All across New York State, colleges and universities are opening up for the Fall 2017 academic semester.  This annual rite of passage is life-changing for the students and deeply impactful for the families.  One key way that college can impact is the cost.

Attending college can add significant economic stress on the families of college students.  Rapidly increasing costs can lead families to go into debt to pay the tuition, housing, books and fees of attending college.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York collects data on student loan debt in the state.  It reported that as of 2015, the average college debt in New York is $32,200, higher than the national average of $29,700.

Moreover, the debt steadily increased for a decade. According to a report from the State Comptroller’s office, the average student debt load in New York State increased by more than 47 percent between 2005 and 2015.

Yet, for most people, getting a college degree is more important than ever.

By nearly any measure, college graduates outperform their peers who have only completed their high school degree.  For example, the average graduate is 24 percent more likely to be employed and average earnings among graduates are $32,000 higher annually and $1 million higher over a lifetime.  And 75 percent of those with a bachelor’s degree vote in presidential election years, compared with about 52 percent of high school graduates.

Clearly, public policies should be focused on making a college education more accessible, while ensuring that families don’t need massive debts to pay for it.

In New York, there have been some innovative steps to address those problems.

Two years ago, Governor Cuomo advanced a plan to help curtail some of the debts facing students.  The “Get On Your Feet” program offers up to two years of federal student loan debt relief to recent college graduates living in the state.

The program supplements the federal Pay As You Earn loan repayment program and by allowing eligible college graduates living in New York State to pay nothing on their student loans for the first two years out of school.

In addition to offering students some debt relief, earlier this year the governor advanced a plan to lower the cost of tuition for those attending public colleges.  The state’s Excelsior Scholarship program supplements current financial aid programs and allows for free tuition to waive the cost of two- and four-year public colleges and universities for families earning less than $125,000 per year.

Access to the Excelsior Scholarship will be widened over time, with a household income limit of $100,000 this year, $110,000 in 2018 and $125,000 in 2019. However, the scholarship also includes restrictions. It requires students to average 30 credits per year, for example, and finish their degrees on time.

While there has been innovation, both the loan forgiveness program and the “free tuition” program have limits and the numbers of students benefiting is relatively small.  Of course, for the students benefiting, the programs are tremendously important and the programs should expand to meet financial needs in the future.

Yet, the state hasn’t kept up when it comes to providing support for public colleges.  As part of this year’s budget deal, the state agreed to a “maintenance of effort” promise.  Essentially, the state promised not to cut its support for SUNY and CUNY and that the new revenues generated by the tuition hikes would go toward enhancing college programs, not filling in budget cuts.

But the maintenance of effort pledge does not include inflationary costs or salary increases, which means that millions of dollars for those increases had to come from somewhere, likely students’ tuition.  As a result, both the State University and City University systems will be scrambling to cover state budget shortfalls unless the state provides some relief.

Before the end of session, legislation was passed that fills the state gap.  Given the extraordinary increase in state revenues over recent years, it makes sense that the state should be enhancing its support for public higher education, instead of hitting up college students and their families.

Innovative programs to help students attend college are important improvements, but unless the state ponies up more of its share, students will end up paying more anyway or services will shrink.

The new semester offers new promise to college students. Let’s hope that the state adds more support to help make those promises realities.

Last week the nation’s top science agencies released a report on the planet’s deteriorating climate.  The report, State of the Climate 2016, by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration made it official: 2016 was the warmest year in recorded history.  And it was the third year in a row that the record was set.

According to the scientists, the planet’s average surface temperature has risen about 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the late 19th century, a change driven largely by increased carbon dioxide and other human-made emissions into the atmosphere.

Most of the warming occurred in the past 35 years, with 16 of the 17 warmest years on record occurring since 2001. Not only was 2016 the warmest year on record, but eight of the 12 months that make up the year were the warmest on record for those respective months.

