Category: Uncategorized

America rudderless amid pandemic

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

A special Providence protects fools, drunkards, small children and the United States of America” — attributed to Otto von Bismarck.

Has America’s providential luck run out? Throughout our history, at moments of supreme danger, our country has managed to find leaders of extraordinary character and ability to steer us through the storm.

Now, if you tune into the White House’s daily pandemic “briefing,” you’d think Captain Queeg was at the helm.

Great presidents are forged in the crucible of great crises. America’s struggle for independence, the Civil War, the Great Depression and World War II gave rise to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, respectively.

Donald J. Trump won’t be joining them in the presidential pantheon. He has failed abysmally to rise to what history will record as the defining test of his presidency. Some responsibility for that failure falls on Senate Republicans, who abdicated their constitutional duty during impeachment to remove a clearly unfit president from office.

Trump’s inept handling of the pandemic has helped to make America number one at something: Coronavirus infections (430,000 people at this writing.) And with nearly 15,000 deaths, we are closing in on the fatality frontrunners, Spain (15,238) and Italy (17,669).

Read the full piece here.

Op-Ed: Why Netflix and YouTube Aren’t Breaking the Internet in the United States

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As broadband networks around the world start to creak under the weight of work from home and other social distancing practices, it is a bit surprising that one country has been left out of the headlines: the United States. We’ve been told for years that our broadband infrastructure is poor and that we pay too much for too little service. Look to Europe, they said. Maintain Title II regulation (“net neutrality”) or it will be the end of the internet as we know it, they said.

But it’s been more than two years since the Federal Communications Commission voted to repeal Title II and re-classified broadband as a Title I service. In the intervening period, the internet has not been destroyed. You don’t have to pay for individual Google searches, as some predicted. Broadband speeds are faster than ever. And we have yet to see headlines about increased usage forcing companies to throttle their video streaming services.

Yes, prices are lower in Europe – but so is investment, because forcing broadband providers to share their infrastructure with competitors gives them less economic incentive to improve that infrastructure. Over time, that lower investment has led to lower-quality services — a reality brought into stark relief when Europe asked YouTube, Netflix, and other streaming services to downgrade their content to prevent the internet from breaking. How did it come to this?

Read the full piece here.

Op-Ed: Trump Is Using the Defense Production Act All Wrong

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The White House and the Centers for Disease Control are recommending that all Americans wear cloth face masks in public to slow the spread of Covid-19. While cloth masks are an effective stopgap measure to help preserve supply of more effective medical masks for our healthcare workers, they are just that: a stopgap.

If we could rapidly increase production of medical masks, public health officials wouldn’t be forced to make this tradeoff between effectiveness and availability. There have been growing calls, from both the left and the right, to use Title I of the Defense Production Act to effectively nationalize the supply chain of critical medical supplies. This piece of Korean War-era legislation grants the president broad authority to command the production of private industry. President Trump has started using the law, commanding GM, for instance, to begin production of ventilators and preventing mask manufacturer 3M from certain types of medical exports.

But nationalization is hugely inefficient. The government doesn’t know which specific factories have the lowest costs to adapt production processes to start producing masks or ventilators. The government can’t figure out what quantity of medical goods is optimal for each specific factory to produce, given local labor supply and existing infrastructure constraints. Government officials can’t know which simple modifications to the designs of these medical goods would enable manufacturers to ramp up production more quickly.

A better idea is to harness market signals and amplify them using the purchasing power of the federal government. And it turns out that there’s another section of the DPA — Title III — that can make that happen using purchase guarantees. If paired with targeted deregulation, massive purchase guarantees can act as a multiplier on American manufacturing capacity.In other words, instead of deciding which companies or factories should take on this production, the government can provide market incentives that allow the best, most efficient companies to step up to the challenge – faster than the alternative.
Read the full piece here. Co-written by PPI’s Alec Stapp and Caleb Watney of the R Street Institute.

Public Education in the Age of Coronavirus: We Need Swift Boats, Not Ocean Liners

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

No sooner had Michigan closed its public schools than the state Department of Education announced that no distance learning time would count toward the required 180 days of instruction. When met with a storm of criticism from district and school leaders, parents, students, and the governor, the department blamed state law.

