 |
Alaska Center for Public Policy Newsletter #17 |  |
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Greetings, Colleague... Just as I was finishing this latest ACPP Newsletter, I ran across a United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) press release about the first comprehensive assessment to date of the well-being of children and young people in the world?s advanced economies. The study:
...recognizes that no single dimension of child well-being stands as a reliable proxy for child wellbeing as a whole. It also stresses that no strong relationship exists between the per capita GDP and child well-being. The Report, from the UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre in Florence, Italy, measures and compares child well-being across more than 20 countries under six different headings ? material well-being, health and safety, education, peer and family relationships, behaviours and risks, and young people?s own subjective sense of their own well-being. But here is our tragedy: In this ranking of the average for all six dimensions of child well-being for 22 of the world's most advanced economies, the United States is second from the bottom! This is a failure of political culture and public policy of immense proportions. We can do better. We must do better. Lawrence D. Weiss Ph.D., M.S., Executive Director
HB 56 has the rather innocuous title, ?An Act relating to minimum wages; and providing for an effective date.? However, according to the sponsors, the bill holds great promise for low income working Alaskans. Here, in the sponsors? own words, they describe the circumstances and the promise:
Alaska?s minimum wage has not been increased since 2002, when it rose to $7.15/hr. Since that time, fuel and other living costs have increased significantly, and other states have increased their minimum wages above Alaska?s. California is slated to increase ITS minimum wage to $8/hr next year. Likewise, Congress is debating a federal minimum wage of $7.25/hr. Alaska?s higher living costs justify a minimum wage increase. On an annual basis, the current minimum wage pays a full time employee $14,000/year. That is an inadequate wage for a full-time worker. People who work for a living should be able to afford basic housing, food and clothing, and provide for their families. Raising and indexing the minimum wage is great for Alaskan workers and families, but what about businesses and the economy? The states that have adopted higher-than-federal minimum wages have seen low-wage workers? incomes rise with no negative side-effects, and over 650 economists, including five Nobel Prize winners and six past presidents of the American Economics Association, recently signed a statement stating that federal and state minimum wage increases will improve the lives of workers but not hurt businesses or the economy. See the ACPP blog posting on this issue for Alaskan-specific research and additional resources.
At the top of the left-hand side of the ACPP home page is our brand new custom-built public policy search engine. We have selected over 100 websites that we use on a regular basis to do public policy searches, or searches for data to inform us about policy issues. Roughly a quarter of these sites are specifically Alaskan sites, and the rest are national. However, often the national sites also have Alaska-specific information. We use these sites because the information on them appears to be fact-based and reliable, and because the organizations or individuals behind the sites appear to have values more or less consistent with those in our mission statement. Consequently, when you use our custom policy search engine, a much higher proportion of results will be of value to you, in contrast to using a general search engine where you may have to wade through hundreds of results to find what you need. You can find a list of the core websites accessed by our search engine by clicking on the ?Public Policy Resources? tab on the ACPP home page. However, from time to time we add new sites to the search engine that we think are of value, and these may not appear on the core list. Note also that our engine is built on a Google platform, so the search results will look like Google search results, but with much more focused content. Your comments and suggestions are invited!
The Center for Policy Alternatives is a unique and extraordinary organization. I urge you to poke around their site and explore the tremendous contribution they make to the world of public policy. Note in particular:
A new reference book is now available from the Center for Policy Alternatives for progressive legislators and advocates in the states. Progressive Policy Models for the States 2006 is a compilation of 123 model bills on 100 different topics. Some are updates of older progressive policy models advocated by the Center for Policy Alternatives?like Family Leave Benefits, Hate Crimes, School Testing, Bottle Bill, Medical Marijuana, and Individual Development Accounts. Others have never been released before?like International Trade Agreements, Offshoring State Jobs, Dating Violence Prevention, Mental Health Parity, Fair Prescription Drug Benefits Management, and I-SaveRx Drug Importation.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
 |
