’s zip code should never determine her destiny; but today, the neighborhood she grows up in impacts her odds of graduating high school, her health outcomes, and her lifetime economic opportunities. This year, the Administration will begin to partner with 20 communities that were hardest-hit by the recession to help get them back on their feet.  Working with local leaders, the President’s plan targets resources at creating jobs, public safety, education, and housing.

• Creates pathways to jobs for all Americans: The President’s plan offers incentives to companies that hire Americans who’ve got what it takes to fill a job opening, but have been out of work so long that no one will give them a chance anymore.  His plan also supports summer and year-round jobs for low-income youth.  This is in addition to his plan to equip Americans with the skills they need for the high-tech, high-wage jobs of the 21st century.

• Expands early childhood opportunity for all Americans: In addition to providing access to high-quality preschool for every child, the President is proposing to make a significant investment in early learning opportunities for our youngest children—birth through age three—by expanding Early Head Start, child care, and other health and education programs.

• Strengthens families: The President is proposing to remove financial deterrents to marriage for low-income couples; as well as continuing to support the critical role that fathers play in enhancing the intellectual, emotional, and financial well-being of their sons and daughters.

The President’s Commitment to Ensuring Hard Work Leads to a Decent Living

• Rewarding hard work by raising the minimum wage to $9.00 an hour: The President believes that no one who works full time should have to raise their family in poverty. But right now, a full-time minimum wage worker makes $14,500 a year – which leaves too many families struggling to make ends meet, with a family of four supported by a minimum wage worker still living below the poverty line, even counting tax credits for working families.  That’s why the President is calling on Congress to raise the Federal minimum wage to $9.00 and index it to inflation thereafter.  The President is also proposing to raise the minimum wage for tipped workers, which has not been increased for over twenty years. The erosion in the real value of the minimum wage has been a factor in increasing inequality in recent decades. The President’s proposal would address this problem by raising the minimum wage and indexing it to inflation so that working families can keep up with rising costs.
o Raising the minimum wage mostly benefits adults, and especially working women: Around 60 percent of workers benefiting from a higher minimum wage are women, and few are teenagers – less than 20 percent.
o Raising the minimum wage helps parents: The average worker who would benefit from a rise in the minimum wage to $9 an hour brought home 46 percent of his or her household’s total wage and salary income in 2011, according to the Current Population Survey.
o For a working family earning $20,000 - $30,000, the extra $3,500 per year from raising the minimum wage would cover:
? The family’s spending on groceries for a year; or
? The family’s spending on utilities for a year; or
? The family’s spending on gasoline and clothing for a year; or
? Six months of housing.
• Providing high-quality preschool for every child: For America to succeed in the 21st century, we must have the most dynamic, educated workforce in the world, and that education has to start early in life. Every dollar invested in early learning and development programs saves about $7 down the road in higher earnings that yield more revenue, and lower government spending on social services and crime prevention. The President is presenting a plan to provide access to preschool for every child, while also incentivizing states to expand access to full-day kindergarten.
o The President’s proposal will improve quality and expand access to preschool, through a partnership with all 50 states, to extend federal funds to expand high-quality public preschool to reach all low- and moderate-income four-year olds from families at or below 200% of poverty.  The U.S. Department of Education will allocate funding to states based on their share of low- and moderate-income four-year olds, and distribute funds to local school districts and other partner providers to implement the program.  The proposal would include an incentive for states to broaden participation in their public preschool program for additional middle-class families. 
o Funds will support states as they ensure that children are enrolled in high-quality programs.   In order to access federal funding, states would be required to meet quality benchmarks that are linked to better outcomes for children, which include:
? state-level standards for early learning;
? qualified teachers for all preschool classrooms; and
? a plan to implement comprehensive data and assessment systems.
o Preschool programs across the states would meet common and consistent standards for quality across all programs, including:
? well-trained teachers, who are paid comparably to K-12 staff;
? small class sizes and low adult-to-child ratios;
? comprehensive health and related services; and
? effective evaluation and review of programs.
• Partnering with communities to help them rebuild and put people back to work: A child’s zip code should never determine her destiny; but today, the neighborhood she grows up in impacts her odds of graduating high school, her health outcomes, and her lifetime economic opportunities. Working with local leadership, the President is proposing to align a number of his signature revitalization initiatives from the Department of Education, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Justice, and the Department for Agriculture to ensure that federal programs and resources are focused intensely on 20 communities hardest hit by the recession. 