Meanwhile Pennsylvania’s Department of Education encouraged public schools to provide some “continuity of learning” but warned that “schools must work to meet the needs of all students, with particular attention to free appropriate public education (FAPE) for students with disabilities and English as a second language (ESL) services for English Learners (EL).” Spooked, many districts decided they were better off not even trying remote learning.

Seattle Public Schools decided that if it could not assure every student had access to online learning, it would offer it to none. Besides, the superintendent told Time magazine, “There’s just no way a district this large can do that.”

Even in the midst of crisis, bureaucracy reared its ugly head. Many districts have gone to heroic lengths to ensure their students keep learning, but overall, the crisis has illustrated a fundamental truth about public education: our hierarchical, standardized, rule-driven bureaucracies struggle to adapt when things change.

Traditional school districts were created more than a century ago, after all, and they were built to be stable, not adaptable. They control their vast budgets and armies of personnel by nesting them in thousands of rules, to prevent abuses. They adopt budgets that hem schools into spending patterns that may have made sense at one time but not anymore — and they make it almost impossible for schools to change how they spend the money.

They negotiate collective bargaining agreements that set hours and duties in stone, making it impossible to make up for lost time by extending school into the summer months, for instance — something probably needed this year.

In a crisis, our bureaucracies are often at their best — waiving rules, soliciting extra efforts from employees, trying their hardest to do what is necessary. Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second largest, quickly promised to buy 150,000 laptops or tablets for every student who doesn’t have one, contracted with Verizon to offer free internet access through new hotspots, used its own television network plus two public broadcasting channels to broadcast school lessons, and handed out 260,000 free meals a day.

Superintendent Austin Beutner asked the state legislature for emergency funding to pay for all this. “We face the largest adaptive challenge for large urban public education systems in a generation,” he said. “Pick your metaphor: This is the moon shot, the Manhattan Project, the Normandy landing, and the Marshall Plan, and the clock is ticking.”

Other districts with entrepreneurial superintendents, such as Miami-Dade County Public Schools and District of Columbia Public Schools, have also turned on a dime, launching distance learning and free meals. Some have even put wifi hotspots on school buses and parked them in low-income neighborhoods.

But they are the exceptions, not the norm. A survey of 82 large districts by the Center on Reinventing Public Education found that as of March 30, “Most districts are still not providing any instruction. The majority provide links to general online resources but no direction on how to use them.”

And when the crisis is over, that bureaucratic norm will reassert itself even in Los Angeles. Teachers unions will demand extra pay for extra work. Principals whose roofs start leaking will wait months or years for central headquarters to repair them. Centralized school bus systems will dictate school start and end times, regardless of what the children and their parents need.

Personnel rules that give teachers with more seniority more control over where they teach will send the most senior, best paid teachers to the middle-class schools and the rookies to the schools full of poor children — guaranteeing that districts actually spend more on their well-off students than on their low-income students.

It doesn’t have to be this way. In today’s world, where change is the norm, we need flexible, nimble public schools.

That’s one reason public charter schools were invented, three decades ago. These schools, operated mostly by nonprofit organizations outside the control of school districts and free of most bureaucratic rules, find it much easier to innovate. In return for this luxury, they are held accountable for their performance — often closed or replaced if their students are not learning enough.

In this crisis, the education media has been full of stories of charter schools shifting rapidly to remote learning. You can read inspiring examples here, here, here, and here.

A few school districts, in Denver and Indianapolis and San Antonio, have embraced chartering as part of district strategy. They have learned that effective information-age organizations are decentralized, mission-driven rather than rule-driven, results-oriented, customer-driven, and competitive. These principles, outlined in a book I wrote with Ted Gaebler, Reinventing Government, capture the essence of why charter schools usually perform better than district-operated schools.

One large urban district embodies all of these principles: New Orleans Public Schools, where every public school is chartered. Central headquarters is small, because it doesn’t operate schools. Its job is to steer the system, not to row every boat.

