PERSPECTIVE ON DEFEATING WORKFARE

November 1977—Jimmy Carter says there is a new spirit crossing the land. But from the perspective of millions of poor and working people, what's crossing, the land is no spirit.

It's unemployment, inflation and poverty. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics the official unemployment rate is now 7%. George Meany says the true rate exceeds 10%. For Blacks, it is 15.5%. Minority youth unemployment in some areas exceeds 40%. moreover, these statistics do not include vast sectors of the unemployed and underemployed workforce: workers who have given up looking for jobs, people who have entered the armed forces because they couldn't find decent jobs, those forced into early retirement, housewives who Ant to work but for whom no jobs are available, millions of public assistance recipients, seasonal workers and undocumented workers. Poverty is the reality for a vast sector of the population of this country—a sector which numbers roughly 50 million, or 25% of the population.

This is the sector which a TIME Magazine cover story recently called the underclass—a vast portion of the population who a mere ten years ago were promised a war on poverty and complete integration into the workforce. Now, in 1977, just ten years since Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, the Democratic Party's massive anti-poverty thrust had failed, the underclass has become a permanent fixture of U.S. society and the War on Poverty has become a full blown war against the poor.

Equality, a dream of the 1960s, briefly financed by deficit spending and a war economy, has become, at least on the part of the government, a commitment of the past. The withdrawal of Federal money for Medicaid financed abortions recently prompted Jimmy “Human Rights” Carter to observe that the vast gap between the rich and the poor was a gap which was simply a fact of life—one which people would just have to learn to live with. Rut living with inequality is no news to the poor. And as economic conditions worsen internationally for Big Business, the reality that poverty is not a consequence of capitalism but a condition of capitalism becomes ever more clear.

Even by their own projections, the prospects for Big Business look grim. There is concern about a general lack of confidence, fear of prolonged stagflation and growing apprehension about threats ranging from the high cost of oil to political instability in Western Europe, from terrorism to trade, protectionism. Competition among capitalist countries is intensifying. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development published an economic forecast for the major industrial nations which was prepared by eight independent economists. It characterizes the situation for business as follows :

For the European Common r1arket, hopes for growth have been cut from an expected 4% to 3 or 3.5%. Inflation in Europe is projected to hit 10%. A German bank, commenting on the German situation, said that only 21 of 40 companies can expect higher profits in 1977. In France there were 108 more bankruptcies in the first half of 1977 than a year earlier. Many European companies are resorting to massive layoffs to stay afloat. Italian economists and Japanese experts are each predicting substantial slowdowns. Canadian banking experts admit that high unemployment, spiraling inflation, and a big balance of payments deficit “are not likely to ease significantly"[2]

A Geneva economist has added: “Businessmen and politicians are now realizing that the boom of the 1960s is not going to come back, that present troubles will be with us for a long time yet, probably through most of the 1980s."[3] Fourteen prominent U.S. economists say that business growth will definitely be slowing down again. The index of “leading indicators,” considered a barometer of future trends, fell over the summer for the third month in a row. The unemployment rate is rising. Dangers of a severe slump by 1979 are considered serious.

Big Business, facing the continued loss of markets and sources of raw materials around the globe, monetary crises, energy crises, political instability, and uncontrollable inflation, has of necessity (from their perspective) developed a strategy that requires the enforcement of austerity in the U.S. Big Business' primary concern is that of stabilizing the economy (read, their profits) which now requires the harnessing of a cheap domestic labor supply. Like the bind concerning undocumented workers, who though viciously scapegoated are in fact needed by the U.S. economy as a malleable and low cost labor pool, so it is increasingly the case that the growing underclass is needed by Big Business to salvage the economy.

Business desperately needs stimulation, and Jimmy Carter's job is to provide it. Carter's new welfare reform proposal, BETTER JOBS AND INCOME, is not just another attempt to solve the age-old “welfare problem.” It is rather a major business stimulus package, a plan to create a cheap and coerced labor supply to provide the major component of that stimulus. It is a plan to give the poor a formal role in the “recovery” of Big Business. Carter no doubt believes that his plan will work. He is counting on Big Business to be reasonable, to share, at least in part, the fruits of the anticipated expansion of profits made possible by providing cheap labor and reducing costs in the public sector, which in turn reduces taxes.