We’ve seen this approach work in places like San Antonio, TX where Mayor Julian Castro is revitalizing neighborhoods that have been distressed for decades, leveraging significant private investment to focus funding where the need is greatest and the evidence of impact is strongest.  In San Antonio, the United Way is working alongside teachers and cops to improve young people’s chances at graduating from high school.
The Administration will designate each of these areas as “Promise Zones” through a transparent, competitive process that can bring a number of programs to bear, including: 
o Targeted investments can transform high-poverty communities into places of opportunity that can attract private investment, improve education, and create jobs.  Such investments may include:   
? Targeting neighborhoods to reduce violent crime by providing Department of Justice funding for local law enforcement and community leaders;
? Transforming high-poverty neighborhoods by leveraging Department of Housing and Urban Development grants to attract private investment to tear down distressed public housing and build new mixed income homes, while ensuring that low-income residents do not get displaced; and
? Ensuring students in these communities graduate high school prepared to enter the workforce or are prepared for college by utilizing Department of Education funding to expand early education, after school and summer instructional time, as well as reduce dropout rates.
o Promise Zone tax incentives to stimulate growth and investments in targeted communities. These incentives will includes tax credits for hiring workers and tax write-offs for capital investment within the Zone.
o Helping local leaders navigate federal programs, cut red tape, and use federal resources more effectively.
• Creating pathways to jobs: The President’s plan helps low-income youth find summer and year-round jobs, teaches our kids the real world skills they need to find a job, and offers incentives to companies that hire the long-term unemployed.  These steps are critical to ensuring that our economic recovery reaches all Americans. In his FY2013 budget, the President proposed a Pathways Back to Work Fund to help support job and work-based training opportunities for long term unemployed and low income adults, , and support summer and year-round jobs for low-in¬come youth. The fund would build on the successful efforts of the Recovery Act’s TANF-ECF program, which helped support job opportunities for 260,000 low-income individuals in 39 States and DC, and the Administration’s Summer Jobs+ effort in 2012. The President has shown a commitment to continuing to provide support to unemployed Americans by proposing wide-ranging reforms to the unemployment insurance program, some of which were adopted in the Middle Class Tax Relief and Jobs Creation Act of 2012. Recognizing that the opportunity to acquire the skills to get and keep a good job starts early and through education, the President will also announce:
o Modernizing America’s high schools for real-world learning: The President is announcing a new competition to kick-start a redesign of high schools to emphasize real-world learning. The President’s plan will invest in redesigning high school to focus on providing challenging, relevant experiences, and reward schools that develop new partnerships with colleges and employers, and that create classes that focus on technology, science, engineering, and other skills today’s employers are demanding to fill jobs open now and in the future. In addition, the President is proposing to strengthen and reform our federal investment in career and technical education to better align programs with the needs of employers and with the demands of higher education.
• Expanding early childhood opportunity for all Americans: Today, far too many kids are already behind academically and developmentally by the time they start school, and never truly catch up—compromising our ability to compete in a global economy and sidelining huge pools of untapped talent. 
o Starting early childhood education from birth. In addition to providing high-quality preschool for every child, the President’s proposal will grow the availability of high-quality early learning programs for young children to ensure that the expansion of preschool services for four-year-olds is part of a cohesive and well-aligned system of early learning for children from birth to age five.  This investment will focus on our existing infrastructure of federally-funded programs such as Early Head Start, and the Child Care and Development Fund to expand services and boost their quality.
o Extending and expanding voluntary home visiting: For our youngest at-risk children and parents, the President will also propose a substantial investment to expand voluntary home visiting programs that provide nurses, social workers, and other professionals to connect families to assistance that will improve a child’s health, development, and ability to learn. This will help ensure that our most vulnerable Americans are on track from birth, and that later educational investments rest upon a strong foundation.
• Strengthening families: The President will also continue his commitment to support healthy marriages for all families, including removing deterrents for low-income couples to get married and supporting the critical role that fathers play in enhancing the intellectual, emotional, and financial well-being of their sons and daughters. The Administration proposes to allow existing federal programs, like the child support program, to implement models that get more men working and engaging with their children. The Administration also proposes to allow States to test strategies to overcome financial deterrents to forming safe and stable two-parent households and marriage in federal programs. 