When Mardi Gras celebrations spread the coronavirus throughout New Orleans, the school district quickly bought 10,000 Chromebook laptops and 5,000 wireless hotspots and launched 45 sites for “grab-and-go” meals and 11 sites for hot dinners.

Free of constraining rules and union contracts, the schools quickly pivoted to remote learning. “Traditional districts are like luxury cruise ships: If they want to change direction, it’s going to take a long time,” explains Patrick Dobard, who led the state’s Recovery School District, which spearheaded the transition to an all-charter system. “New Orleans is like a bunch of swift boats: When we need to change directions, we’re able to change nimbly, and quickly.”

The new virus has once again shown us how badly we need swift boats, not ocean liners. It is high time we reinvented our public school systems.

Read the full piece here.

Reinventing the New Orleans Public Education System

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

If we were creating a public education system from scratch, would we organize it as most of our public systems are now organized? Would our classrooms look just as they did before the advent of personal computers and the internet? Would we give teachers lifetime jobs after their second or third years? Would we let schools survive if, year after year, half their students dropped out? Would we send children to school for only eight and a half months a year and six hours a day? Would we assign them to schools by neighborhood, reinforcing racial and economic segregation?

Few people would answer yes to such questions. But in real life we don’t usually get to start over; instead, we have to change existing systems.

One city did get a chance to start over, however. In 2005, after the third deadliest hurricane in US history, state leaders wiped the slate clean in New Orleans. After Katrina, Louisiana handed all but seventeen of the city’s public schools to the state’s Recovery School District (RSD), created two years earlier to turn around failing schools. Over the next nine years, the RSD gradually turned them all into charter schools—a new form of public school that has emerged over the past quarter century. Charters are public schools operated by independent, mostly nonprofit organizations, free of most state and district rules but held accountable for performance by written charters, which function like performance contracts. Most, but not all, are schools of choice. In 2019, New Orleans’ last traditional schools converted to charter status, and 100 percent of its public school students now attend charters.

Read the full policy report here.

Protecting core systems: After today’s huge announcement, what Treasury and the Fed need to do with the rest of the $500 billion

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As of Thursday, April 9, Treasury and the Federal Reserve are finally starting to set set up the facilities need to use the $500 billion in funds for “severely distressed sectors” contained in the $2.2 trillion CARES relief act. The money has to be allocated by December 31, 2020.

In this initial round, the Fed is stepping up to lend $600 billion to small and medium-sized businesses; $850 billion to bond issuers to fund corporations and household borrowing for items like automobiles; and $500 billion to support state and municipal liquidity. This lending is backed up by $195 billion in Treasury funds from the CARES act.

What should Treasury and the Fed do with the rest of the $500 billion? Some will go directly to the airlines and industries essential to national security, like airplane manufacturing.

But Treasury must think strategically as it decides how to dole out the money over the rest of the year.

Read the rest of the essay here.

A Tale of Two Parties

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute
The 2020 presidential election, like almost everything else, hangs in suspended animation as Americans ride out the coronavirus pandemic. When it resumes, we will learn more about whether another kind of contagion—illiberal populism—is advancing or retreating here.
Over the past decade, populism has been rewriting the rules of party competition across the West. Sparked by a working-class revolt against entrenched political establishments, the populist surge highlights new political divides based on culture, identity, and geography, as well as the waning relevance of the old left-right debate. Yet the picture is distinct in the United States, where populist currents are reshaping the internal dynamics of the two major parties rather than creating new parties. It’s owing to our enduring duopoly that populism came to power here with Donald Trump’s 2016 election.
Had Trump formed his own party, few would have taken his presidential bid seriously. Instead, he had the good fortune to run as a Republican in a crowded field of GOP heavyweights, who divided the vote and enabled Trump to get a foothold with a series of plurality wins in early primaries. As his rivals dropped out, he consolidated his hold on white working-class voters and took control of the party.
Read the full piece here.

Op-Ed: COVID-19 makes it clear: Medicaid block grants will make everyone worse off

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Trump administration prepares for the best instead of the worst. During a period of economic growth, instead of preparing for an inevitable downturn, the administration pushed through large tax cuts that benefited corporations and the wealthiest individuals, driving up federal deficits. And after the Ebola outbreak subsided, rather than preparing for a new global health challenge, the White House disbanded the National Security Council’s office of global health security.

