FRESNO - The Fresno Daily Republican Newspaper has always invited public comments on its news stories, columns, and political opinion pieces. A summary of the most recent reader comments is provided below. Readers comments indicate predominant concern with the Valley economy and have offered what readers see as causes of poverty and civil despair with the role and functions of the officials at local government agencies, City Hall, County, State and federal government.
For example, Cy Stanton reacts to Republican stories about the welfare state: "While I certainly recognize a moral obligation to help people who truly are trying and just can't get off the ground, welfare, as we know it today, has become a costly monster that has destroyed the work ethic of a generation.
"Jimmy Carter recently acknowledged that the programs of the Johnson era--those that he and others tried to implement to help the poor--have been unanimous abject failures. Even Avis LaVelle, the assistant secretary for public affairs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said in Essence Magazine (a magazine aimed at a primarily black audience) that "Many African-Americans believe that welfare has robbed us of our sense of dignity and has actually made us poorer as a people." (For the record, and before some over-zealous liberal jumps on me, yes, there are more whites on welfare than blacks, but that's beside the point). LaVelle is 100 percent correct. Conservatives have known this all along.
"Unfortunately, president Clinton will only pay lip service to welfare reform and doesn't have the conviction needed to effect real change. The GOP knows that tough (often unpopular) choices have to be made and they're willing to make them--but the American people have to have the courage to give them a chance (like the Democrats had 40 years) before they jump to condemn their efforts."
On July 10th Ron Stordahl wrote that: "I have read The Minimum Wage Bill and while the issue of freedom is sufficient for me to want to decrease the role of government I have long felt that for the electorate the driving issue is economics, essentially happy each voter is with their economic situation.
"But its more than just how each voter feels, rather it is compelling.
If you can't afford to buy what you need, and some of what you want
you have to do without. A sure thing for dissatisfaction, something
you will take to the voting booth.
"The problem should be self correcting, however your article sadly indicates to me that the USA has a long way yet to travel on the socialist road. You show the EU average outlays %GDP of 51.0, yet we are just at 33.5. Those nations are just now considering turning back. It looks bleak to me."
Gordon Williamson writes: " Great article! I just had one point. What if the Republicans played this as an unfunded mandate. Thereby accusing Clinton of trying to supersede congressional authority and revoking the minimum wage increase."
Michael Thomas writes about today's Front Page story on the Web Encryption fiasco of the Clinton administration. Thomas writes:
"What is particularly puzzling to this writer is why all these entrepreneurs, engineers, business leaders, etc. in the Computer field failed to realize that a Democratic administration virtually predicts regulation. Rather than speaking out for the Republicans, they are still sitting on their hands and pandering to the liberals in order to maintain their credentials in the elitist social culture they aspired to."
Fresno DR readers have commented on the Fresno County recession setting in about mid 1993 accounting for about 70% to 75% of the job loss in the San Joaquin Valley. Some important light manufacturing, technical, and related jobs were lost.
The other thing that readers commented on was that during this recession the population of Fresno County has continued to increase by over 10%. Fresno led all large counties in 1995 up 1.93 percent to 760,900. Fresno was followed by San Diego, up 1.19 percent to 2,690,300.
Recovery will be slow in the Valley. And, keep in mind, these numbers are estimates, based on government records such as tax returns and drivers licenses. They are accurate enough fot the State to apportion state-collected local taxes and for other government purposes, however.
Right now, the official estimate is about 2.3 million people in the Valley, and people who follow demographic trends will tell you that's an under count by about 5% to 7% and this is undocumented immigration.
Some local economists at the university who moonlight for the banks suggest the California economy is rebounding. They say we have between 8% and 12% true unemployment in Fresno County. The Fresno DR economists tag Fresno County true unemployment at 17% or more currently.
Along these lines, business owners are telling the Fresno Daily Republican they can't find employees with the proper skills in Fresno County for jobs that actually do exist.
Applicants' basic education skills are inadequate. And there is a fundamental shift in the economic base. It's growing, and there is a tendency to have high-skilled/high-wage jobs and low-killed/low-wage jobs. The middle range in jobs, njow requirs superior skills, much more sophisticated than you used to. We think we're probably on the cutting edge of trying to come up with proper solutions to this problem.
