WASHINGTON, D.C. – Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, today will join policy makers and experts at the Special Summit on New Nuclear Energy, sponsored by the United States Nuclear Infrastructure Council, to discuss the state of the global “Nuclear Renaissance.” Marshall will contribute to a roundtable discussion with Ricardo Perez, Westinghouse Electric Corporation, Jacques Besnainou, Areva North America, and Ganpat Mani, ConverDyn, on the future of nuclear energy in the United States. The summit agenda can be viewed at https://www.nuclearinfrastructure.org/summit2011agenda.php.
For more information, please contact Steven Chlapecka at schlapecka@ppionline.org, 202.525.3931 (office), or 202.556.1752 (cell).
In the era of big money, it is a familiar, if sobering, theme in modern presidential administrations, and this week President Obama’s administration took its turn.
A report published this week by iWatch news details the nearly 200 “bundlers” – individuals who channel multiple large donations to particular candidates – from President Obama’s 2008 campaign who have subsequently taken jobs or advisory roles in the administration.
True to form, White House spokesman Eric Shultz was quick to defend administration’s appointments, saying that all appointees “have sterling academic credentials, years of public services and private sector experience that make them eminently qualified for the positions to which they were appointed”.
This is probably true, in part because many of those qualities are what put people in the position to persuade wealthy friends and contacts to make donations in the first place. However, the appointment of bundlers today, as in past administrations, is worrisome for three reasons. Such appointments create at least the appearance that selections for executive positions may not be made on merit alone, undermining the public’s confidence in government, and they also narrow the pool of talent that the administration is likely to call upon in making their final decisions.
Regardless of the number of highly talented and qualified individuals Mr. Schultz can point out, public doubt inevitably lingers over such appointments. The American Foreign Service Association has long raised concerns over the appointment of campaign bundlers as ambassadors. Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia and career diplomat Thomas Pickering told iWatch that individuals could “multiply their chances” of gaining diplomatic appointments by bundling campaign contributions. Indeed, 24 ambassadors appointed by the administration were campaign bundlers, fourteen of whom raised at least $500,000 for the campaign.
It is likely that the prevalence of bundlers in certain positions within the administration narrows the field from which candidates are drawn. Half of those raising $200,000 or more for President Obama in 2008 were appointed to some role in the administration and fully 80 percent of those raising $500,000 or more were appointed. It is hard to imagine that when comparing candidates of similar qualification, the total money raised does not play a role, not least because the president will rely on many of these same people to raise money for his next campaign.
A narrower pool of talent means that those who supported former opponents are less likely to be appointed. Bi-partisan appointments, beyond a few high-profile exceptions, are even less likely. This is damaging at a time when finding common ground is vital to making major decisions about the challenges we face.
There is a solution to this problem; voluntary public funding of elections would allow candidates to raise money from a much broader base of public support. That would enable presidents to make appointments of talented and loyal supporters without doubts being raised as to whether such appointments were traded for financial support. It would also encourage the administration to cast its net more widely for the best available talent, perhaps even across the aisle. Such a change has to be good for our democracy.
Governor Chris Christie has decided to pull New Jersey out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), the Northeast’s carbon cap-and-trade program. New Hampshire’s legislature has also voted to leave, though the governor may veto the bill. Other states are considering their positions. As states leave RGGI and its market gets smaller, the advantages of linking up diminish, eroding its economic and political viability. Meanwhile, California’s attempt to implement cap and trade is under attack from the left and, as a result, has hit procedural roadblocks. These events have come as a surprise to many who follow this sort of thing—but are they important? Maybe. Three reactions are possible.
1) Despair(Cap and trade gets a knife in the back to match the one in the front)
RGGI and California’s AB32 are reminders that once, not so long ago, climate change was politically relevant and the best policy for avoiding it—pricing carbon—appeared not only possible but inevitable. RGGI and Europe’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) are the only carbon cap-and-trade programs of any size anywhere in the world. (New Zealand also has a nascent scheme.) RGGI, to date, has survived the political tides that turned cap and trade into “cap and tax” and likely make any new carbon policy impossible in this country. In short, the states would carry the torch until, one day, Washington wakes up. It would be depressing irony, this story goes, if those state programs should die not by outside political force but by suicide.
2) Indifference (“Wait…New Jersey had a carbon policy?”)