And most recently, the administration announced that states could apply for a waiver to convert Medicaid from an open-ended entitlement program to a block grant program, with a set amount of federal funding annually. Under the waiver, the federal government will cap the amount of funding it allocates to states for able-bodied adults, including in some cases pregnant women and families.

COVID-19, the novel coronavirus that has spread to a global pandemic, demonstrates why block grants are irresponsible and hurt the most vulnerable.

Read the full piece here.

Op-Ed: Hitching a ride on the coronavirus: How partisans of all stripes are exploiting this crisis

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute
For many of us, the coronavirus calamity is a humbling reminder of all we don’t know and can’t control. But for the ax-grinders, hobby-horse riders and zealous partisans among us, it’s just another opportunity to advance pet causes.
So from certain right-wing politicians and propagandists, we get the lunatic theory that the pandemic is a Democratic or “Deep State” ploy to bring down Donald Trump — even as it’s killed tens of thousands of people in other countries. This may be the starkest example of how viewing everything through the grimy lens of tribal politics addles minds.
Over on the left, Bernie Sanders partisans are also hitching a ride on the COVID-19 express to keep his idea, if not his campaign, alive. They contend that the virus has laid bare the inadequacies of America’s “corporate-run” health system and vindicated Sanders’ “Medicare for All.”
This ignores the inconvenient fact that two of the countries hardest hit, Italy and Spain, have just the kind of single-payer system Sanders advocates. The virus, indifferent to sectarian arguments over the one best way to deliver medical services, overwhelms every kind of health-care system.

Read the full piece here.

Blog: Does America CARE about Charter Schools?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The $2.2 trillion Corona Aid, Relief, and Economic Securities (CARES) Act appropriated $30.75 billion for education—almost half of which will flow to “Local Education Agencies.” These LEAs include both school districts and many charter schools or networks. But charter laws differ from state to state, and many charter schools authorized by school districts do not have legal status as LEAs.

Will these charters—more than a quarter of all charter schools, according to the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools (NAPCS) —get a piece of the federal relief money? Or will some districts, which may feel hostile toward charters, keep the money for their own schools? And will governors hand out their share fairly?

Governors will distribute $3 billion to K-12 schools and institutions of higher education, as they see fit. State education departments will distribute $13.5 billion to LEAs, based on the relative share of federal Title 1 funding (for low-income children) they received last year. So LEAs with higher percentages of poor children will get more money.

School districts and charters that are LEAs can use the money for a variety of purposes, including buying devices for schools and children so they can continue their learning online and making up for lost time with summer school. 

The U.S. Department of Education should immediately issue guidance to governors, state education departments, and school districts requiring that CARES Act funding flow to all charter schools at the same rate and using the same formula as the traditional public schools within a district. (Online charter schools could be exempted, since they have suffered far less disruption than brick-and-mortar schools.)

The CARES Act funds will be distributed to states within 30 days of enactment, based on applications to the U.S. Department of Education. The department has 30 days from the date of receiving a state’s application to respond. If approved, states will be responsible for disbursing the funds within a year of receipt. 

Amy Wilkins, senior vice president for advocacy with NAPCS, is optimistic about how CARES Act funding will be disbursed. When asked about whether NAPCS believed charter school families could be punished for the choice they made, Wilkins said, “In this time in which we are all acting together against common challenges and threats, we are confident that school districts will rise to the occasion to ensure that all students benefit from the education funds contained in the CARES Act.  It’s almost beyond thinking that anyone would try to undercut charter school students in this moment.”

As the Department of Education finalizes the application states will use, it must include guidance to ensure that charter school students and their families are not penalized for exercising choice in public education.