The report also found that

• Global land surface temperatures last year were highest in 137 years of record keeping.
• Sea surface temperatures were also at their highest.
• Sea levels were at record highs in the 24 years that satellite record keeping has been used.

The peer-reviewed report stated that with a global annual average CO₂ concentration of 402.9 parts per million, 2016’s greenhouse gas concentrations are the highest on record—and the first year in more than 800,000 years in which CO₂ levels exceeded 400 parts per million.

From a climate perspective, the news is all bad.

The increasingly dire situation underscores the need for more aggressive responses: greater investments in alternative energy sources and a halt to the expansion of new fossil fuel investments.

It makes no sense to invest in new infrastructure to transport fossil fuels with the planet now increasingly destabilized by the burning of fossil fuels.  In order for such investments to pay off, they must be used for years – years that the planet simply does not have.

It is precisely for that reason, that Governor Cuomo should do all in his power to block new such projects in New York.  He has his one such opportunity with his decision on whether to allow the operation of a new natural gas plant, the Competitive Power Ventures project in the Hudson Valley.

The project would import and burn large quantities of natural gas.

And in order for it to succeed financially, it would have to do it for quite some time.  Time, which when it comes to climate change, that the world does not have.

Given the dire circumstances, the state has begun to act.  Other new fossil fuel projects have been scrapped but others, like the Competitive Power Ventures project, are still under consideration.

Earlier this month, energy scientist Amory Lovins laid out a plan for focusing state resources on efficiency and renewables as the best path toward responding to the climate crisis.  His analysis argues that investing resources in efficiency programs reduces energy demand and is so much cheaper per kWh that it could replace much of the power generated by current energy plants.

The longer the world waits in seriously tackling the climate crisis, the more difficult the options.  Blocking the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure, as well as curtailing the billions that the governor is using to prop up inefficient, aging nuclear power plants, and instead using those resources to boost efficiency and the use of renewables, are the best options now. New York shouldn’t wait.

Every year, the American Cancer Society reviews each of the 50 states’ cancer-fighting programs.  The report, How Do You Measure Up, was released last week and identified some good news and bad for New Yorkers.

As we all know, cancer is a classification of many types of diseases.  According to the National Cancer Institute, cancer is “the name given to a collection of related diseases.  There are about 100 different types of cancer.  In all types of cancer, some of the body’s cells begin to divide without stopping and spread into surrounding tissues.”  As those cells spread, they can damage other parts of the body and may form growths called tumors.

Virtually all New Yorkers have had an experience with cancer.  According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), cancer is the second leading cause of death in America.  Outside of the relatively benign skin cancers, there are five cancers that constitute roughly half of all cancer cases in New York and that also constitute half of all of the cancer deaths.  Those are cancers of the prostate, female breast, lung, pancreas, and colon.

Breast cancer is the leading form of cancer affecting women and the second biggest killer.  Yet, it is not the leading cause of cancer deaths for women.  Prostate cancer is a leading cause of cancer in men, but it is not the leading cause of cancer deaths in men.  That terrible distinction belongs to lung cancer.  Nearly one quarter of all cancer deaths result from lung cancer.

The American Cancer Society’s report reviewed how the state combats cancer using the best practices that are available.  In some areas, like colon cancer screening, the programs show strong positive results.  While there are always risks to undergoing any more invasive screenings, generally the risks are far outweighed by the benefits of identifying and treating colon cancer.

When it comes to lung cancer, the screening programs’ successes are more limited.  Yet we know how best to avoid lung cancer: by reducing the use of tobacco products.

The leading cause of lung cancer is tobacco use. Today nearly 9 out of 10 lung cancers are caused by smoking cigarettes.  Not only are smokers at risk, but even non-smokers can be afflicted by exposure to tobacco smoke.  In the U.S., more than 7,300 nonsmoking lung cancer patients die each year from exposure to secondhand smoke alone.

