The 1944 GI bill helped catapult a generation of veterans into the middle class and beyond, financing the education of three future Supreme Court justices, three presidents and thousands of doctors and scientists while democratizing many of the nation’s leading universities.

In 2008, Congress, figuring what worked once would work again, passed an expanded law that promised the same opportunity to the new generation of veterans who had served since Sept. 11, 2001.

But some of those GIs are seeing their opportunity squandered by for-profit colleges with low graduation rates, high costs and high loan-default rates. In fact, their new benefits might be propping up some schools that otherwise would struggle to meet federal rules.

The failings of many for-profits — and the risks they pose for both students and taxpayers — have been widely publicized.

The average cost for tuition and fees at for-profits is $14,487 — 76 percent higher than the price that the average in-state student pays to attend a public institution. Yet by just about every academic measure, the for-profits deliver results inferior to those at traditional schools.

At public universities that accept virtually all applicants, 31 percent of the students graduate within six years. The rate is nothing to brag about, but it beats the for-profits, where just 22 percent graduate. Students also withdraw at far higher rates —more than 50 percent at six of the schools most popular with veterans. Loan-default rates are higher, an indication that students aren’t faring well.

Still, veterans are flocking to the for-profits. Among the top 10 recipients of GI educational dollars in the 2010-11 school year were eight companies that run for-profit schools, led by Apollo, parent of the University of Phoenix. Why so popular? Online courses, flexible hours and, in some cases, an effective education.

Many schools also aggressively mine the lucrative veterans’ market. Veterans look like “dollar signs in uniforms” to predatory schools, Theodore Daywalt, CEO of VetJobs, told a Senate hearing last year. The reason? A loophole in a federal law meant to ensure that for-profit schools are solid enough to attract some students who pay their own way.

These schools are required to get at least 10 percent of their revenue from sources other than federal student grants and loans. The idea is sound. But in a bizarre twist, veterans’ benefits do not count as federal funds and can be used to plump up the nonfederal 10 percent. The for-profits’ trade association says many schools surpass the 10 percent threshold, but tellingly, it opposes raising the level to 15 percent.

Some schools also stretch the truth or worse. Thirteen of 15 colleges investigated by the Government Accountability Office gave agents posing as applicants questionable, even deceptive, pitches about graduation rates, guaranteed jobs or likely earnings.

This is a shoddy way to treat any student, and it’s a dubious way to invest taxpayer money. It’s just all the more offensive when applied to veterans. As Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) said, the GI benefit is a life-changing “one-time shot.”

His legislation to plug the 10 percent loophole is a sensible response. But until for-profits improve or student aid rules are overhauled, veterans will need to look out for themselves.

But the recent reports of wasteful spending of severance payouts and bonuses on Wayne County government officials have uncovered a culture of entitlement and flat-out greed — all on the dime of taxpaying citizens.

For months, we have been saturated with story after story about the severance payout scandal in Wayne County. Wayne County Circuit Judge Michael Sapala recently ruled that the Wayne County Executive’s Office must honor lucrative payments of up to 24 weeks’ pay and enhanced pensions for 15 county political appointees. These severance payouts will put taxpayers on the hook for a grand total of almost $1 million.

Regardless of this ruling, it doesn’t take a law degree to see that these payments never should have been agreed to in the first place. Apparently, these generous benefits were offered to more than one hundred political appointees to encourage them to retire early. In addition, it has been reported that many appointees received a boost in their pensions. Around 50 of them reportedly took the deal, some receiving up to $50,000 just to leave their jobs.

While many of Wayne County’s severance payout and bonus practices have been called into question as of late, perhaps the worst offender has been largely overlooked. For almost three decades, the elected Wayne County treasurer has exploited an obscure 1970’s state law to pay himself a bonus each year for collecting delinquent property taxes — which is the main responsibility that the taxpayers are already paying him for.

