E-Mail This Article to a Friend A 16-year-old critiques a Harvard forum BY STEVEN STYCOS

TUESDAY, July 27, 2004 -- Politics to Felice Lopez is not John Kerry or George Bush.

Instead, it is the fact that the senior honors student from Woonsocket High School in Rhode Island had to change her schedule three times because budget cuts forced her urban high school to cancel Spanish 4, physics 2, and statistics classes.

Lopez, 16, is not sure whether Democrats or Republicans or the city, state, or federal government is responsible for lack of funds at her struggling urban high school. But she comments, "I assume the war [in Iraq] is drawing funds from everything."

Lopez traveled to Boston on Monday as part of a groupfrom the Brown University-based Rhode Island Debate League, an inner cityhigh school debate group. She was there to learn more about politics by attending a forum on United States domestic policy sponsored by Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. At the afternoon program, Harvard President Lawrence Summers and three faculty members spoke about the long term issues facing America. All stated that neither party was confronting the issues, but none mentioned what seemed apparent to the teenager from a decaying mill town -- that a war half a world away is diverting funds from pressing domestic problems.

Kennedy School Dean David Ellwood, co-chair of President Bill Clinton’s welfare reform effort, predicted that more jobs will need to be filled by the elderly and immigrants. Given that many immigrants are now either undocumented workers who snuck over the border, he stated, or workers allowed to enter the US temporarily to fill a specific job, the US economy "is increasingly relying on workers who we are discouraging, in every way we can, to be part of society."

Harvard economics professor Caroline Hoxby warned that the US will start to lose more high skilled jobs overseas unless it provides a highly skilled workforce. Since 1970, she stated, regular education spending per child, adjusted for inflation has doubled and special education spending has tripled, but school achievement has not improved.

Kennedy School professor Joseph Newhouse discussed health care issues, noting that "the true giant sucking sound," we all hear is health care consuming an increasing share of federal spending. Medicare currently comprises 13 percent of the federal budget and when the new prescription drug benefit begins, he commented, it will rise to 16 percent . With medical science extending lives and the baby boomers moving into retirement, he observed, a key issue will be financing Medicare and Social Security in the 2020’s. The sooner taxes are raised to handle the surge of elderly medical costs, the better, he said, before predicting that neither Kerry nor Bush will confront the problem.

Summers, a former member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers and World Bank economist sounded a similar note at the session's end. The keys to future government finances, he suggested, are a strong economy, a hard look at Medicare and Social Security, restrained government spending and revised tax cuts. "It is difficult to understand," Summers noted, that tax cuts are expanding just as baby boomer retirements place increased financial demands on government services.

So what did Lopez think? "I was surprised no one talked about the war," she remarked afterwards.