The American Cancer Society report reviewed the state’s tobacco control efforts and essentially gave it a failing grade.  It’s not that the program doesn’t follow the best practices, it’s because the program is starved for funds – funds which are readily available.

And that’s where New York State policy comes in.

The federal government has offered blueprints to the states on how to design their tobacco control programs to have the most beneficial impact.  And here is where the wheels start to come off in New York.

The experts at the federal government’s U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend that New York State spend roughly $200 million on its tobacco control program.  But New York never has.

What is most inexplicable is that the state has the money for the program.  It collects over $1 billion in tobacco taxes and still receives hundreds of millions from the Master Settlement Agreement.  The Master Settlement Agreement was a deal between the tobacco companies and the states to compensate taxpayers for the health care claims that resulted from tobacco use.

Instead of investing some of these tobacco revenues into programs to help reduce the health care carnage caused by smoking, the state’s program has suffered from devastating cuts during the Cuomo Administration, and has lost more than half of its funding.

So despite receiving well over a billion dollars from tobacco companies – who take it from their addicted customers – the Cuomo Administration has slashed funding for programs to keep kids from starting and to help smokers to quit.  They’ve spent the money elsewhere.

The American Cancer Society’s report should be a wake-up call to the Administration and to all New Yorkers – invest tobacco revenues into health prevention; if that is done many lives will be saved.

The nation’s Capitol seems gripped in the absurd.  The Congressional majorities in each house are hell-bent to take away health insurance from millions of Americans.  Despite promising to make health care better and more affordable, the President and the Republican majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives seemingly cannot rest until they have torn away health insurance coverage from low and moderate income citizens.  An effort, by the way, that would lead to misery, financial insecurity and a much greater risk of serious illness and early deaths for those without coverage.

The latest effort came in the Senate, which has spent weeks secretly scheming how to take away health insurance. Their plan, which came after House Republicans voted to take away health insurance from over 20 million Americans, has been to twist the rules of the Senate to make it easier to get a majority vote to take away coverage.

The twist is called “budget reconciliation.” Under that process, the Senate only needs a majority of its members (or just half with the Vice President casting the tie-breaker) to approve a proposal.  Under the Senate’s normal rules, in order to prevent a filibuster, 60 Senators need to agree.  Republicans control the Senate with a slim majority of 52 senators, and on most legislation, Democrats can force a 60-vote threshold, making it difficult, if not impossible, for Republican leaders to pass a bill with only partisan appeal.  Budget reconciliation allows the Republican majority to avoid a filibuster.

When Congress chooses to use the reconciliation process, a special set of procedures must be followed.  Without getting into the details too much, the process places strict limits on what can be included in a reconciliation bill in the Senate — unless 60 senators vote to agree to override those limits. With just 52 GOP senators and virtually no hope of attracting Democratic support on their effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Republicans had to comply with limits on the reconciliation process.

In the end, the Senate Republican leadership cobbled together an eight-page “skinny bill” to advance. They knew that the bill would not become law, but they knew that if something passed the Senate, they could go to negotiations with the House – which has already passed a bill to strip health insurance from millions of Americans – and come up with a final deal more like the House version.

The final product, no doubt, would have taken away health insurance from millions of Americans.  The only thing unclear would be how many millions.

But the Senate strategy failed.  After initially getting 50 Senators to vote in support of moving ahead with a floor vote, adding a 51^st tie-breaking vote from the Vice President, the eight-page “skinny bill” was voted down when three Republican Senators (Collins of Maine, McCain of Arizona and Murkowski from Alaska) decided to vote no.  Their three votes, added to the 48 Democratic Senators in opposition, killed the proposal.  At least for now.

That’s not to say that the current system is perfect, far from it.  A combination of a cumbersome structure coupled with years of unceasing opposition to any positive changes have resulted in a health insurance system that does not provide universal coverage and is financially weakened.  That system does need to be strengthened.

Improved, not repealed.