The Wayne County treasurer is the only elected county treasurer in Michigan who has been collecting this bonus. The Wayne County treasurer’s bonus has reportedly risen from almost $16,000 in 2001 to $57,000 in 2008. Perhaps most egregiously, the Wayne County treasurer sought to boost his salary by an additional $73,000 just a couple of years ago, while Wayne County citizens were losing their homes to foreclosure left and right.

In a twist of irony, it was the Wayne County executive who admonished the county treasurer for seeking the exorbitant bonus payout due to the fact that county workers were being asked to take a 10 percent pay cut to offset the county’s budget deficit. While the messenger may have lost credibility, the message has not.

Just because some things might be deemed legal, it does not necessarily make them right. Whether it’s the court ruling that has upheld the payouts to county officials or the outdated law that has allowed the Wayne County treasurer to bilk taxpayers for thousands of dollars for the last quarter century, our laws are not meant to be abused for personal or political gain.

It is the job of all government officials to prudently manage taxpayer dollars and uphold the public trust. These lucrative severance payouts for already highly-paid officials and the outlandish bonuses that the county treasurer has been collecting are an inappropriate and fiscally irresponsible use of taxpayer dollars.

Wayne County government can ill-afford such reckless and self-serving spending, especially in light of the financial problems we are currently facing. These lavish perks are being paid for by the taxpayers, and they deserve better from their elected officials. It is now time to hold county leadership accountable and restore order, ethics, transparency and integrity in our government once and for all.

(State Sen. Tupac Hunter is the Democratic Floor Leader and represents the 5th District, which is comprised of Dearborn Heights, Inkster and northwest Detroit. He is the Minority Vice Chair of the Senate Committees on Banking and Financial Institutions, and the Senate Committee on Economic Development, and is a member of the Senate Committee on Government Operations.)

One of the most popular ideas is the flat tax — a uniform rate applied to all income, without exemptions, deductions, or special favors. The flat-tax approach could apply to individual incomes taxes as well as to taxes on businesses.

The flat tax is a bold idea, which has caught on in many so-called emerging markets. Done right, it could revitalize America’s economy. But my home country of Mexico serves as a cautionary tale for what can go wrong when policymakers try to exploit the flat tax as just another instrument to enhance tax revenues.

In Mexico, the unhappy experience centered on business taxes. In January 2008, thanks in large part to the leadership of President Felipe Calderon, Mexico installed a national 16.5 percent flat tax — officially known as the “IETU” — on all corporate earnings. It was eventually adjusted upwards to 17.5 percent, which is the current rate.

The problems that inspired Mexico’s IETU are similar to those plaguing the American system. Mexico’s code was riddled with an absurd number of deductions and special-interest carve-outs.

Tax code complexity generates massive compliance costs that leave businesses with fewer resources to put toward genuinely productive activities. In Mexico, code compliance expenses involve a transaction cost of almost 2 percent of GDP.

In the United States, citizens spend over 6 billion hours anually filling out tax forms. Research from the Laffer Center shows that for every dollar collected by the IRS, taxpayers incur an additional 30 cents in compliance costs, totaling $431 billion every year.

In Mexico as in the United States, large corporations have the resources and the (perverse) incentive to exploit complexities in the tax code to reduce their taxes. In Mexico, while the official corporate marginal tax rate was 30 percent, many businesses routinely finagled their burden down to as low as 6 percent “effective” tax rate.

To get a sense of the size of that same problem in America, just consider that General Electric paid precisely zero percent in taxes on net income in 2009 and 2010.

Done right, the IETU would have transformed the Mexican economy, radically simplifying tax compliance and getting rid of mountains of existing loopholes. But something went wrong between conception and implementation.

By the time President Calderon obtained congressional approval and signed the bill into law, it looked wildly different from the ambitious conception of the flat tax.

Policymakers, obsessed only with tax revenue, started tinkering — and then tinkered and tinkered some more, to the point that the final law actually made the country’s tax code far worse. Instead of a simple, straightforward rate on earnings, businesses got handed yet another bundle of complexities in calculating and complying with tax obligations.