Carter is asking Big Business to take on the economy, with a little help from its friends. He hopes they will thusly get by, as he looks towards getting the government out of, the welfare business altogether. But what the Carter proposal in reality does is to provide for the stimulation of business, at the expense of poor and working people. BETTER JOBS AND INCOME (an ironic misnomer, to be sure) sets up mechanisms through which a long term recycling of the workforce would occur.

Recycling is a process through which the wages and standard of living of certain sectors of the workforce and eventually poor and working people as a whole, are lowered. It is accomplished by the introduction of low paid workers into the workforce. They perform the same, or similar work as higher paid workers, though classified and categorized differently. Higher paid workers, who in some cases are unionized, are either directly laid off, or their positions are gradually eliminated through attrition, retirement and/or reassignment of personnel.

The process becomes downwardly cyclical as newly unemployed workers, jobless because of the implementation of the above, reenter the job market through programs nominally designed to find or create jobs for the unemployed, but which in reality serve to further the process of recycling. BETTER JOBS AND INCOME is such a program. The National Labor Federation, in its paper, “Sociology and the Unrecognized Worker,” gives examples of how recycling has been employed.

They cite the restructuring of many welfare departments across the country in the late 1960s and early 1970s as one of the first. In California, the restructuring began with dividing the work of welfare caseworkers, who had previously handled all aspects of a recipient's case, into “eligibility determination” on the one hand and “servicing of clients” on the other. The eligibility functions were defined so as to require solely clerical skills, and new workers, without social work training, were hired at lower wages to perform that function.

Some of the trained social workers, commanding higher salaries of between $13,000 and $17,000, were fired and rehired as eligibility clerks at enormous cuts in pay, in some cases up to 50%. Others worked in the service division at their previous pay levels. However, a new category of worker, Service Case Aid, was developed shortly thereafter, who performed the same or similar function as the better paid social workers, though they were paid between 25% and 35% of the salary of the regular service workers. Higher paid workers were gradually laid off or their positions terminated through attrition, as lower paid labor replaced them.

The new division of labor furthered the recycling process as well by enabling the government to increase the caseload of the eligibility workers from 60-80 per worker to 250-400 per worker, serving to reduce the num bar of workers needed. Similar processes have occurred in the hospital systems where short term training enabled lower level nurses to take on the function of higher level nurses without raises in pay. Fewer nurses are therefore needed at the upper pay and skill levels, reducing the average pay within hospitals. Teachers' Aids have been introduced into the classroom, taking on certain functions of better paid teachers, thereby necessitating fewer teachers in the schools. These developments foreshadow the impact of Carter's program. Let us begin to examine BETTER JOBS AND INCOME, its recycling mechanisms and its effects on the workforce as a whole, by outlining its major components.

BETTER SOBS AND INCOME consolidates current public assistance programs: Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Food Stamps, and retools current jobs programs, Work Incentive (WIN) and the Comprehensive Employment Training Act (CETA), has as its most basic principle that work be more profitable than welfare. The stated thrust of the program is to increase job opportunities and centralize cash assistance. All participants will be classified either “employable” or “non-employable,” and placed on one of two levels: The higher level tier or the lower tier. Non-employables are the aged, blind and disabled and single parents with children 6 and under.

All other adults will be considered employable, unless there are 2 adults in a family, in which case only one will be so categorized. Single parents with children between the ages 7 and 14 will be considered employable for part time work, unless adequate daycare is available, in which case they will be considered fully employable. Any person considered employable would be required to accept any job offered to them, at or above the minimum wage under conditions specified by the program, or lose all or part of their benefits. This feature is the centerpiece of BETTER JOBS OR INCOME and the source of the name Workfare.

The program intends to financially and administratively emphasize employment in the private sector. For the first eight weeks after acceptance into the program, which acceptance is determined on the basis of income levels over the prior six months, an “employable” must search for a regular job in the private and public sector. This search will be facilitated by upgrading placement through use of computer matching in local and state employment offices. During this period any job offered at or above the minimum wage must be accepted, The Earned Income Tax Credit, a program to return same tax money to the working poor, will be expanded and will cover workers placed in the private and regular public sector. The Earned Income Tax Credit will not apply to those in the created jobs. Should the placement in regular employment prove unsuccessful, the person will then be placed in a created public service employment job.

