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Draining food stamp swamp

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is high on the Republican list of programs targeted for reform — and justifiably so. The program has gone from 17 million enrollees in 2000 to about 43 million today, with outlays up from about $25 billion to more than $70 billion. The Trump administration’s budget submitted last February includes major reforms to the program, designed to save $216 billion over the next decade. Now the House Agriculture committee has put forth its own reforms as part of the bill reauthorizing the budget of the Department of Agriculture for the ...

Post-high school education good for kids, state

For most students and their families, it’s not just a matter of which college offers the best education, or where the college is located, or which has the most beautiful or well-appointed campus. The deciding factor — or at least one of the deciding factors — may be which college offered the best financial aid package, and which college’s tuition, room, board and fees will be the most manageable. Money has to be part of the calculus now because college debt in the United States is no trifling matter. Depending on which report you favor, Pennsylvania ranks either first or ...

Graduates: remember your ‘peeps’

This year’s graduates have come of age during two decades of the most intense change this planet has ever known — in all its billion years imagining and reforming itself. For this year’s graduates, change isn’t just constant. It’s both constant and exponential — happening so fast that it seems hard even to catch your breath. What do I mean? Let me give you some numbers — four, 10, 250,000 and 1 million. * Four as in exabytes. That’s four times 10 to the 19th power of unique, new information will be generated in the world this year—more information than was ...

Address campaign finances

PennLive.com Late last month, Gov. Tom Wolf, joined by his Democratic allies in the state House and Senate, rolled out a comprehensive suite of reforms aimed at restoring public trust in the electoral process and limiting the influence of special interests in state politics. Included among them was a proposal to fix Pennsylvania’s broken campaign finance system. “To rebuild trust in Harrisburg, we must have fair and accessible elections for all citizens from our rural communities to our big cities,” Wolf said in a statement. “These reforms have been championed by House and ...

Educational fraud continues

Earlier this month, the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress, aka The Nation’s Report Card, was released. It’s not a pretty story. Only 37 percent of 12th-graders tested proficient or better in reading, and only 25 percent did so in math. Among black students, only 17 percent tested proficient or better in reading, and just 7 percent reached at least a proficient level in math. The atrocious NAEP performance is only a fraction of the bad news. Nationally, our high school graduation rate is over 80 percent. That means high school diplomas, which attest that ...

On gun laws, Legislature is ‘waffle’ house

State legislators characteristically did nothing in 2012 after John Walton, of Butler Twp., Luzerne County, retrieved a gun that a court had ordered him to surrender and used the weapon to kill his estranged wife and himself. Under state law, Walton was allowed to surrender the gun to his brother, Donald, after John Walton’s wife, Stacy, had obtained a protection from abuse order against him. After Stacy Walton withdrew the PFA, John Walton retrieved the weapon from his brother, violating a portion of the law that requires the court to issue an order clearing the return of a weapon ...