Indeed, the worst mutation by far was that instead of replacing the old, broken corporate income tax system, the IETU was introduced as an alternative to compete with it. Every year, businesses now have to tally up how much they owe under both the old corporate rate (with countless of deductions) and the flat tax alternative — and then, by law, are supposed to pay the higher amount.

Shockingly, instead of using a simple idea to simplify life, the government managed to increase compliance costs. Businesses have to hire double the lawyers and accountants every tax season, leaving even less time and money for productive activities, and making it all the more likely that they might decide to just avoid paying taxes entirely. Tax evasion today represents almost 40 percent of all (non-oil) tax revenues collected!

The IETU was conceived as a way of streamlining the tax code in order to spur business growth and make Mexico more accommodating to investment. But politicians morphed it into a brazen money grab. The law that President Calderon signed is nothing like what flat tax advocates were originally hoping for. In the process, the very idea of a flat tax has unwittingly gotten a bad rap.

American policymakers need to avoid our mistakes. The U.S. tax code needs to be simplified. There could soon be the political will for installing a national, uniform flat rate. When legislators go about writing that rate into law, though, they must keep it pure and simple — and fight back against any special-interest scheming to recreate the costly and inefficient rules of the past.

(Roberto Salinas-León is the president of the Mexico Business Forum.)

Republican Secretary of State Ruth Johnson is working hard to sell her Secure and Fair Elections initiative, which she said is an effort to ensure that Michigan elections are as secure and fair as possible.

At the same time a group called the Michigan Judicial Selection Task Force, which formed in late 2010, has issued a report containing seven recommendations, with proposed legislation, to make Supreme Court races less partisan and more transparent.

The task force’s top aim is to force Supreme Court campaigns to fully disclose their funding sources. The group also wants a registry identifying people and groups that create and fund campaign messages, including so-called “issue ads” by interest groups.

There is no doubt both efforts are needed; there’s also no doubt Johnson’s needs more teeth. She acknowledged the state must move toward full disclosure in all political campaigns and said that’s an eventual goal, though it’s not part of the SAFE initiative. Her staff is researching if recent court decisions will allow her to require disclosure of issue ads under current state law; she said she would act if she has the authority.

Part of Johnson’s initiative will require quarterly reporting of contributions and expenditures by candidate and political action committees every year, she said. Currently, candidates only have to file one report in non-election years. That’s a step forward.

Twelve bills that are part of the SAFE package have passed the House or the Senate or are being taken up by various committees. How they eventually fare is yet to be seen.

The fight over Supreme Court reforms will likely be a war, in
part because so many influential players like the status quo. The task force report says that in the 1990s, a jaw-dropping 86 percent of Supreme Court cases involved contributors to the justices’ campaigns.

While the public strongly backs full disclosure — 96 percent of Michigan voters — political parties never have.

The nominating process is next. In Michigan, judges are nominated by the political parties but run “non-partisan” campaigns. It’s a sham. In 2010, the Republican and Democratic parties spent $5.5 million on Supreme Court races, compared to the $2.3 million spent by the candidates themselves. The task force wants non-partisan primaries instead.

Michigan’s top court is widely considered one of the nation’s worst, fed by secret money and extreme partisanship. If the task force report doesn’t produce change, it will only get worse.

— TRAVERSE CITY RECORD-EAGLE

While these awful circumstances are hard to forget, let’s focus simply on giving condolences and thanks for the service Clark provided to his country.

He died far from home, far from those he loved dearly. That is a risk that anyone who suits up for military duty accepts when going into hostile territory. Many families in the area have understood that intimately, sending off young adults to serve and, in a few cases, seeing them return in caskets.

We are often impressed by the willingness of those who enlist to serve, despite the obvious challenges they face. We have heard story after story of those who re-enlist for second, third and even fourth tours of duty.

In Clark’s case, that willingness to serve began in his hometown of Addison, as a volunteer firefighter. It was clear in the last week that while Clark had moved away more than a decade ago, he had made a lasting impact on his community.

