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March 2012
Op-Ed: It's time for Pennsylvania to reform its debt process
By State Treasurer Rob McCord

If we want to see more productive and essential public investments — and less political pork — Pennsylvania’s state government must reform its capital budget process. The existing system, which the state uses to select and fund hundreds of large construction projects, is broken. It lacks fiscal discipline, fails to measure returns on investment and forces taxpayers to spend more each year on debt costs. Learn more...

November 2011
Op-Ed: Making gaming decisions with more than a roll of the dice
By State Treasurer Rob McCord

Did you know Pennsylvania’s residents are the majority stakeholders in all of the state’s 10 operating casinos?

When Pennsylvania legalized slot machine gaming in 2004 to generate new public revenues, Pennsylvanians became stakeholders in casino operations by virtue of the state’s over 51% aggregate tax rate. Now, five years after the first casino opened, that tax rate and license fees have generated over $5 billion for property tax rebates, local community improvements, and statewide economic development projects. That is more revenue than any other state in the nation – including Nevada and New Jersey.

We clearly are not dealing with small change here. Learn more...

August 2011
Op-Ed: How You Can Keep Pace with Rising Tuition
By State Treasurer Rob McCord

If you have a child going to college this Fall – or if you have a child that is still years away from higher education – you no doubt have read with concern recent headlines about pending tuition increases.

Pennsylvania has seen historic budget cuts to public higher education this year, and partially because of that, schools across Pennsylvania are raising tuition this fall – at higher-than-average rates, too, in some cases. Learn more...

December 2010
Op-ed: Take Time Now to Plan for College, Reduce your Tax Bill  
By Rob McCord, Pennsylvania's state treasurer

The year's end is quickly approaching, and most of us are planning - for the holidays, for work projects with a Dec. 31 deadline, and, I hope, for vacations.

As state treasurer, I want to prompt you to make year-end plans that save you money, too. With Dec. 31 only weeks away, I want to remind you about a tax-savings strategy that has a phenomenal additional benefit - it helps your loved ones pay for college. Learn more...

September 2010
Op-ed / Fall Reflection: It’s Time to Help the Women Who Can’t Take a Summer Vacation
By State Treasurer Rob McCord

With summer over, many Americans savor memories of sun and fun. Yet for others – women especially – summer is actually a busier-than-normal time.

When schools let out, working mothers start juggling more than usual, managing their year-round jobs and their summers-off kids. It is hard work to find summer programs and child care and then to get kids there and back -- and it all gets tougher in August, when most camps and recreation programs close.

If working mothers are single, as my mother was for a decade in my childhood, these obstacles become even greater. In summer, I saw how hard my mother worked -- as others vacationed -- to provide for my brother and me and how much she worried about money. Learn more...

August 2010
Op-Ed: There's no quick fix for the DRPA disaster/ The agency needs sustained reform and oversight.
By State Treasurer Rob McCord

Commuters who pay the tolls to cross the Delaware River have reason to worry that their money is being wasted.

Cascading media accounts have found evidence of self-dealing, mismanagement, absurd perks, petty theft, excessive spending, and poor planning at the Delaware River Port Authority, which collects and decides how to spend $300 million a year in tolls and fares. Learn more...

April 2010
Op-ed: SEC's climate change transparency
By: Anne Stausboll, Rob McCord, and Thomas DiNapoli

Transparency is a cornerstone of our economy. For investors, that means being entitled to hear about the risks of an investment before making a long-term capital commitment.

You might not commit, for example, to a computer chip-maker whose silicon costs are about to triple, or a clothing manufacturer whose factories are caught up in civil unrest overseas. Or you might invest and then pressure the company to address its issues.

That’s why the Securities and Exchange Commission’s new climate change disclosure guidance is important. It outlines the type of information that publicly traded companies facing material effects from climate change should be disclosing. Learn more...

November 2009
Op-Ed: Treasurer McCord calls for full disclosure by Freddie Mac
By State Treasurer Rob McCord

“You can’t handle the truth,” Jack Nicholson memorably railed at Tom Cruise in an iconic scene from A Few Good Men. Today, Freddie Mac – the giant government-sponsored backer of residential mortgages – is pretending the public cannot handle full disclosure about what Freddie Mac did either.

Investors and taxpayers now deserve to learn what really happened at Freddie Mac, the privately-owned but government-sponsored enterprise (“GSE”) created to serve the public good by purchasing residential mortgages from traditional lenders. At one point, Freddie Mac’s purchase of these mortgages provided useful liquidity for the national housing market and supplied banks with capital to make new loans.

Yet something went terribly wrong with Freddie Mac’s business model. In 2007 and 2008, during the housing boom (that we now painfully know to have been a debt-inflated bubble), Freddie Mac executives crowed that their institution was a savior of the housing market. Indeed, on November 30, 2007, Freddie Mac was worth $17.3 billion. Then, when the bubble burst, Freddie Mac's market capitalization shriveled to less than $600 million (a 97 percent plummet!). And the victims were taxpayers as well as Freddie Mac’s shareholders. Learn more...

September 2009
Op-Ed: Savings plan lets you invest in your child's education
BY State Treasurer Rob McCord

As our nation slowly emerges from the recession, Americans work to shrink their debt and increase their personal savings. Yet for 60 percent of college students, the only way to cover the staggering price tag of college is to borrow, and this debt sets students up for years of potentially crippling student loan payments.

College affordability is a top priority of the McCord Treasury, because I want to ensure that merit and skill are the only factors that determine whether a child can pursue higher education — not the family’s ability to fund it.

There is much work to be done to harness the skyrocketing cost of higher education, and I intend to bring the voices of hard-working Pennsylvania families to the table as we continue.

Yet there is something that Pennsylvania families can do right now to cut the cost of tuition in half — save for higher education expenses instead of paying with loans. September is National College Savings Month, and as your state treasurer, I am proud to offer the Guaranteed Savings Plan. Learn more...

May 2009
Op-Ed: On 529 Day, make an investment in your child’s future – start saving for college
By Rob McCord

As the son of a college professor, I learned at an early age about the huge value of higher education. Yet, as I watched my mother go through graduate school, I also felt the economic toll that expensive education can have on a family. And this was decades before runaway inflation struck most American colleges and universities.

Today, the current recession makes it harder to save. Yet many Americans have made the right choice by increasing, not decreasing, their college savings rates during this challenging time. Long after current hardships have faded from memory, savings you contribute now for college will pay immense dividends for your children and grandchildren.
Learn more...

January 2007
Op-Ed: Pursuing the dream
My family moved into our dream house - an old stone home within walking distance of playing fields and fine schools.

We also happened to move into the shadow of a large church. We anticipated the Sunday traffic, but we did not anticipate that a longtime churchgoer would steer too close to our new mailbox, knocking the mirror off his car.

Annoyed, he pulled into our driveway and marched to our door. When my wife answered, the visitor asked, "Is the lady of the house in?" That question brought out a troubling bias. You see, my wife is African American. Apparently, the driver expected an African American woman to work in, not own, a large Main Line home. Learn more...