News & Brews September 12, 2024
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Many undecided voters are still undecided
The critical sliver of undecided voters who watched Tuesday’s presidential debate seem to agree that VP Harris won, but multiple media outlets are reporting that this doesn’t necessarily mean these voters have decided to vote for Harris. The liberal New York Times reported, “In interviews with undecided voters … they acknowledged that Ms. Harris seemed more presidential than Mr. Trump. And they said she laid out a sweeping vision to fix some of the country’s most stubborn problems. But they also said she did not seem much different from Mr. Biden, and they wanted change.”
How Shapiro admin is driving up broadband costs
Bridging the “digital divide” between those with high speed internet access and those without has long been a priority in Pennsylvania. But the Commonwealth Foundation’s David Osborne explains that “the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry (L&I), under Gov. Josh Shapiro’s leadership, has doubled the cost of broadband development with regulatory red tape–leaving many communities in the digital dust.” It all goes back to pricey prevailing wage requirements, coupled with job misclassification that inaccurately equates “workers laying broadband lines” with licensed “electric linemen,” who work around “high-voltage cabling.”
Philly poverty rate drops, but city remains poorest big city
The Inquirer reports, “Philadelphia’s poverty rate fell more than one percentage point between 2022 and 2023,” dropping from 21.7% to 20.3% and “marking the most significant year-over-year decline in a decade.” Still, the city is “the poorest big city in the nation.”
Pa. has a bunch of useless regulations
PennLive reports that “a two-year-long review of stacks of regulations in 10 state agencies turned up more than a few obsolete rules, like requiring that campaign reports be submitted on computer diskettes.” The review, ordered in 2022 by House Republicans, was approved yesterday by the state’s Independent Regulatory Review Commission. The impetus for conducting the review was former Gov. Wolf’s COVID-era temporary suspension of regulations, which prompted then-House Majority Leader Kerry Benninghoff to observe that if a regulation could be suspended for up to two years, it may not be needed.
Examining the ‘teachers are underpaid’ narrative
We hear it all the time from politicians and the media. Teachers are underpaid. But is it true? Reason explains, “The answer is more complicated than you might think.” In the 2023-2024 academic year, “the average public school teacher salary was just under $70,000—well over the average for bachelor’s degree graduates ages 25 to 34…. However, salaries have generally stagnated. From 2002 to 2020, inflation-adjusted teacher salaries declined by 0.6 percent while per-pupil spending increased.” Where does the increased spending go? Not to teachers’ salaries. Instead, “instructional aids” have seen the greatest growth. Reason concludes, “Whether teachers are underpaid isn’t an easily answered question. But if you want to know why your local public school teachers aren’t getting paid more, the answer might just lie in the influx of nonteachers on the district payroll.”