Friends still remembered him fondly. One described Clark this way:

“Just a regular guy from a small village with one traffic light made a huge impact on the world.”

We couldn’t put it any better. Our thanks go to Capt. Bruce Kevin Clark and all the thousands more who suit up in defense of our country.

— THE JACKSON CITIZEN PATRIOT

This spring I am committed to fight to pass important, bipartisan legislation that will help to preserve and promote our flourishing heritage here in Michigan and across our country.

As our nation’s economy continues to recover, we must balance deficit reduction with policies that support economic growth and middle class families. Unfortunately, I believe the Ryan budget plan fails this important test. Instead of making important investments in infrastructure, education, and clean energy, all of which would help the middle class, this budget instead continues to support the richest of rich by recklessly cutting taxes for the wealthiest among us.

Oil companies would get to keep their tax loopholes, which they have been exploiting for years, and the wealthiest Americans would get an average tax cut of $150,000 according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Following this outline will not get our economy back on track. Rather, this follows the same failed blueprint of the Bush years which ended up driving our economy into the ditch.

Even worse, I believe the Republican budget plan destroys the sacred promise we have made to our nation’s seniors by ending Medicare as we know it. What the Ryan budget plan does is raise out-of-pocket costs for Medicare beneficiaries while preserving tax cuts for the wealthy. According to the Congressional Budget Office, costs will rise for Medicare beneficiaries by $2,200 in 2030 and $8,000 in 2050. This is not the treatment our seniors deserve, and I know we can do better for them.

The principle of shared sacrifice should guide us in our discussions about the nation’s budget and our economic recovery. Publicly available Internal Revenue Service data show our tax code is riddled with loopholes that allow nearly a quarter of all millionaires to pay lower effective tax rates than middle-class families. That same IRS information also shows that the top-earning 400 Americans, each making an average of $270 million, paid an average effective federal tax rate of 18.2 percent in 2008.

As we search for ways to address our country’s mounting debt problem, I believe it’s important for all Americans to shoulder their fair share of the load. That’s why I’m very proud to be a co-sponsor of H.R. 3903, the Paying a Fair Share Act, which would ensure that the highest-earning Americans pay at least a 30 percent effective tax rate. H.R. 3903 would make the so-called “Buffett Rule” the law of the land, so that millionaires never pay less in taxes than their secretaries.

The bill also makes great economic sense. If the Bush tax cuts expire at the end of this year, H.R. 3903 would reduce the deficit by $46.7 billion, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation. In short, H.R. 3903 is equal parts social justice and fiscal responsibility.

As Congress continues to explore ways to grow and strengthen our economy, we must ensure that higher education is affordable and attainable to all. Our country is on the verge of another debt crisis due to the rising interest rates on student loans. In late 2012, the total amount of student debt in our country surpassed $1 trillion, according to Reuters.

This problem is further exacerbated by the recovering economy and the difficulty graduating students are having finding employment. Whether graduating from a technical school, community college, or a four-year college or university, we need to make sure students are not saddled with unnecessary debt before they can establish themselves in the workforce.

As the financial crisis grew in 2007, Congress passed, with my support, the College Cost Reduction and Access Act which reduced the interest rate on Stafford Loans from 6.8 percent to 3.4 percent until July 1, 2012. As that date nears, according to the Department of Education, nearly seven million students face increased loan payments that may prevent them from buying that first home, new car, or starting a family. I am a cosponsor of H.R. 3826 which would permanently keep Stafford loan rates at 3.4 percent.

We need to ensure that graduating students can get off to a running start rather than being dragged down by burdensome loan debt, but House Majority Leaders have chosen to pay for a one-year extension of the 3.4 percent interest rate by eliminating the Prevention and Public Health Fund which invests in innovative programs, practices, and treatments to prevent cancer, heart disease, and diabetes.

We should not have to choose how we are going to invest in our country’s future; how do you decide to cut investments in the education for the workforce of tomorrow versus the health of that very same workforce? I hope that the House leadership will allow a vote on a commonsense alternative so students and their families aren’t left paying for higher interest rates to go to school.

