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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Grainne who wrote (22127)	5/24/1998 9:18:00 PM
From: Rambi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

I'm sorry, Christine, if I spoke out of turn. -I didn't realize you hadn't mentioned this! I thought you had talked about the different schools you were looking into and described several here on the thread. Why does it matter if it's public or private? Why would you get hate mail? We used private schools for eight years until we moved here and I make no apologies for it! We do what we need to for our children. That was I guess what I was getting at in my rambly post before. You do seem to be worrying about this..and you shouldn't. Your first responsibility is to your daughter. If anyone criticizes us for that, and says they would do different given the opportunities, they are either childless or lying. Now, is that outspoken enough for me? (I really am sorry if I said something I shouldn't have)

To: Grainne who wrote (22127)	5/25/1998 3:47:00 PM
From: Ann Corrigan	Respond to of 108807

Hi Christine, Good to see a forum at SI discussing real-life problems other than the stock market<gg> Just finished reading Your post from May 24 re sending child to public or private school. This is a dilemma isn't it. My 7 yr old niece is just finishing first grade. At the beginning of the year she was enthusiastic about school, jumped out of bed each morning looking forward to the day. However, the past couple months she has had just the opposite attitude. Says school is boring. She is attending a public grade school. We're wondering if she'd be better off where the curriculum is more challenging for her. She's been using children's educational computer programs for the last 3 yrs & started lst grade knowing all the basics in addition to reading. That's her favorite past-time other than playing with her friends. Enjoyed your post. Gathering all the info we can should help with the decision. take care, Ann

To: Grainne who wrote (22127)	5/27/1998 8:56:00 AM
From: Zoltan!	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

Clinton's own Labor Department admits the minimum wage destroys entry-level jobs of the poor, even in an economic boom: The Minimum Wage's Disreputable Origins By BURTON W. FOLSOM JR. May 27, 1998 Sen. Ted Kennedy is pushing for yet another increase in the minimum wage. If we are to evaluate his plan, we need to know why we have a minimum wage law and what its historical effects have been. In June 1938 President Franklin Roosevelt signed into law America's first minimum wage: 25 cents an hour, rising to 40 cents an hour over the next seven years (almost $5.00 in today's dollars). The driving force behind the legislation was not the working poor, who were struggling to eke out a living, but the highly paid textile workers of New England, who were eager to protect their jobs. During the 1920s and '30s, the American textile industry had begun to shift from New England to the South, where the cost of living was lower and where Southern workers produced a high quality product for lower wages. Politicians in Massachusetts, led by Republican Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. and House Minority Leader Joseph Martin, battled in Congress for a law that would force Southern textile mills to raise wages and thereby lose their competitive edge. Democratic Gov. Charles Hurley demanded that Congress pass a law to hike Southern wages so that "Massachusetts [would] have equal competition with other sections of the country, thus affording labor and industry of Massachusetts some degree of assurance that our present industries will not move out of the state." Southerners were well aware of what Massachusetts was doing and they scuttled all minimum wage laws before Congress during 1937 and well into 1938. In doing so, they handed President Roosevelt his first major defeat in Congress on any piece of New Deal legislation. "Northern industries are trying to stop the progress of the South," Rep. Sam McReynolds (D., Tenn.) observed, "and they feel if they can pass this [minimum wage] bill it will really be a tariff against Southern goods." Southern congressmen joined those economists who argued that Congress couldn't make a man worth a certain amount by making it illegal to pay him any less. They said that people whose skills and experience were worth less than whatever Congress decreed as the minimum wage would be priced out of the labor market. The Great Depression, they said, would get worse by Congress telling workers, in effect, "If you can't find a job that pays at least the minimum, then you're not allowed to work." The desperate plight of unskilled workers trying to hold on to their jobs disturbed Rep. Carl Mapes (R., Mich.). "The enactment of this legislation," Mapes concluded, "will further increase unemployment, not reduce it. It is bound to increase unemployment unless all human experience is reversed." Mapes predicted that the law would most harm workers who had limited skills and were desperately trying to secure a foothold on the first step of the job ladder. Mapes cited the case of a local minimum wage law passed in early 1938 in Washington, D. C. Immediately after its passage, the Washington Post lamented, scores of maids and unskilled workers were laid off by local hotels. Mapes's prediction has been prophetic: Like magic, the steady hikes in the minimum wage have made jobs disappear. The most vulnerable workers, especially blacks, teenagers and women with limited skills, have often been the first to be fired and last to be hired because their labor is not yet worth what the law says they must be paid. The particularly harmful impact of minimum wage laws on blacks has been conspicuous since 1956, when the minimum wage shot up from 75 cents to $1.00 an hour. During the next two years, nonwhite teenage unemployment spiraled from 14% to 24%. The 1996 hike in the minimum wage to $5.15 an hour had a similar effect: Unemployment among black male teenagers jumped from 37% to 41%. Data from President Clinton's own labor department show that at least 20,000 jobs were eliminated by the 1996 hike. The Employment Policies Institute calculates that the real number was closer to 128,000. Sen. Kennedy would have us believe that what has been good for Massachusetts is good for the nation. That was wrong in 1938 and it's still wrong 60 years later. Mr. Folsom, a senior fellow with the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Midland, Mich., is author of "Empire Builders" (Rhodes and Easton, 1998). interactive.wsj.com