Building on the Progress We’ve Made

In addition to the President’s comprehensive reform agenda to increase access to high quality education for all Americans, the Administration will build on a strong foundation in these key areas that help create ladders of opportunity.
• Increased access to early childhood education: The Administration’s significant investments in Head Start, Early Head Start, and child care funding have increased access to early education for hundreds of thousands of young children. We increased the number of children served in Head Start and Early Head Start by 61,000 and boosted child care funding, while implementing historic reforms to ensure that Head Start children are served only by the best programs. Under the President’s leadership, enrollment in Early Head Start in particular has nearly doubled. The Race to the Top – Early Learning Challenge has rewarded 14 states that have agreed to raise the bar on the quality of their public and private early childhood education programs, establishing higher standards across programs and providing critical links with health, nutrition, mental health, and family support for our neediest children.
• Supporting strong families and marriage: The Affordable Care Act invests more federal funds in voluntary home visiting services for low-income parents and newborns—providing hundreds of thousands of families with services on maternal and child health, parenting skills, nutrition, child abuse prevention, and parental education and employment. The President fought to extend an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) that reduces “marriage penalties” in the tax code for working parents with children. Finally, the President has a long-standing and deeply personal commitment to encouraging both parents to be actively engaged in a child’s life, with a particular emphasis on reaching fathers through partnerships and modernizing our federal programs.
• Revitalizing Neighborhoods: Since 2009, the President has invested more than $350 million in more than 100 of the nation’s persistent pockets of poverty through two of his signature programs. Fashioned after the Harlem Children’s Zone, the Administration has invested in Promise Neighborhoods to support high-poverty communities in building a ‘cradle through college’ pipeline of educational supports to help young people graduate high school and pursue higher education. Choice Neighborhoods helps transform neighborhoods with distressed public housing and concentrated poverty into opportunity-rich, mixed-income neighborhoods, by aligning investments in improved housing with expansion of high-quality educational opportunities.
• Partnering with local leaders to support distressed cities: In 2011, the White House launched Strong Cities, Strong Communities, a unique partnership between Mayors and the federal government to drive economic growth in chronically distressed cities. Through federal teams on the ground and specialized technical assistance, the pilot is helping seven Mayors implement their economic visions to promote strategic partnerships between government and businesses that create jobs, implement strategic city planning, and use taxpayer dollars more efficiently.
• Providing jobs and skills training for low-income youth and adults:  The President’s Pathways Back to Work Fund would build upon success in the Recovery Act, which helped place 372,000 low-income youth into summer and year-round employment and supported job opportunities for about 260,000 low-income individuals in 2009 and 2010. The President’s Summer Jobs+ Initiative in 2012 also secured commitments from the private sector, non-profits and government at all levels to provide opportunities for low-income and disconnected youth.  In total, more than 150 Summer Jobs+ partners committed over 300,000 training and mentorship opportunities, including over 100,000 paid jobs.
o Reforming our Unemployment Insurance System to Help Put People Back to Work: The President has already shown a commitment to continuing to provide support to unemployed Americans and to make our unemployment system more of a back-to-work system. The President proposed, and Congress adopted in the Middle Class Tax Relief and Jobs Creation Act of 2012, wide-ranging reform to the unemployment insurance program that encourage states to adopt work-sharing programs to prevent layoffs, help the unemployed start new businesses, and give states authority to run pilots helping workers on unemployment insurance get on-the-job experience designed to lead to employment.
? Strengthening economic security for all working Americans through tax relief: As part of the end-of-year fiscal deal, the Obama Administration secured permanent middle-class tax relief, preventing a $2,200 income tax increase this year for the typical family of four. The President fought hard to include extensions of Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and Child Tax Credit improvements that provide critical assistance to 15 million low- and moderate-income working families with children. 