Investing in our nation’s public health also includes ensuring that our public health agencies are equipped to respond to threats in our families’ medicine cabinets and community pharmacies. One of the pressing items on Congress’ agenda this spring is the reauthorizing of the prescription drug and medical device user fee agreements, and the creation of the generic drug user fee agreement and the biosimiliar user fee agreement. Industry and FDA have negotiated agreements that will provide the agency with the funding and personnel needed to approve new, innovative and safe medical products, while ensuring industry can get their products to market in a timely manner.

More importantly, I have been working tirelessly to ensure that FDA also has the authorities they need to ensure the safety of our drug supply chain. We must ensure FDA knows who is importing drugs into our country, parity in inspection between domestic and foreign drug manufacturers, require manufacturers to notify if their product has been counterfeited or stolen, permit FDA to detain or destroy products they know to be adulterated, among other things. American families deserve to know that the drugs in their medicine cabinets are safe to take. I have been working closely with my colleagues on the other side of the aisle and feel confident that we will be able to have a final product on the President’s desk by the end of summer.

Finally, Congress must consider legislation that will create immediate construction jobs this summer. Our nation’s roads, bridges and highways are crumbling and rather than pass a long-term bill to rebuild and rehabilitate our infrastructure, the majority has proposed extension after extension. Our state and local governments, as well as the transportation industry need a long-term surface transportation reauthorization. Short term extensions serve no purpose except to waste Congress’ time debating every three months how we should invest in our country.

We need to make the hard decisions about how we will fund transit projects that will move our communities in to the 21st century, and how we will continue to invest in high-speed intercity passenger rail that will allow us to compete with our neighbors abroad.

As this debate continues you can rest assured that I will fight alongside my colleagues in the Michigan Congressional Delegation to ensure Michigan is getting its fair share of funding as well. Our infrastructure is in dire need of fresh funds, and it is Congress’ responsibility to make absolutely certain that our great state receives the proper amount of funding. A long-term surface transportation reauthorization is a commonsense way to create jobs, increase our nation’s competitiveness, and improve our communities ability to attract and retain industry.

Throughout my time in Congress, I have been an advocate for the betterment of the American people, whether it is though my work on the landmark health care reform legislation, cleaning up the environment, or making sure that American companies create American jobs here on our shores.

The state of Michigan is going through a transformation, and in order to complete that transformation for the better, we must work to ensure our infrastructure is sound, our citizens are receiving the health care they deserve, our students aren’t buried under mountains of debt, and experimenting with creative, yet common-sense, ways to improve our economy and encourage people and businesses to stay in the state. In a time when cuts need to be made to ensure the solvency of our nation, it is the government’s responsibility to make the responsible choices regarding where the cuts will come from, and it is not a job I take lightly.

I can say with the utmost integrity that I will continue to work tirelessly for the people of Michigan, as I have ever since I took my dad’s seat in Congress in 1955.

This has now been proven to be empty rhetoric.

Why? Because the Department of Health and Human Services has mandated that under the health care law, private health insurance plans must cover the “full range of FDA-approved contraception” — in which category HHS explicitly included the abortion-inducing drugs ella.

This mandate includes a so-called “religious employer exemption,” yet the exemption is so narrowly defined that most religious schools, colleges, hospitals and charitable organizations serving the public do not qualify. Even an expanded definition of “religious employer” would fail to protect non-religiously affiliated organizations, individuals and even religiously affiliated health insurers whose pro-life consciences are nonetheless violated.

This is an unprecedented attack on the freedom of conscience of millions of Americans, eviscerating their freedom of choice to purchase private insurance that does not violate their ethical, moral or religious objections. I hope all readers will contact their elected representatives in Washington, D.C., and voice outrage over this anti-life mandate.

Gerta J. Grimm
Dearborn

The three young women and their families, I am certain, were gratified to see the coverage given by your paper. Thank you, again.

Joan Arrick
AAUW Leadership Award
Committee for 2012