Expanding Postal Voting to Preserve Democratic Institutions During the COVID-19 Crisis

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Expanding Postal Voting to Preserve Democratic Institutions During the COVID-19 Crisis

The recent outbreak of COVID-19 in the United States has caused an untold amount of economic, political and social disruption. Trillions of dollars in economic activity has been lost, and in the first week of the crisis 3.3 million workers reported being laid off1. These reported numbers are only expected to increase in the coming days, weeks and months. This is because social distancing remains the primary strategy to prevent the spread of the virus, keeping economic activity depressed as a result. While policymakers and society at large have accepted the tradeoff – forsaking the economy for the sake of public health – the effects of social distancing are far broader than just the economic effects. Democratic institutions themselves are also threatened.

The United States is currently amid “primary season” where every state and territory in the United States holds elections to allow voters to choose the presidential candidate for their respective party. Some states hold local elections on the ballot during this time as well. However, these elections have been thrown into doubt as COVID-19 continues to spread throughout the United States. There is good reason to be worried; these elections represent a unique threat to public health. However, action needs to be taken to ensure that the legitimacy of these elections is not jeopardized. 

Public Health

The United States’ primary elections present a significant public health risk for several reasons. Polling places are often crowded well-above the current Center for Disease Control (CDC) guidance to limit social gatherings to no more than 10 people at a time2. In addition, polling machines are a clear transmission vector for the virus, unless they are thoroughly cleaned and disinfected after each use.

Most stark are the public health risks the inherent demographics of primary elections present. COVID-19 has a case fatality rate of 3.6% for those aged 60-69, 8.0% for those between 70-79 and 14.8% for those 80 or older3. These case fatality rates are relevant because primary voters skew far older than the general population: 24% of the primary electorate up until this point in the primary season has been age 65 or older4. For comparison, that age group represents only 15% of the total population of the United States5. Officials also commonly locate public polling places within nursing homes. In Ohio alone, more than 140 polling places were in nursing homes before the primary was rescheduled6. This mix of elderly turnout, polling location placement and the case fatality rate amongst the elderly should raise concern with election officials and lawmakers.  

Democratic Illegitimacy

Despite the public health risk, preserving democratic institutions is an important part of the response to the coronavirus pandemic. The two facets of this crisis – public health and the economic aspects – both rely on a high degree of trust between the government and private actors to coordinate an effective response. When the government issues stay-at-home orders, as many states already have, business owners and individuals must (1) trust that the government has the authority to carry out said orders and (2) be assured that the government will provide some level of economic support to reduce the harm caused by these measures. Spoiling election integrity during this crisis would be detrimental to the fragile coordination required to carry-out these important measures.

Cancelling the primary elections outright may be tempting, especially if a clear frontrunner emerges. However, cancelling these primary elections would forever brand the eventual nominee, and possibly the next President of the United States, as being the product of a tainted electoral process. Strong, respected authority is needed to maintain the fragile coordination the government is undertaking with private actors. It is unlikely that a year from now that the United States will be completely recovered from COVID-19 and the recession that has accompanied it. Respected leadership and strong institutions are necessary to continue to lead the country out of this crisis.

What we should do

Voting during the COVID-19 pandemic represents a two-pronged issue: carrying out elections could result in a spike of cases of COVID-19 and cause subsequent fatalities; cancelling elections, however, is not the appropriate response. The health and trustworthiness of our democratic institutions could not be valuable than it is now. This is where postal voting (also known as vote-by-mail) presents states with a novel solution to solve both problems. 

Postal voting is the concept of mailing election ballots to voters rather than requiring voters to be physically present at an official polling place in order to cast their votes. With postal voting, voters can request a ballot, often available online, from election officials who then mail a ballot to those who request one. Voters then have up until a predetermined date to mail their filled-in ballot back to election officials or place it in a secured drop-off location. Both methods greatly minimize human contact that comes along with traditional voting measures. 

Expanding postal voting to all Americans is no small task. Only five states – Washington, Oregon, Utah, Hawaii and Colorado – currently have the proven capacity to allow all their citizens to vote by mail. The remaining 45 states and territories have postal voting laws that vary wildly, ranging from opt-in provisions that allow some counties to administer election by mail, to other states that bar postal voting except for in the most extreme circumstances7.