Carter claims that he is creating 1.4 million jobs, but in fact, by the time the program would go into effect, there will be over 700,000 CETA jobs already in existence, many of them at higher pay levels than BETTER JOBS OR INCOME. Of the remaining 700,000 to be created, 300,000 will be part time. Jobs will be in such fields as construction, maintenance, sanitation, recreation, education, care for the elderly and childcare. They will pay the minimum wage. There will be no benefits such as pensions or seniority. Jobs will last for a maximum of a year at the end of which the cycle repeats and the employable must endeavor to find a regular job for another 8 weeks, before being placed once again in a created job. The program will permit families, headed by two parents where one is working in a job not found through the program, to receive income supplementation if the earnings are below certain levels.

There are different annual benefit levels for each tier and for persons within each tier. Examples of levels in 1978 dollars are as follows:

Not expected to Work (the higher tier)		Expected to work (lower tier)
Individual	$2,500	$1,100	individual
Couple	$3,750	$2,200	couple
single parent, one child	$3,J00	$1,700	2 parents, one child one parent, 2 children
single parent, two children	$3,500	$2.,300	2 parents, 2 children one parent, 3 children
single parent, three children	$4,200

If one is expected to work but not employed and there is no placement available; families with children would be transferred to the higher tier, while individuals would be left on the lower tier. The “expected to work” benefits are intended to supplement the wages earned in either the regular or created jobs. The supplement drops if the wages rise.

A family of four where the employable works in a private sector or regular public sector job would receive in combined salary and benefits $6,600 annually, plus an Earned Income Tax Credit of several hundred dollars. Those placed in a created job (with a family of four) would receive just the $6,600 combined salary and benefits, thereby making a regular job higher paying than a created one. Those families of four for whom no job could be found or created would receive $4,200 a year and those who refuse a job, also for a family of four, would receive $2,300. This means that families in the first two categories would be living over the poverty level, families who couldn't work or for whom there was no job available would be living at 66% of the poverty level and those who refused a job would be living at 36% of the poverty level. Final benefit levels , are unclear because the individual states have the option to supplement.

Institutionalizing Poverty

The underlying themes of BETTER JOBS AND INCOME are complex. Like much that has emanated from the Carter administration, the program might at first glance appear to be liberal. It has thus captured the support of such forces as the NAACP and the Urban League. But, as we have learned, liberal in form and rhetoric but essentially center-right in substance has become the hallmark of Carterism. While rejecting the institutionalization of public employment and intending to insure that the government remains the employer of last resort, Carter has fashioned a welfare and jobs program that institutionalizes poverty.

Whereas anti-poverty programs of the 1960s fought for equality by attempting to raise the standard of living of the poor to a higher level, the new program shuns that kind of equality and substitutes in its stead, equalization. That is, a redistribution of roughly the same amount of money, already woefully inadequate, within the lower strata. This is a clear reflection of the economic realities of this period, and the move from equality to equalization is a manifestation of the changing material conditions from the 60s to the 70s, and the resulting needs of Big Business.

However, the equalization and stabilization of the poor at a permanently low standard of living exacerbates the bind of Big Business, eventually forcing them to extend their austerity drive to include all sectors of the workforce. A vast, low paid working population, though valuable in that it provides a cheap labor supply for business, allowing a greater margin for profit, undermines Big Business' ability to realize those profits.

Given the increased competition for a shrinking number of markets internationally, business must rely more and more on its domestic workforce and on the government, via military and other types of spending, to provide the markets necessary to realize pro fits. Yet a low paid workforce has extremely limited buying power, particularly in the face of inflation, and provides the government with a limited base for revenues.

With their profiteering fettered by a severe realization problem, Big Business again looks to increase its profit margin by eventual reduction of wages of other sectors and austerity in government spending in areas like social services, education, etc., which venerate little profit for them. The effect on both working and poor people is a devastated standard of living,. The Wall Street Journal predicted that the program would substantially reduce income for at least 10% of the participants.

By the Administration's own figures, work and income benefits will increase in 12 states but will remain the same or decrease in 38 states. The states which will enjoy increases are in the South, reflecting s legislated redistribution of money away from the industrialized and unionized northeast and midwest, towards the South where labor is non-unionized and cheap, and where capital investment is high. This redistribution and equalization process is not only geographical.