Another view is that you can talk all you want about “carrying the torch” without changing the fact that RGGI was and is a mere drop in the bucket. Its goals were always modest, and emissions caps were set so high that allowances never had any real value. If it weren’t for price floors, they would have been worthless. The program didn’t result in enough emissions cuts to be regionally relevant, much less have an effect on the climate problem. RGGI hasn’t had political success either. It’s chosen form—cap and trade—has become much less popular since the program started. If RGGI was supposed to show the country that cap and trade could work and wasn’t so scary after all, it’s either failed or nobody was paying attention in the first place. When and if pricing carbon becomes politically plausible again in Washington, it will be because politics and national public opinion have changed, not because New Jersey lit the way. The programs don’t seem to have had any effect internationally, either—they aren’t touted by U.S. climate negotiators and seem to have had no persuasive power during climate talks.
3)Optimism (Playing the long game)
Michael Levi argues that there may be more positives than negatives in Gov. Christie’s announcement:
…in the course of rejecting RGGI, Christie embraced the reality of the climate problem. Last fall, he said he was skeptical that human-caused climate change was a real problem. In his withdrawal announcement, though, he made it pretty clear that he thought climate change was a serious matter. This is no small thing for a rising star in a party that has increasingly made climate denial a litmus test for its leadership.
Christie’s about-face on this issue makes former Minnesota Governor and GOP presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty’s recent turn in the opposite direction look like ham-handed pandering.
Just as with every other environmental issue, the U.S. will have a climate policy when the center-right accepts that one is necessary, and not before. RGGI is doing very little to change that. In other words, RGGI matters only if you care more about the tool (cap and trade) more than the problem (climate change). It is odd, though, that a deficit hawk like Christie would spike a revenue generator like RGGI. That does not bode well for those who think that a carbon tax is the key to a grand environmental-fiscal compromise.
Which of these three is right? Perhaps unsurprisingly, all three to some extent. Pricing carbon is the most effective climate policy—so it is troubling to see it lose ground. RGGI itself is largely irrelevant to both the science and politics of climate. And the long view matters most of all. If you want a meaningful federal climate policy, you are looking for one thing: a 60th vote in the Senate. Could that one day be Christie?
It’s a nostrum of American politics that presidential candidates do best by first playing to the party base in competitive primaries, but then “moving to the center” to appeal to swing voters in close general elections. As a result, one of the strategic pitfalls for candidates is to go “too far” in the primaries in a way that makes “moving to the center” impossible.
Given the radicalization of the Republican Party by the Tea Party Movement (itself, I would argue, mostly a radicalized subset of the same old conservative “base” that has dominated the GOP for three decades), one of the big imponderables for the 2012 GOP field is how many general election risks they are willing to take to establish conservative bona fides in a very demanding and competitive environment for Wingnuttery. Last week we witnessed three examples of candidates going pretty far down the rabbit hole.
Most notably, Tim Pawlenty released an economic plan—a first in the field—which begged for mainstream media and “expert” mockery, but aligned T-Paw with an assortment of useful intra-party themes and pet rocks.
Do conservatives believe, to a theological degree, tax cuts for the wealthy will produce hyper-growth, generating revenues that largely pay for the tax cuts? Pawlenty promised to achieve growth levels exceeding anything in the go-go early 1980s or late 1990s, which is good, because it would take that kind of miracle to even come within shouting distance of the eleven trillion dollars in lost revenues his tax cuts would produce over ten years, according to the Tax Policy Center.
Do conservatives tend to think of federal budget deficits as caused by “waste, fraud and abuse” and excessive benefits for poor people? Well, T-Paw offered up a magic stew of symbolic, pain-free (to Republican voters) gestures in the direction of massive spending reductions, including a balanced budget amendment, vast new appropriations impoundment powers for the president, and implementation of the Lean Six Sigma process beloved of the management consultants of yesteryears.
Have conservatives recently lurched in the direction of Ron Paul’s monetary theories, redolent of the deflationary gold bugs of the late nineteenth century? Pawlenty’s plan lurches in that direction, too, raising alarums about “runaway inflation” and demanding the Fed do nothing but focus on fighting that phantom menace.
T-Paw’s not the only one using rather over-the-top methods to send up ideological flares. Michelle Bachmann is known primarily as a social conservative (her roots are definitely in the Christian Right) and as a partisan bomb-thrower, not as much a sober economic conservative. She addresses that perception by submitting to a public inquisition in the Wall Street Journal by self-appointed ideological commissar Stephen Moore (best known as founder of the Club for Growth):
Ms. