The Youngest Finishes College

Our youngest son, Zach, graduated Saturday from Drury University with a degree in musical composition. It’s been an arduous journey, taking more than six years. Zach carried a huge load his last semester, 18 hours, and earned an A in every course. He did this while working 30 hours a week to help pay for school.

I’m glad Zach felt nurtured in music growing up. All three of our sons took piano lessons when young and all did quite well. But only Zach stuck with it, and he has become not only a skillful musician, but a talented composer as well.

Thankfully, Zach persevered. As a kid, I dragged Zach and his two older brothers out to play baseball quite a bit. His brothers loved it; Zach preferred to be about anywhere else.

Lately I’ve grown closer to Zach’s view in his disdain for watching sports as a waste of time. But it’s never a waste to listen to music.

Zach accomplished his school progress without a great deal of financial help from me. Now comes the difficult part: finding a job in his field — and paying back student loans.

Shortsighted Solution

Congress, looking for ways to remedy the “fiscal cliff,” is seriously considering cutting the availability of charitable deductions that have been in place since income tax collections began nearly a century ago. Such a plan would be a shortsighted solution, for it would end up costing the government more in the long run.

Lawmakers in favor of the proposal say those who itemize their taxes and who tithe aren’t likely to stop because they no longer can claim the deductions. In theory, that is correct. But in reality, churches likely will be taking in much less income if churchgoers are even more strapped than they are now.

And if church income goes down appreciably that means many of the free services provided to help people no longer would be available. These include soup kitchens, homeless shelters, addiction recovery centers, and after-school programs.

Without those in place, there likely will be a lot more homeless people looking for food, addicted people in need of treatment and latchkey kids getting into trouble.

The government will pick up the slack when people end up in jail, hospitals or mental health facilities because the programs that kept them from falling through the cracks are no longer affordable at churches.

Jobs and Insurance Coverage

The full impact of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, on employers is just more than a year away, but companies already are devising ways to circumvent footing the bill.

The bill, in part, is designed to tie adequate health care coverage to jobs. Starting Jan. 1, 2014, companies with more than 50 employees must provide health insurance to full-time workers or face a $2,000 per-employee government penalty.

Some companies already have announced plans to pass costs on to customers to accommodate the bill. But others are maneuvering to skirt the law by keeping a cadre of part-time workers so they won’t have to pay for their coverage.

Obamacare defines a full-time employee as anyone who works 30 hours a week. So, beginning a year from now, there will be a lot of restaurants and retail stores scheduling workers no more than 29 hours per week.

Rather than fix the problem of uninsured workers, Obamacare will result in a lot of people having to hold down two four-day-a-week jobs just to pay the bills. We will have a lot more people working service jobs in this country, but they won’t be better off regarding health insurance.

Demographic Realities

There is a job opening at my office and I hope we don’t hire another white male.

Our staff of 10 is all white. Seven of the employees are men. Eight of the workers are older than 40. That doesn’t make us demographically representative of the country, or our readers.

I’ve heard the argument that we should hire the “most qualified candidate,” but it seems strange how that person time and again happens to be white. There also is the reality that Springfield is one of the whitest cities in the country. Well, it might be time to look beyond the normal pool of candidates.

While I’m not in favor of quotas, it just makes demographic and ultimately economic sense to diversify the staff. The denomination we cover in the magazine is 40 percent non-white. While white writers like me try to do their best understanding culture from a black, Hispanic, Native American or Asian viewpoint, perhaps a non-white staff member could bring a more authentic perspective to an article. However subtle, when the four primary staff writers are all middle-aged or elderly white males, the articles have a homogenous tone to them.

I’m glad there are more ethnic minorities among the 800 employees in the organization than when I started 13 years ago. There are even a couple of African-American executives. But the reality is, if you want to find a non-white person in the complex, the best odds are to look in the kitchen.

Of course not hiring a minority for the post might not be the worst outcome. That would be if the powers to be decide to eliminate the position entirely. In this economy, that might happen.

The Real Twinkies Tragedy

Americans have raided grocery store shelves across the country to stock up on Twinkies, Ding Dongs and Ho Hos now that the 85-year-old manufacturer is in liquidation.

I find it amusing that people are getting so sentimental about a company that promotes junk foods. There is no such outcry when a magazine goes out of business.

Hostess built its trade largely by helping generations of Americans grow fat. There won’t be any shortage of junk food options now that Hostess has gone belly up.

But the real tragedy here is not the demise of Twinkies; it’s the unwillingness of workers to compromise in order to stay employed. Hostess workers went on strike and the company opted to go out of business rather than engage in prolonged negotiations with its bakers’ union.

That means 18,500 more Americans have lost their jobs, in three dozen plants and 565 distribution centers. Food is one of the few commodities that we don’t import en masse from China.

“Our members decided they were not going to take any more abuse from a company they have given so much to for so many years,” Frank Hurt, the bakers’ union president, said Friday.

Those union workers who refused to take pay, health insurance and pension cuts are living in denial. Years into a recession isn’t the time to be demanding more concessions from your employer. It’s hard enough for college graduates to find work today, let alone factory workers.

There isn’t a plentiful choice of any kind of job today, unless you happen to be an airplane pilot or physician. No matter if wages and benefits have been cut, it’s better to keep a job that to force your company into insolvency to prove a point.

Election Choices

Mercifully, Election Day — and an end to all the snarky campaign banter — is just over a week away. Unlike four years ago, the outcome is in doubt. Barack Obama rode a wave of hope and excitement to the White House in 2008. However, even ardent supporters are muted this time around, and many have abandoned the president altogether.

Obama has failed to deliver on promises to turn the economy around, and just as with many other recent presidential campaigns, this one likely will hinge on how voters believe they will be impacted in their pocketbooks. Despite being in office for four years, Obama continues to blame President Bush, Republican lawmakers and many others for the faltering economy and even escalating deficit. As we’ve seen with the deaths of U.S. embassy personnel Libya, the president refuses to take blame for anything that goes wrong under his watch. A little humility might win him some votes.

Mitt Romney has ridden a wave of anti-Obama sentiment, but has failed to fully capitalize because he still has plenty of sticky issues. By repeating the same lines for three debates he appears robotic. Many see him primarily as a rich businessman-turned-politician out of touch with the problems of common folk. And he is yet another old white guy nominated by the GOP, albeit healthier than his predecessors.

In addition to the economy, the election will be determined by which party better motivates voters to get to the polls. An unenthusiastic base could spell trouble for Obama, if millions decide to skip voting rather than reward him for another four years of mediocrity. For Romney, it will depend on energizing evangelical voters, many of whom would have to ignore their beliefs that Mormonism is an aberrant religion.

I’ve talked to several people who don’t think it matters who is in the White House, although obviously these men paint starkly different portraits of America’s future. I can’t really blame a jaded electorate. The candidates have spent months not so much spelling out what they would do in the next four years, but instead focusing on how to best demean the opponent.

Print Journalism Slide Continues

I’m afraid those of us who make a living from print journalism are deceiving ourselves. The loss of revenue and subscribers continues unabated in an era when most readers don’t want to bother paying for content they think they can find for free on the Internet.

The announcement by Newsweek last week that it would cease publication after 79 years is a case in point. At 1.5 million subscribers, Newsweek certainly has many more readers than a lot of publications going belly up. But the subscriber base has dropped in half in the past seven years and advertising is virtually non-existent. The periodical has been bleeding red ink for years.

But CEO Baba Shetty failed to face reality when he told The Wall Street Journal that Newsweek would gain “hundreds of thousands” of online subscribers at $25 annually during the next year. Currently Newsweek has just 27,000 online-only subscriptions.

Advertisers who shunned the print edition won’t flock to Newsweek’s website. Neither will readers. News has been missing from Newsweek for a long time. Most cover stories these days are first-person opinion pieces with no sources. Newsweek is a shell of its former self, masquerading as a current events resource. 

Nearly all magazines are in financial trouble. My former employer, Christianity Today, last week let go Senior Associate Editor Mark Moring, who had worked for the company for 19 years. I hope the day never comes when CT goes out of business, because it truly provides a clarion voice for the evangelical world.

Pentecostal Evangel, where I now work, isn’t immune from subscriber attrition, although it helps that the magazine is distributed primarily in bulk to churches. Yet not that long ago I had two full-time news writers on staff; now I’m a one-man department.

Magazines must strike a delicate presence between having a web presence with easy-access material combined with marketing their product as unique, valuable and unavailable elsewhere. Our magazine doesn’t put everything online for free that is in the print version, and I think that’s wise.

I rue the day when we have only a few magazines left and professional journalists become obsolete. Our society will be ill-informed if all we have to read are opinion-laced blogs.