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County jails housing wrong people

It may shock you to learn that county jails have become the largest mental health facilities in America. County jails and taxpayers dollars are increasingly being used to detain pre-trial offenders and house inmates who suffer from serious mental illness and developmental disabilities; the majority of which do not pose a public safety risk. Although offenders must be held accountable for their actions, most of these individuals have not committed serious crimes. A more effective use of our limited resources is to safely provide supervision, treatment and support in the ...

Seeing both sides of Betsy DeVos

People hate Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. When she spoke at the Kennedy School of Government, students held up signs calling her a “white supremacist.” When she tried to visit a school, activists physically blocked her way. The haters claim DeVos knows little about education, only got her job because she gave money to Republican politicians and hates free public education. Of course, education isn’t really “free.” Taxpayers spend $634 billion a year on it. It’s laughable that activists claim conservatives “cut” education spending. Funds per student ...

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 ...