Sheilah Kast

 Last week, President Obama released his budget for fiscal year 2015. It includes substantial defense cuts--the Army would shrink to its smallest size since before World War II. The military accounts for almost $35 billion dollars of economic activity in Maryland, according to a 2008 state government report. So, how might Maryland be affected by these cuts? 

 

  In 1938, the federal government established a minimum wage for the first time. It was 25 cents an hour, or 4.15 in today’s dollars.  Now, both President Obama and Governor O’Malley have made raising the minimum wage a priority.  In Maryland, the minimum wage is currently the same as the federal rate, 7.25. The legislature is considering a proposal that would raise that to $10.10 by 2017.  

In Maryland, lenders have up to 12 years to take homeowners to court for any remaining debt they owe on a foreclosed home. It’s known as a “deficiency judgment.”  The General Assembly is considering two bills that could change deficiency judgments in Maryland.   We talk about both.

Erika Robuck, who lives in Annapolis, has made a specialty of weaving fictional plots around the real lives of literary giants of the early 20th century.  Her latest is a book called Fallen Beauty, a novel that traces the life of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, the third woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in poetry.

This is The Checkup, our weekly series about how healthcare is changing in Maryland.  One of the goals of the Affordable Care Act is to change incentives for providers of healthcare, so economic rewards would be more attached to keeping patients well than to the number of tests, treatments, and procedures performed on those patients.

Baltimore County native Martha Shane's documentary film After Tiller follows the four doctors in the country who openly perform late term abortions.  We talked with her  before an audience at the Brown Center on the campus of MICA as part of the Maryland Film Festival Spotlight Series.  You can learn more about the Film Festival here.

Before her mid-20s, Sheri Booker already had worked for nine years in the Albert P. Wyle Funeral Home.  She started at 15 with a summer job answering phones and, as she says, Baby-sitting bodies. Over the years the job turned into a lot more, and Sheri Booker has written about it all in her memoir, Nine Years Under: Coming of Age in an Inner City Funeral Home. She talks with Sheilah Kast about her experience.

The Maryland legislature is considering a bill called the "Maryland Second Chance Act of 2014" (SB 0804, HB 1166) which would shield convictions for ten non-violent misdemeanors from the eyes of the public-including most employers. A path to a second chance, or an unfair restriction on employers?

Race can be a major predictor of how healthy you are, and what diseases you’ll get, and how much money you’ll make—or not make—over the course of your life.  A new study from the Bloomberg School of Public Health found that health disparities among African-American and Hispanic men cost the economy more than $450 billion dollars between 2006 and 2009.  Researchers looked at both the direct costs of medical care, as well as the indirect costs such as lower productivity.

The federal government has ordered Baltimore city to pay back $3.7 million of federal stimulus money intended to reduce homelessness. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development says the city failed to properly account for the funds it spent. Luke Broadwater, City Hall reporter for The Baltimore Sun, reported on the story. He joins Sheilah Kast by phone to talk about it.

You can read Luke's reporting on the story, along with The Baltimore Sun's Yvonne Wenger's,  here.