Building out the capacity to move the remainder of the primary election process, and potentially the 2020 general election process, to postal voting will require the coordination of officials from the local level all the way up to the federal level. Luckily, several states have already begun to roll out initiatives due to the COVID-19 pandemic. After delaying their March 24th primary, Georgia announced plans to mail absentee ballot request forms to all registered voters ahead of the rescheduled May 19th primary8. Ohio cancelled its March 17th primary and will give registered voters until April 28th to request an absentee ballot and mail it in9. The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act), including financing to carry out measures like these. The CARES Act includes $400 million dollars in election grants assisting states to “prevent, prepare for, and respond to coronavirus.”10

The CARES Act does not specify how exactly the election security grants should be spent to “prevent, prepare for, and respond to coronavirus.” However, states would be best advised to use the grants to implement postal voting for this election cycle. The funding provided by the CARES Act will go a long way in helping implement this policy, but it will not fulfill the entire budgetary need for the program. Based on estimates from the Brennan Center for Justice, the cost of expanding postal voting to all Americans runs from $982 million to $1.4 billion11. To offset these costs, states should redirect existing election appropriations to implementing postal voting that otherwise would have been used to run in-person election this cycle. In addition, Congress should include additional election security grants in the fourth stimulus bill that is widely expected to be introduced. Congress should specify that these election security grants be used only to implement postal voting. 

States will also have to revise their voter registration rules to accommodate the shift to postal voting. Currently, 39 states and the District of Columbia have implemented online voter registration12. Of the remaining 11 states, potential voters must request a voter registration form be mailed to them or visit a government office in-person in order to register to vote. Based on Brennan Center estimates, implementing online voter registration for the remaining 11 states will cost just $3.7 million13. 

While the short-run will require significant cooperation and investment in order to move the entire electoral system from in-person to postal voting, large long-run benefits should be anticipated from this policy. Research has shown that postal voting reduces the administrative costs related to running elections by 40%14.

Some officials and organizations have warned that postal is more vulnerable to fraud than in-person voting, the evidence makes it clear that is not true15. The decentralized nature of postal voting means that widespread fraud would require infiltrating the postal system itself, while in-person voter fraud requires only the infiltration of a singular machine or ballot box within a centralized network. The track record of states with postal voting proves this point: Oregon, for example, had only 10 instances of voter fraud during the 2016 Presidential election16.

If there was ever a time to move the nation’s voting process from in-person to mail-in, it would be now. A democratic and public health need for such a process is clear, and the financing and political will are available to execute such policy. 

Conclusion

COVID-19 is an unprecedented risk to the public health, economy and democratic institutions of the United States. The usual approach is no longer applicable, and novel solutions must be created in order to ensure that our recovery from this crisis is swift. The health of the electoral system is one of those prerequisites to recovery, and postal voting presents a solution to an impending problem for state lawmakers. 

 

SOURCES:

  1. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/26/upshot/coronavirus-millions-unemployment-claims.html
  2. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/large-events/index.html
  3. https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/global-covid-19-case-fatality-rates/
  4. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/3/4/21164479/super-tuesday-results-exit-polls-turnout-patterns
  5. https://acl.gov/sites/default/files/Aging%20and%20Disability%20in%20America/2017OlderAmericansProfile.pdf
  6. https://apnews.com/daf7c44adcbf7b11c7d69d4d07fa2d08
  7. https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/all-mail-elections.aspx
  8. https://www.ajc.com/news/state–regional-govt–politics/georgia-mail-absentee-ballot-request-forms-all-active-voters/s1ZcJ57g8qqIwyG6LNWfIM/
  9. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/25/ohio-vote-by-mail-primary-election-149012
  10. https://bipartisanpolicy.org/blog/cares-act-is-just-a-first-step-in-preparing-for-november-elections/
  11. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/estimated-costs-covid-19-election-resiliency-measures
  12. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/estimated-costs-covid-19-election-resiliency-measures
  13. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/estimated-costs-covid-19-election-resiliency-measures
  14. https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/2016/03/colorado-voting-reforms-early-results
  15. https://www.heritage.org/election-integrity/commentary/avenues-voter-fraud-have-no-place-coronavirus-bill
  16. https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2019/04/10-oregon-voters-plea-guilty-to-voter-fraud-in-2016-presidential-election.html

The Moment of Truth for Walmart, Amazon and the Rest of the Food Supply Chain

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In our previous blog post, we wrote about the importance of keeping the food/essentials supply chains open. With hundreds of millions of Americans stuck at home, having a dependable source of food is essential to avoid panic and to stay the course on social distancing. That’s not optional.

