Family & Children

It’s a good news, bad news situation. The good news is an increasing body of evidence shows that children’s participation in high quality pre-kindergarten (PK) programs helps them begin kindergarten ready to succeed. Similarly, there is growing evidence that children who start kindergarten behind but participate in a full-day kindergarten (FDK) program catch up to their peers by the end one academic year. The bad news is these effects often appear to “fade out” over time.

Suburbia, the preferred way of life across the advanced capitalist world, is under an unprecedented attack--one that seeks to replace single-family residences and shopping centers with an "anti-sprawl" model beloved of planners and environmental activists. The latest battleground is Los Angeles, which gave birth to the suburban metropolis. Many in the political, planning and media elites are itching to use the regulatory process to turn L.A. from a sprawling collection of low-rise communities into a dense, multistory metropolis on the order of New York or Chicago.

WASHINGTON -- Attacking real or imagined health care villains, though sometimes necessary and always fun, will not make health care more affordable today or tomorrow unless we also face hard facts and reform our system. It is broken and our leaders know it, but courage to talk about real solutions is scarce, so most stick to diversionary tactics.

The ultraliberals' diversion is to blame capitalism and greed, to pretend that employers could just pay more while insurers and providers could charge less, which would occur under the magic of total government control.

America is the world's most entrepreneurial nation, giving tremendous opportunities to our own citizens andattracting business leaders from around the world wholocate in the United States to realize the benefits of our dynamic labor force. Yet as recent cover stories in Businessweek and Fortune magazines indicate, American workers increasingly feel stressed about trying to balance their work and family commitments, and value working arrangements that can help them find balance.

What prevents the U.S. child welfare system from doing all it can to protect children and support families? Complex social problems? Insufficient funding? Staff turnover? The truth is, the inability to address these barriers is rooted in a much larger problem--a chronic lack of public will. Despite its best efforts, child welfare faces daunting challenges in making policymakers and the public understand and commit to fixing the system.

Many Oregonians face a personal savings crisis that society cannot afford to ignore. For example, nearly half of households headed by adults 55 or older in our state lack such retirement assets as pensions and annuities. Furthermore, among low-income households in Oregon headed by an adult older than 55, nearly three out of five households (60 percent) are without retirement assets.

Health insurance is the gateway to health and to our health care system, yet over five million Californians are uninsured, about 800,000 of whom are children. Having health insurance facilitates access to affordable care from a network of health care providers and shields families from financial ruin in the case of a catastrophic medical emergency.

The New America Foundation is committed to achieving universal health insurance coverage for all people in America. The most promising route to universal coverage is a system that relies on shared responsibility among individuals, employers, and the government. To that end, the New America Foundation has released a series of three papers outlining how to cover all children in California as a first step towards universal coverage. This paper is a component of that series.

For the complete document, please see the attached PDF version. 

As Congress is now preparing a second round of Katrina-related proposals, it's important to bring ideas to the table that will help families achieve economic stability. Hurricane Katrina highlighted the fact that many Americans live in abject poverty, without any assets to draw upon in bad times.

Before a storm sank New Orleans and a pair of Boeing 767s gored the Twin Towers, officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) drew up a list. It escaped notice in the months of second-guessing after the September 11 attacks but took on an air of prophecy within hours of Hurricane Katrina's landfall. There were three disasters, FEMA managers concluded at an August 2001 training session, that Americans should beware above all others: a terrorist attack on New York City, a hurricane in New Orleans, and an earthquake near San Francisco.