Another indication of it is the fact that the CETA program, which presently finances over 300,000 jobs and is slated to finance nearly 750,000 jobs by 1980 at higher pay levels than BETTER JOBS AND INCOME contemplates, will be consolidated into BETTER JOBS AND INCOME at lower pay levels. The CETA program was targeted as a stop gap measure against long term unemployment, resulting primarily from layoffs. Only 16% of current CETA workers were on public assistance prior to their CETA jobs, the majority being relatively recently laid off workers; many of them city, state and county employees. The consolidation of CETA into BETTEF JOBS AND INCOME will mean not only the end of such jobs at more decent pay levels but the loss of certain services performed by many CETA workers, which will impact heavily on the poorest communities which are most dependent upon public services.

The overall effect of this furthers the process of stabilizing this sector of the population at a lower economic level. The end of extended unemployment insurance benefits, now slated for consolidation into BETTER JOBS AND INCOPT, will involve thousands more in this downward spiral, part of the overall recycling process.

The Effect of BETTER JOBS AND INCOME On The Poor

For those who are now on some form of public assistance, the effects will be skewed. The “unemployable” will collect higher benefits in some cases, lower benefits in others. The “employables” will collect in combined salary and benefits anywhere from 36% of poverty level to 20% above poverty level, depending on whether they work, whether they would if they could or whether they won't.

The removal from the budget of anyone who was in prison on the 30th day of the preceding month, and the complete exclusion of undocumented workers, even from receiving emergency aid are clear racist attacks on Blacks, Latinos, Chicanos and other minorities who make up the bulk of the prison population and the totality of the “illegal” population. As well, any youth 16 or over who refuses to attend a vocational rehabilitation program will be removed from the budget.

This is no insignificant provision for communities where youth have given up hope for a decent life, and whose interest in such programs is now marginal. Many have turned to crime and drugs. BETTER JOBS AND INCOME provides no way out; no way to seriously confront these problems. Those 18 and over without children will not even be eligible for a created job. The six0month accounting period will base eligibility not on what people currently have or expect to have, but on what they have had, averaged out over the prior six months.

This will prove most difficult for migrant and seasonal workers, recently laid off workers who are ineligible for unemployment insurance and striking workers who will be effectively banned from assistance by virtue of this procedure. Family units will be redefined to prohibit separate cases within households, which serve to reduce benefit levels.

In fact, it is estimated by the Administration that 36 million instead of the current 40 million people will be eligible. And to sell the package, Carter has placed explicit emphasis on fraud detection to control eligibility. However, the central impact of BETTER JOBS AND INCOME on the poor is that the program is a vehicle to harness them as a cheap and coerced labor supply. The program is a way to control them, and to use them against and in conjunction with other sectors of the population to the eventual advantage of Big Business.

When Carter first announced his proposal in Plains, Georgia, he was asked by a reporter to explain what the created jobs would be. He answered that they would cover a wide range and that many would be “providing for the beauty and cleanliness of the municipalities and countryside.” Translated, this means sweeping streets and understood by millions of poor people, this means no future.

In fact, historically the only means for moving ahead for the poorest layers of the working class population is through private sector jobs in the context of economic expansion. Carter is of course counting on this happening, by virtue of various stimuli for business. From the perspective of the government, representing the interests of rig Business, short term jobs provide the long term solution. Their answer is lowered expectations and low wages for the poor.

Effects on Private and Public Sector Workers

The program intends to emphasize private sector employment by requiring an eight week search period for a regular job before placement in a created job, during which time benefits will be extremely low. Only adults with children will be eligible for the created jobs.

Any job offered in the private sector at the minimum wage must be accepted or the person faces a loss of all or part of their benefits. This establishes a basis for the unfolding of the dramatic, though long term recycling process, whereby the private sector has available to it a massive supply of cheap and coerced labor, enabling it to tap this labor supply rather than others which are less controlled. It is ironically true that the non-unionized, working in the private sector and now employed at perhaps slightly better wages, or if not, at least in a “freer” state, would be passed over and/or laid off, leaving them to be recycled through BETTER JOBS AND INCOME. Questions of how the program would [a]ffect the more privileged sectors of the workforce are complex.