We equally stressed the importance of the health and safety of the workers in the food supply chain.  That’s also not optional.  And it’s not just Walmart, or Amazon, or Kroger–it’s every company in the food supply chain that faces the same problem of workers in distribution centers or stores getting infected and potentially spreading it to their coworkers and customers.

Walmart and Amazon are understandably bearing the brunt of criticism, because of their size and their sophistication.  Both companies are putting into place similar measures. Amazon is ramping up to do temperature checks of every employee at their entire U.S. and European operations network and Whole Foods Market stores by next week, and distributing millions of masks.  Walmart is doing roughly the same thing, with the roll-out of fever checks taking somewhat longer.

But this is the moment of truth for Walmart, Amazon, and the rest of the food supply chain. As more is learned about the virus, the standard of care will evolve. These companies must move pro-actively as that happens, including reorganizing tasks to increase distance between workers and tightening screening of potentially ill workers.

Moreover, workers need to be compensated for their risk. Amazon says that  “…we expect to go well beyond our initial $350 million investment in additional pay, and we will do so happily.”

The food supply chains must remain open. Workers must be protected and compensated. It’s not a choice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

America Needs to Mobilize its Medical Production

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In order to save lives and mitigate the impacts of the economic shutdown, there is an acute need for national direction to orchestrate and coordinate medical supply production — and it needs to happen quickly.

When the U.S.N.S. Comfort sailed past the Statue of Liberty most Americans felt something — whether it be pride or hope — there is no denying that people felt emotional to a large scale, coordinated response to help a city ravaged by COVID-19.

As this pandemic worsens, state and hospital leaders have been asking for help: they are in desperate need for personal protective equipment (PPE) for health care workers and ventilators to treat sick patients. If the United States is going to protect the health care workforce and return to normal activity, there needs to be huge increases in PPE production and distribution.

In order to save lives and mitigate the impacts of the economic shutdown, there is an acute need for national direction to orchestrate and coordinate medical supply production — and it needs to happen quickly.

Read the full piece here.

The Warehouse Safety Conundrum

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

This very unique crisis is creating very unique problems. One is how to get food and other essentials from warehouses all over the country into stores and delivered to people’s homes. This is not optional. The supply chain cannot shut down.

Americans are confined to their homes, watching the rising tide of deaths. It’s an existential moment unlike any other in recent history.

What’s keeping Americans from panicking is the knowledge that the lights remain on, the water still flows, and that food and other essentials continue to arrive.

To keep the food/essentials supply chain open,  companies like Walmart, Amazon, CVS, and Lowe’s are hiring in droves. Walmart has announced that it is hiring 150,000 workers for its stores and distribution centers. Amazon is hiring 100,000 workers. CVS is hiring  50,000 store associates, home delivery drivers, distribution center employees and customer service representatives. Lowe’s is hiring 30,000 workers.

In many ways this hiring is giving us a glimpse into the post-pandemic future. Jobs that are disappearing in one sector of the economy are being partly made up in another sector, often at a higher wage.  That part of the economy is still functioning.

On the other hand, the food/essentials supply chain was never set up for social distancing or the current circumstances. It’s not surprising that warehouse and store workers are demanding higher pay, virus-related sick time and safer working conditions, all of which they deserve. They are on the front lines of the war against COVID-19 at a critical moment that no one expected.

It’s essential to keep workers safe and compensate them, but equally essential to keep feeding vulnerable Americans who are waiting out the virus. It’s a tough but necessary balancing act.

 

Blog: Let’s Flatten the Curve on Anti-Charter Politics

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Lest anyone still thinks the teachers union in Los Angeles cares a whit about school children, its president, Alex Caputo-Pearl, has again demanded that L.A. Unified School District block any expansion of charter schools. These schools educate almost a quarter of Los Angeles County’s public school students—and do it far more effectively than district-operated schools.

