News from 2013
Fiscal Wiz Carmen Chu named Assessor-Recorder
Calling her fiscally “brilliant” SF Mayor Edwin Lee named Carmen Chu (MPP ‘03) as the city’s Assessor-Recorder. “Carmen’s exemplary budgetary skills as chair of the Budget and Finance Committee of the Board of Supervisors have benefited the entire city,” says Mayor Lee. The assessor-recorder administers the property assessment system of the City and County of San Francisco. Read the full story here.
Robert Reich on the Minimum Wage
Professor Robert Reich discussed why raising the mimimum wage is a "no-brainer" with NPR's Talk of the Nation.
Sequestration Cuts Will Devastate Head Start
Our leaders often peddle the role of family. Yet with the specter of a federal government shutdown, Washington has put our most vulnerable citizens on life support. While the White House expands preschool, Washington shrinks Head Start. California's poorest kids deserve better. A brain child of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, Head Start has served more than 30 million low-income preschool children since 1965. Head Start cuts, which will trim the number of slots by about 7 percent, will do damage.…
Demand Good, Sustainable Food Retail Jobs to Fight Food Deserts
In his State of the Union Address this month, President Obama called for a much- needed increase to the federal minimum wage. Almost four million American workers are paid at or below the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour for their work, adding up to about $15,000 per year, per person for a full-time, 40 hour per week job. This doesn’t come close to covering the cost of living for a single person, let alone a family. In the food retail…
The Minimum Wage, Guns, Healthcare, and the Meaning of a Decent Society
Raising the minimum wage from $7.25 to $9 should be a no-brainer. Republicans say it will cause employers to shed jobs, but that’s baloney. Employers won’t outsource the jobs abroad or substitute machines for them because jobs at this low level of pay are all in the local personal service sector (retail, restaurant, hotel, and so on), where employers pass on any small wage hikes to customers as pennies more on their bills. States that have a minimum…
The Secret to Fixing Bad Schools
What would it really take to give students a first-rate education? Some argue that our schools are irremediably broken and that charter schools offer the only solution. The striking achievement of Union City, N.J. — bringing poor, mostly immigrant kids into the educational mainstream — argues for reinventing the public schools we have. Union City makes an unlikely poster child for education reform. It’s a poor community with an unemployment rate 60 percent higher than the national average.…
Year Up Bridges the Gap
Students 18-24 years old can get help from everything from handshakes to computer programming in their quest to go to college or get a job, thanks to Jay Banfield (MPP ‘97) and the program he founded, Year Up. “There is a real skills gap in our country,†says Jay.
Goldman School Welcomes Hilary Hoynes
Professor Hilary Hoynes, a noted public finance and labor economist currently at the University of California, Davis, will join the GSPP faculty on July 1, 2013. She will also have an appointment in the Economics Department. She will hold the Haas Distinguished Chair in Economic Disparities. Professor Hoynes studies poverty, inequality, and the impacts of government tax and transfer programs on low income families. Her current projects include evaluating the impact of the Great Recession across demographic groups, examining the impact of…
“Inequality for All” Premieres at Sundance
Chancellor's Professor Robert Reich teams up with filmmaker Jocob Kornbluth in a feature documentary exploring America's widening income inequality. Inequality for All premiered at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival to strong reviews. In the documentary--much of which was filmmed at the Goldman School and the UC Berkeley campus--Professor Reich clearly and compellingly explains the current econonimc malaise in light of three decades of rising economic inequality. "We’re hoping Inequality for All will do for the…