Ironically, last week offered a relevant historical milestone.  It was 52 years ago that the Senate passed legislation creating Medicare and Medicaid, which guaranteed health insurance coverage for those over 65 years old, people with disabilities and those who are too poor to afford coverage.

And that is what government is supposed to do – solve problems, not create them.  Until the 1960s, it was virtually impossible for older Americans to get health insurance.  So, the government created a program – Medicare – to ensure that older Americans were covered.

In today’s America, the political elite seem to view solving problems as the problem.  The fight over health care is just one example.

New Yorkers have a big decision to make in three and a half months: A decision whether to overhaul their state constitution.  That document requires that every 20 years voters get an opportunity to decide whether they want to rewrite the state’s foundational document.  This November, voters will get that vote.

Having such a provision is unusual, but not rare in America.  Fourteen other states have similar mechanisms in place to periodically ask voters about convening a convention.

Not surprisingly, since it only occurs once every 20 years, the vast majority of New Yorkers don’t know about the vote.  In a recent poll, fully two thirds of New Yorkers were unaware of the upcoming vote to revamp New York’s state constitution.

The decision on whether to convene a convention will likely turn on two questions: (1) How New Yorkers feel about the state of their state; and (2) How concerned they are about provisions of the current constitution that could be put at risk if a convention is convened.  If voters are more unhappy with the direction of New York than they are worried about jeopardizing popular constitutional provisions that exist, then they’ll vote yes.

The process for convening a constitutional convention contains four basic steps:

• New Yorkers vote on whether they want to convene a convention. That will happen this November.  If voters choose no, then the process ends.  If voters approve the convention, then…
• New Yorkers choose delegates to the convention at the November 2018 election. The constitution says that voters will choose three delegates for each of the state’s 63 senate districts and then vote on 15 statewide fora total of 204 delegates.
• Those delegates will convene the convention in the following Spring. The delegates can make whatever changes they want to the constitution, there are no restrictions.
• Finally, the changes drafted by the delegates goes to the voters for final approval.

This vote is a contentious one, with organizations lining up to battle over the pros and cons.  Under New York law, politicians and interest groups that raise or spend campaign donations must periodically report their activities.  Last week, New Yorkers got a peek into the efforts to influence the upcoming question to be put to voters on whether they want to convene a state constitutional convention.

The campaign filings last week showed just how intense the upcoming debate will be.  A coalition of groups urging a “no” vote on the constitutional convention, which they call “New Yorkers Against Corruption,” disclosed that it had raised $635,000 so far.  Much of that was raised from unions: $50,000 from the teachers’ union and $250,000 from a health-care union.

The strange-bedfellow coalition includes Planned Parenthood, the United Federation of Teachers, the Rifle and Pistol Association, the Conservative Party, and many environmental organizations.  It’s not just advocacy groups weighing in:  In addition, the majority party leaders of the Senate and Assembly have urged opposition.  The Senate Democratic minority leader is opposed, and the governor has expressed concerns.

A competing odd couple coalition which calls itself the Committee for a Constitutional Convention, is urging a “yes” vote and has raised $67,000, mostly from individual donors giving small amounts.  In addition, a donor to many liberal causes, Bill Samuels, has spent more than $100,000 to support a “yes” vote.  Lastly, the leader of the Republican Assembly minority has urged support for the convention.

Supporters argue that Albany’s a mess – corrupt, operating in secret, costing too much and that the state’s basic document is old, anachronistic, and contains provisions that are now considered unconstitutional under the U.S. Constitution.  Opponents argue that the current state constitution includes provisions that protect the Adirondack Park, require a sound, basic education for children, require that the poor are protected, and guarantee the pensions of public employees.

At New York’s last referendum for a constitutional convention, in 1997, the issue was voted down.  Voters were unwilling to accept the risks.

As the battle over convening a convention heats up, with corruption trails upcoming and with a wobbly administration in Washington, we’ll see if New Yorkers have changed their minds.