The two leaders discussed the world economy and President Obama's plan to pursue a U.S.-European Union free trade agreement, which was mentioned in his State of the Union address earlier this week.

Here’s a quick glimpse at what happened this week on WhiteHouse.gov.

Cecilia Muñoz, Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, answers questions from the public about immigration reform and President Obama's State of the Union Address in an “Open for Questions” session moderated by Elianne Ramos from LATISM.

view all related blog posts

View the original article here

Chart Of The Week: China’s Pollution Crisis Is Worse Than Living In A Smoking Lounge

So it turns out that burning nearly as much coal as the rest of the world combined is not good for public health.

“Beijing’s daily peak and average concentrations of PM2.5, the airborne particulate matter that raises risks for lung and heart diseases, as measured by the U.S. Embassy. The 2013 daily average was 194 micrograms per cubic meter, with an intraday peak of 886 on Jan. 12, the data show. By contrast, PM2.5 levels averaged 166.6 in 16 airport smoking lounges in the U.S.” (Via Bloomberg)

Significantly, though, as one Brigham Young University professor points out, “Unlike cigarette smoking, exposure to ambient air pollution is involuntary and ubiquitously effects entire populations.”

And that reminds me of the line from the Hitchock-esque movie, Diabolique, where a man says to the femme fatale as she lights up a cigarette, “Second-hand smoke kills, you know.” Blowing smoke in his face, she (Sharon Stone, of course) replies, “Not reliably.”

Living in Beijing kills far more reliably. Indeed, during the peak pollution weekend, “the number of emergency room patients with heart attacks roughly doubled” at one hospital.

A World Bank study performed with China’s national environmental agency, concluded “outdoor air pollution was already causing 350,000 to 400,000 premature deaths a year. Indoor pollution contributed to the deaths of an additional 300,000 people, while 60,000 died from diarrhea, bladder and stomach cancer and other diseases that can be caused by water-borne pollution.”

And that was in 2007! One can only imagine what the deaths from pollution in China are now that it burns 40% more coal than it did 6 years ago

jQuery(document).ready(function(){jQuery('#comment_submit').click(function(){if(jQuery('#comment_check:checked').length

View the original article here

With ‘Legit,’ FX Tackles Disability, Independent Living, And Sex—And Makes It All Very Funny

Over at The New Republic earlier this week, I wrote about how FX’s new comedy Legit, which premieres tonight at 10:30, encapsulates an underlying theme that animates all of the network’s programming: what does it mean to be a legitimate and successful American man? While not ever FX watcher is loyal to the network’s entire lineup, if you drop in on its comedies and dramas, you’ll find men dealing with everything from how to be better fathers to their children than their own were, coping with the consequences of sexual double-standards, and grappling with downward mobility or weaker economic positions than their partners. Legit, an enormously agreeable show that’s simultaneously sweeter and tarter than many of FX’s offerings, fits in that formula and expands it in some exciting new directions.