While Carter's proposal calls for no job placement to break strikes and no created jobs to replace laid off unionized workers, it is not sufficient cause for trust. For unionized workers in the private sector, the lowering of the standard of living for all other layers of the population and the subsequent exacerbation of Big Business' bind, has a detrimental effect on their capacity to maintain wage increases which keep pace with inflation. Particularly as the unions are under such strong attack now, a non-unionized workforce becomes an even more immediate threat to the unionized.

These attacks and subsequent compromises have been unfolding rather rapidly in the past several years. From the minimum wage compromise to the surrender of the repeal o£ 14B as part of the labor law reform package; from the U.S. Supreme Court decision enabling individual states to bar welfare payments to the families of striking workers to the NY State Supreme Court decision to declare strikers ineligible for unemployment insurance; from the heavily funded attempt by J.P. Stevens to keep the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union out of their shops to the steelworkers in Philadelphia who voted themselves a 10% cut in pay to keep a plant open; labor has been steadily losing ground and membership, left ever more vulnerable to attack.

As far as unionized workers in the regular public sector are concerned, the effects of such a program are considerably more direct. The created jobs, though again mandated by law not to replace unionized workers, will likely do just that. As has been the case with many local workfare programs, new job titles and categories are created wherein certain jobs are performed that would otherwise be the domain of unionized workers. There have been instances in the CETA program where direct replacement has been attempted. In some cases the unions have challenged this practice; in others not.

Carter's program embodies both a short term and a long term perspective. Its short term perspective is the equalization of the poor, in a permanently vertical situation relative to the rest of society, while inflation rises and our communities deteriorate to provide an immediate stimulus for business. Its long term perspective looks towards the eventual equalization of the entire workforce, and a general stabilization of the standard of living of the U.S. population at a low enough level to bolster Big Business' profits.

The Prospects for BETTER JOBS AND INCOME

While Carter proposes his workfare solution to the “welfare mess” conjoined with a jobs creation bill, politicians who are the leading apologists for Big Business have begun to flex their muscles. And given the stormy history of welfare reform (four programs have gone down to defeat in the last eight years) Carter must be sensitive to the political dynamic in Congress. Russell Long, (D. La.) powerful and conservative head of the Senate, Finance Committee has decried Carter's plan as too liberal. He would have all recipients forced to work for their checks or receive no benefits at all.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D. NY) who originally praised the bill, has changed his tune on the basis that it provides insufficient aid to the beleaguered states and cities, which conveniently dovetails with the fact that Moynihan is beholden to Long for his appointment to the Senate Finance Committee and to the chairmanship of the Subcommittee on Public Assistance.

Let us not forget that Moynihan was the author of the Family Assistance Plan which proposed a Guaranteed Annual Income of first $1600, and then $2400 a year for a family of four during the Nixon Administration. It was he who engineered Nixon's domestic policy of benign neglect. He will play a key role, along with Long, in the fate of BETTER JOBS AND INCOME. The special House subcommittee on Welfare Reform is holding hearings, attempting to come to grips with the issues raised. In any case, though Carter naively expected and encouraged passage of the bill by the spring of 1978, it is clear that this timetable is unrealistic and that Congress is unwilling to move quickly on such a volatile issue. We, on the other hand, must not be unwilling. The question for us, for progressive community activists, leaders of unions of the poor and trade unionists, is what must our perspective be, both short and long term, in response to Carter's Workfare and the underlying realities which it reflects?

Organize the Unorganized

The successful implementation of Carter's strategy (that being beneficial to Big Business), relies heavily on both the masses of the unorganized remaining unorganized and the continued isolation of the labor movement from that broad mass. Ferment is growing among the unorganized lower strata of the population. Yet this ferment is difficult to discern without organizations that can give expression to it. Meanwhile, labor remains trapped as a not so mighty constituency within the Democratic Party, without an independent strategy of its own and by default wed to the anti-labor strategy of Carterism. Labor continues to .ignore the yet to be organized poor masses, who as FETTER JOBS AND INCOME rakes plain, will be used against them, unless otherwise organized. It is the very isolation of labor from the broad mass of the population and the lack of organizations of these strata that allows Carter to develop, propose and possibly implement such an anti-working class program as BETTER JOBS AND INCOME.