In a letter to Superintendent Austin Beutner and the school board, Caputo-Pearl used the COVID-19 health crisis as his excuse this time. He demanded that the board not approve any new charter schools this spring, since board meetings will probably take place by audio or video conference. Conveniently, he seems to believe the public could not submit comments in such a format. 

Caputo-Pearl also said the board should not make any new decisions to allow charters to share space with district-operated schools—something charters have a right to do under state law. Any new sharing would not begin until next fall, but Caputo-Pearl apparently believes the health crisis will still be underway then.

Or perhaps Caputo-Pearl just wants to make life as difficult as possible for the thousands of children on charter school waiting lists.

Charters are free public schools, operated by nonprofit organizations, that cannot select their students. In today’s world, the majority of publicly funded services are delivered by private organizations—in health care, in transportation, in almost everything the public sector does. Charter schools are the manifestation of this trend in education. 

Because they have freedom from most bureaucratic rules and are closed if they perform poorly, they produce better results than schools operated by district bureaucracies. In Los Angeles they produce higher test scores, graduation rates, and college preparedness than district-operated schools. 

The most detailed study of test scores was done by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, an organization embraced by the teachers unions after its first charter school report, more than a decade ago.  Its 2014 report on Los Angeles found that charter students in L.A. gained months of learning every year, compared to demographically similar students with similar past test scores in district schools.

But the teachers unions hate charters, because most of their teachers choose not to unionize. Hence as the number of charter school children grows, the unions shrink. 

During a strike last year, Caputo-Pearl and UTLA demanded a moratorium on charters and broadcast the false claim that charters were responsible for the district’s financial woes. 

Clearly, Caputo-Pearl and United Teachers of Los Angeles don’t care about students’ test scores, graduation rates, or preparation for college or careers. If they did, they would support the expansion of charter schools. They care only about keeping their coffers full of union dues.

While we all do our parts to flatten the coronavirus curve, is it asking too much for teachers unions to flatten the curve on their anti-charter lies? Our crisis today calls for truth and unity, not propaganda and division.

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David Osborne, author of Reinventing America’s Schools: Creating a 21st Century Education System, directs the education work of the Progressive Policy Institute.

What’s Next: Breathtaking Deflation, Stunning Inflation or Both?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Get ready for the biggest economic and financial roller coaster of all time.  Policymakers in the United States and around the world are opening up the monetary spigots full bore and limbering up spending packages on an unimaginable scale. This comes after more than a decade of low interest rates. In the United States,  Congress has passed a $2.2 trillion pandemic package.

Let’s assume for the moment that progress is made on the health front against COVID-19, since the alternative is too horrifying to think about.  If we look out ahead, are Americans moving into an era of amazing deflation, stunning inflation, or both?

In the short run,  the sheer disruption of the sudden lockdown advocated by the health experts is going to send both demand and prices plunging. Goldman Sachs is forecasting a 24% plunge in GDP in the second quarter.  Domestic demand for non-food, non-health goods will collapse,  export demand will fall, factories will close. It will be a moment of supreme deflation, combined with an overwhelming–and deeply saddening–surge in virus-related deaths.

But then, like a tsunami wave, trillions of dollars of Federal Reserve funding and Treasury payments to individuals and businesses will finally come roaring onto shore. Demand should soar for all sorts of goods and services that the global economy is too disrupted to provide in quantity.  The most likely outcome: A new era of rising prices like we have not seen since the 1970s.

That surge of inflation, if it happens,  will present policymakers with a very tough choice–tighten up monetary and fiscal policy and potentially send the economy back into recession, or accept the inflation surge. The choice won’t be a choice–higher inflation will seem infinitely preferable to another downturn.

Instead, if we’re lucky, we’ll see a slow 3-5 year withdrawal of fiscal and monetary stimulus, as government loans are paid back, budget deficits are reduced, interest rates are raised, and excess funds are withdrawn from the financial system. Eventually the global economy comes back to normal–whatever normal will be.