Another popular view is tat the California congressional delegation has not been doing an aggressive enough job to make sure that we keep those aerospace jobs here. They're slipping into other parts of the country. The work is still substantially there. But it's left this area. The consequence is that you've got a lot of small mom-and-pop operations, but not enough jobs for larger and larger numbers of people.
Yet, another reason given by many readers is that California's Central Valley relatively high tax rates, and other factors, such as workers' compel, have driven many of the businesses out of the region. Other states are continuing to aggressively solicit California's economic base. We have the federal government come up with programs supposedly to solve the problem.
Peter Druker, of Claremont Graduate School, writes about how we're moving to a knowledge-based system where what companies need are people who are educated, flexible, capable of making decisions-and capable of educating themselves through the course of their career.
We've absorbed massive changes in the work place before, but it was much easier to translate skills from agriculture into heavy industry with very little training time. During World War II, my father worked in a steel mill in West Virginia. They pulled people who had third-grade educations out of the hills.
Within a generation, they were out of poverty. Literally their first pair of shoes were steel-toed boots that they were issued by the company. We no longer have the ability to do that, and I think it's really critical that we address education and skills development for a long-term solution.
In the San Joaquin Valley we have had firms that have come to us and said, we can't find workers with these skills. We have this huge pool of unemployed people and a lot of them out of aerospace. But they don't have the right skills. A key thing that we see is linking the training providers with business, one on one.
Historically, the San Joaquin Valley schools have been 20 or more years behind times but it's worse now because the problems are much greater. You don't have a homogeneous community. There is a lot of political infighting, a lot of demand for money that just plain isn't there. Look at some of the schools that don't have computers.
There are serious language communication problems in the San Joaquin Valley. There's a debate going on within the Hispanic community regarding whether or not bilingual education is really serving the interests of their kids to become more upwardly mobile. Those are political battles in a lot of respects and not really educational battles.
One of the distressing things that appear to be happening is that because the makeup of the taxpayer base is so different from the makeup of the student body, there seems to be a diminished commitment to putting resources into the educational system. People just don't recognize what a shared interest all of us have in educating our children.
An average person who is working today is living on the edge of bankruptcy. People are just trying to make ends meet and not slip further into debt. And that is the reason why you have so much pressure about not raising taxes. Why do they vote 'no'? Because they don't want it to come out of their pocket.
Not because they don't want to educate kids. Every person wants to see all the children in the system educated. Everybody recognizes that if they're not educated, you have a higher level
of poverty, crime, health problems and so forth. But they just are worried to death, even those in higher levels of income, whether they're going to be able to hold on to what they have, much less commit more to the system out of their existing incomes.
It looks as if we are going to continue to fight this problem of poverty. There's a whole bunch of spins that you can put on it, but one is age discrimination. There's a lot of people that have lost jobs that have been good jobs. Once they get over 50, you find that business is very hesitant to rehire them. And you keep seeing business restructuring and a lot of the losses are in middle management or these production-line jobs. The growth is coming in small business, but they're hiring in ones and fives and tens.
You still have a lot of large businesses doing this restructuring and laying off in the hundreds. The working poor and the immigrant population living well below the poverty level. We talked about education, what's not available to the kids. It's even less available to the adults with no skills who are working very low, day-wage jobs, have no health care, can't feed their family.
Most people who take the risk of coming here, come here for jobs. Whether they're in the underground economy, or working in a sweat job, there still are jobs here. There are not enough people at the lower end of our existing population to take those jobs. And it's unfortunate, because immigrants tend to be economically exploited.
The only way we're going to be able to deal with the problem is at the border, and not let this country continue to be an overflow valve for Mexico. Mexico's economy is in terrible shape. So it's every bit to their advantage to have large numbers of poor people come to this country. And they're not willing to do what is necessary on their side of the border to stop the level of immigration.
There have been studies that have offered relatively high-wage jobs to urban youth in the Valley. And when that's happened, they have found all these middle-class values come to the top. That really shouldn't surprise us, because with rising incomes throughout the world you get lower birthrates. When people have some economic hope for their own future, they start conserving their resources.
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