English-Only Laws Are Divisive and Ludicrous

/ The Old Crank

Fredrick Kunkle wrote a story for The Washington Post earlier this week about a proposed English-only ordinance in Carroll County, MD. Kunkle finds it curious that English-only would be much of an issue in a county where only about 2.6% of the resident are Latino. There is no mention in the article of the recently enacted Maryland DREAM Act, and whether the controversy over that measure over the last year or so might have anything to do with the timing of this proposal.

Later in the story we learn that the ordinance wouldn’t actually do anything:

Kim Propeack, political director of CASA of Maryland, said the proposed ordinance’s only significance is its symbolism. Federal and state laws require that services they fund must be accessible in languages besides English. It’s also meaningless in the private sector, where businesses that are eager to win new customers have embraced bilingualism.

“On a policy level, this is just ludicrous,” Propeack said. “You have to wonder what they’re really trying to say.”

Two paragraphs later, we have our answer:

“Send them all back where they came from,” said store owner Shane Fitzgerald, 33.

One other point that can’t be made enough, apparently. If universal, free, English-language instruction were suddenly made available to all, and everyone who wanted to learn English enrolled tomorrow, (and plenty of people would) that would not remove the obligation to provide government services and information in multiple languages, because it actually takes some time to learn a new language. And you’d need to keep those services and information resources accessible to non-English speakers even after all your current residents have learned English, because more non-English speaking people will be coming along right behind them.

That is, unless you take the position that non-English speakers simply don’t have the same rights as those who do.

There just isn’t any remotely legitimate policy interest behind English-only laws. The government has an obligation to treat people equally and fairly, and not every one of us at any given time speaks/read/understands English. It’s pretty simple.

Most non-english speaking people want to learn English. The way to support people to do this is to invest in programs that will help them to learn. I don’t know about Carroll county, but recent reports are that Maryland has an adult education waiting list at any given time of about 1,200-2,700 people. (And a report from a few years earlier had that number at about 5,000, with the vast majority waiting for ESL services.) Waiting list numbers always underestimate the actual demand for services, because many people have given up looking, or can’t find a suitable program in their community to begin with.

h/t @JohnSegota

Decades-Long Decline in Federal Spending on Job Training and Workforce Development

/ The Old Crank

In a recent article for the Center for American Progress, Joy Moses lists 10 reasons why cutting poverty programs to address the government’s fiscal issues is a bad idea. Reason number three is that spending on many individual programs is “stagnating or declining.” She cites workforce and job training programs as a prime example:

Chart from "Top 10 Reasons Why Cutting Poverty Programs to Resolve the Fiscal Showdown Is a Bad Idea"

Source: Joy Moses, “Top 10 Reasons Why Cutting Poverty Programs to Resolve the Fiscal Showdown Is a Bad Idea”

I went and looked at the OMB spreadsheet she cites as a source and it looks like those numbers make sense, although I wonder if there is a bit of an apple/oranges problem when comparing federal job programs from 1972 with 2012. I’m also not sure why she compares the 2007 investment with 1972’s expenditure, when it looks like job training spending spiked even higher in the late 70s-1980. (I assume there is a good reason, I just don’t know what it is.) But none of that takes away from her overall point, which should be helpful to workforce/job training advocates.

One slightly more substantive quibble: I’m not sure that I’d describe federal job training as strictly a “poverty program,” since these services are not exclusively aimed at people living in poverty. In fact, as others have pointed out, low-income people currently represent only about half of those receiving job training or related services with federal adult employment and training funding, despite their increased rates of unemployment. It would be useful (and possibly make her argument even stronger) to look at whether the number of low-income individuals receiving federally funded job training and related services has declined in the same proportion as the overall decline in funding.

Senator Durbin: Federal Education Spending Boosts Economy

/ The Old Crank

His comments about Medicare and Social Security got most of the attention, but in his speech yesterday at the Center for American Progress, Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) also came pretty close to taking the position that education should be firewalled off from any further spending cuts that are included in the deal to avert the year-end fiscal cliff.

According to my notes, he said that if the deal includes caps on spending, it should not apply to things that “create jobs and growth and opportunity in our economy.” In that category he included education, infrastructure, and research. In fact, he said that, if anything, we should be spending more in this category, particularly on infrastructure.

He did identify one area where savings could be found in federal education spending: financial aid that ends up at for-profit schools, citing some figures from the Harkins report on the percentage of federal college loans that goes to for-profit tuition and the high default rates on those loans.

Senator Durbin also made the point that probably can’t be said enough: if spending cuts do end up being part of the deal, it’s important to note that $1.5 trillion in savings were already created by capping funding for discretionary programs in the Budget Control Act, and a disproportionate amount of those savings came from non-defense programs. 

Not all Charitable Donations Go to Charity

/ The Old Crank

Whatever your position is on the charitable deduction, it’s only fair to point out that not all deductible charitable donations are invested in what are commonly thought of as charitable activities, such as feeding the hungry. To use the example cited by Singletary in the lead to her column, while tithing to her church may support some of the church’s charitable activities, some of that money likely also goes towards staff and facilities that have worship services as their main purpose. Nothing wrong with worship, but it’s not accurate to characterize that spending as helping to “take up the slack from reduced government services and financial aid to people in need.”

Secondly, while people may say to pollsters that they would reduce their giving if the charitable deduction didn’t exist at all (something that is not being proposed, by the way), it’s also instructive to look at the evidence of what people have really done in the past after tax changes were supposed to have resulted in dire consequences for charitable giving. Both Joseph Cordes (cited in the article) and William Randolph have noted that the evidence is actually not very clear on whether past tax law changes have changed people’s giving habits that much. For example, there were concerns that the lower tax rates mandated by the Tax Reform Act of 1986 would cause donations to drop, but, in fact, charitable giving remained pretty stable.