San Francisco Chronicle

..."I had such a frustrating meeting the other day on the Hill, where one staffer said, 'We don't have a problem until Wall Street tells us we have a problem,' " said Maya MacGuineas, head of fiscal policy at the nonpartisan New America Foundation. "By the time the financial markets tell us we've gone too far, it will be too late to fix this in any rational way. We are the toad in boiling water, where it's getting hotter and hotter and nobody's really noticing..."… more

...Len Nichols is the director of the Health Policy Program for the New America Foundation, which aims to expand health care coverage to all Americans. He said San Francisco's efforts are so revolutionary that the city shouldn't be knocked for taking longer to enroll everyone... LINK

Once a land of savers, America is now the home of the thriftless. Americans' personal saving rate, in steady decline over the last quarter of century, finally plunged into negative territory this year. No surprise there. In modern America the struggle between debt and saving is a rigged contest. It's never been easier to borrow -- credit cards, subprime home mortgages, home equity loans, payday loans. But when it comes to saving, about half of American workers, including more than… more

"People value the idea of a period beyond their work life," said Yale University political scientist Jacob Hacker, who has studied U.S. pension and health care policies. "Retirement was the victory of the affluent society over the need to be a cog in the machine your whole working life..." LINK

A bill in the state Assembly would require the California Public Employees' Retirement System, the mammoth pension fund for government workers, to offer individual retirement accounts for private-sector employees. The goal of the bill, AB2940, is to increase retirement savings among the vast number of people who have no plan at work and don't have the will or skill to open an IRA on their own.

Although several other states have considered letting their public-sector pension funds run private-sector accounts, no state… more

California has a massive dropout problem: An estimated 25 percent of students fail to complete high school, ultimately costing the state billions in lost income tax revenue, crime costs and public assistance.

Last month, a study from UC Santa Barbara suggested that the dropout problem might be more concentrated than previously thought: It found that just 20 percent of schools account for 80 percent of dropouts, and that many of them are "alternative" schools that are meant to help students who… more

SF Chronicle | Questioning Immigrants' Desire to Assimilate

. . . Two new books diverge from the political approach to the simmering assimilation debate, one looking backward, another looking forward. Los Angeles Times columnist Gregory Rodriguez's provocatively titled "Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America" examines Mexican Americans' self-identity through history, from the Aztec conquest to 21st century immigration into the United States. Rodriguez makes a strong argument that the very… more

Americans have little confidence that assimilation is happening today as it once did. According to a 2006 Pew Research Center poll, 44 percent of Americans believe that today's immigrants are not as willing to assimilate as those who came during the early 1900s. Their confidence is not likely to grow with the release of a new Pew Hispanic Center report, which shows that by 2050 nearly 1 in 5 people in the United States will be foreign-born. Nativists, such as… more

Castro, primaries - food, fuel for blogosphere (San Francisco Chronicle)

It came as a shock that, after 50 years in power, Castro has conceded he is no longer physically up to the job of running Cuba and is transferring the reins of power (well almost) to his brother, Raul. What this all means was taken up at links.sfgate.com/ZCNE by Steven C. Clemons. He says that what is lost amid all the reporting of the moment is that… more

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's diagnosis of California's $14.5 billion budget shortfall: a "spending problem." His remedy: 10 percent across-the-board spending cuts. What about a second opinion?

A spending problem is a chronic condition that warrants more than unfocused across-the-board cuts. Eliminating unnecessary spending would be a more reasonable and lasting treatment. The first step is identifying that wasteful spending -- not always an easy task. The task is made even trickier when some of it is hidden in our tax laws. Removing… more