Legit has a relatively simple premise: a stand-up comic, Jim (stand-up comedian Jim Jeffries), who lives with his divorced friend Steve (Second City alumn Dan Bakkedahl), who he met when Jim came to live with Steve’s family as an exchange student (Steve tells his mother, who hates Jim, at one point that “I wanted a Swedish female!”), decides to become more “legitimate,” with a vague sense of what that might mean. But he finds some purpose when Steve encourages Jim to reconnect with Steve’s younger brother Billy (DJ Qualls), who has muscular dystrophy, and who is confined to an assisted-living facility. Deciding that Billy, who is 31, has been overly coddled and needs to experience more of life, Jim first takes it upon himself to break Billy out of the facility for occasional adventure, and then decides to move Billy in with him and Steve and begin caring for him. The show, run by Peter O’Fallon, starts off a bit rough around the edges. But it grows quickly in its first couple of episodes, and Legit‘s portrayal of both life with disability and the friendships among maturing men has the potential to be something special.

To start with, it’s very funny. Many of the stories are drawn directly from Jeffries’ experiences with his friend with muscular dystrophy or O’Fallon’s helping to care for his father, who died of ALS. Much of the punch of Jim’s stories comes from his character’s utter lack of social awareness. Sometimes, he’s hilariously entitled, spinning out a fantasy about having a child with a terminally ill woman who will die once their child is old enough to get him beers from the fridge, saving him from having to be a good husband, and guaranteeing that his child will always be grateful. And in other moments, that lack of respect for social norms mean Jim’s capable of caring for Billy without inhibition, whether he’s helping the other man urinate because he’s decided the bottle Billy uses is a genius invention, or helping him through the awkwardnesses of Skpye dates and cybersex. Jim may believe that Billy’s going to be the perfect wing man, and that taking him out and helping him develop a social life may mean that he’s “going to get so much pussy.” But despite his frattish inclinations, Jim spends a lot more time hanging out with Billy at home than taking him out and making use of him. If selfishness set Jim on his quest to become legitimate, it seems that once he’s started visiting Billy again, Jim finds himself in it for the pure enjoyment of Billy’s company—and the joy of tweaking Billy’s mother, Janice.

Steve is an appealing straight man to Jim’s wildness, and an ongoing illustration of the limitations of Jim’s approach to life, and the practical realities of caring for someone with muscular dystrophy. When the two men take Billy on an exuberant road trip to a Nevada brothel so he can lose his virginity, they deposit him in a room with a cheerful prostitute (and Jeffries real-life girlfriend), only for Steve to realize that he’s forgotten to undress his brother. After Jim hands out dating tips to Steve and Billy, Steve initially finds success with an attractive woman from his office by complimenting her eyes, only to end up stuck with variations on that theme after he finds he doesn’t have anything else to talk to her about. Good intentions and low inhibitions aren’t enough, as it turns out, to navigate every situation or to negotiate a truly fulfilling life.

While it might have been preferable to have an actor with muscular dystrophy playing Billy, Qualls turns in a very funny, physically astute performance that’s enriched rather than inhibited by Billy’s limited mobility. And Legit‘s done better in other areas. Nick Daley, who has Prader-Willi Syndrome, as Billy’s roommate Rodney, who does an impressive Donald Trump impersonation and is a genius at Wii bowling, skills that help him fit in just fine during a rager at Jim and Steve’s house, and the morning after, when he, Steve, Jim, and Ramona, a nurse from the long-term care facility marathon Dance Moms. And Daley isn’t the only one, though I’ll avoid discussing those other performances until the episodes have aired. As the world of the show expands, Legit has the potential to become a showcase for actors with disabilities, an important service for viewers at home, and a key niche in the Hollywood economy, where work for actors with disabilities is often highly episodic. That its only real competition is Glee says a great deal about the state of Hollywood’s representations and employment of actors with either physical or intellectual disabilities.

I hope to see Legit do better on its female characters, who initially are sorted into buzzkill and saint categories, though subsequent episodes show signs of improvement and warmth. But it’s exciting to see Legit get better with each of the three episodes sent to critics in advance of the premiere. And it’s even better to see a show do the right thing in giving work to actors with disabilities and putting issues like sexuality, independent living, and nursing care on television, and to do it with charm, love, and wicked humor, rather than the taste of spinach or the condescension of a Very Special Episode.

View the original article here