Central to a precise and effective defensive response is the building of organizations of the lower strata. After several years of building them, we now know that there is a material basis for these organizations to be both explicitly political and politically independent. They must orient towards unionization, that is, the right of economic representation for the masses of disenfranchised poor. These unions represent vehicles for direct resistance to such policies as are embodied in BETTER JOBS MID INCOME as well as vehicles for the materialization of unity between organized labor and the community. (Here we define community as that sector of the population without the workplace and organizations of the workplace, i.e., trade unions, as their primary nexus with society.) This is the unity necessary to confront and to change the actual conditions which poor and working people now face.

The materialization of third wave independent unions and mutual benefits associations has begun over the past several years. They now include such organizations as the New York City Unemployed and Welfare Council (NYCUWC), the Texas Farm Workers Union (TFW), the Lake County Coalition for Survival (LCCS), the California Homemakers Association (CHA) and others. These organizations are based in both urban and rural communities and share a thrust towards winning the right to collectively bargain over wages and income and working and community conditions. They are politically independent, in that they do not orient towards the Democratic Party (historically the party of the poor) but rather towards the development of a new and progressive social force, uniting the heretofore unorganized with the labor movement, without ties to the political infrastructure which, all liberal rhetoric aside, supports the interests of Big Business. The growth of these organizations and the birth of others like them are the key to upsetting Carter's scenario.

The Labor-Community Challenge to Workfare

There has been significant evidence of this potential already. In Gary, Indiana, in November of 1976, the Lake County Coalition for Survival began a campaign to defeat a state workfare program. It was joined by United Steel workers of America, Locals 1010, 1011, 1014, 1066, 3133, 1273, 6103, 6787 plus other community organizations in this effort. These forces testified in Indianapolis, representing over 50,000 poor and working people and did significant lobbying which influenced the tabling of the bill. A watered down version did finally pass however, due to the absence of a supposedly anti-workfare Democratic senator. This served to corroborate the need for these strata unions to be politically independent.

The California Homemakers Association (CHA) in California united the attendant care workers and relief recipients it represents to block passage of several proposed changes in the State Homemaker/Chore Program this past summer. One component of the proposals would have required that any able-bodied person living in the house with an aged or disabled recipient had to provide home care services for free, a workfare program brazen even for workfare's home state. The first modern workfare programs were initiated by then California Governor Ronald Reagan in the latter part of the 1960s. Delegates from across the state, having fought similar regulations in their localities since 1973, went en masse to hearings held by the State Department of Health in Sacramento and testified militantly, displaying the unity of the recipients who receive services and the workers who perform them, under the program. These actions have successfully prevented the implementation of such provisions. These developments represent but the barest beginnings of an answer to Carterism (in this area but a ‘liberalized' version of Reaganism) and the kinds of policies which Carterism represents. New organizational forms are materializing in response to his specific moves, along the lines herein discussed.

The NYCUVIC has spawned the Association of Public Service Workers, a union formation to represent welfare recipients and other poor People who are to be placed in the host of work programs now operative. As such, the ability of the lower strata to respond to the conditions imposed by such programs and the eventual implementation, should it pass, of BETTER JOBS AND INCOME, is greatly advanced, the ability of the government to implement its workfare strategy is greatly fettered, and the vehicles for uniting all sectors of the workforce are further in place. Such is the significance of third wave unionization. The breakdown of labor's isolation and the organizing of the unorganized sectors—both employed and unemployed—will be a long and arduous struggle. But unwittingly, Carter has given us an unprecedented opening. I send you this paper by way of initiating dialogue on these critical issues, with the hope of forming a national Labor-Community Task Force Against workfare, through which we can begin to coordinate our activities against BETTER JOBS AND INCOME and all workfare programs, both state and national, and in support o£ programs that provide productive jobs at decent wages with the right to organize, for all poor and working people.

I am eager for your comments on the analysis begun herein, and for your initiatives on this important task. There is a final irony in Carter's gospel about a new spirit crossing the land. The irony is that it's true. But it's not the one he thinks it is. It's not a spirit of acceptance of inequality or of empty and hypocritical calls for human rights—not at all. It is in fact the spirit of poor and working women and men, struggling for a decent life, for economic representation, for the right to organize, for a future for ourselves and our children.

[1] U.S. News and World Report.

[2] U.S. News and World Report.

[3] U.S. News and World Report.

[4] U.S. News and World Report.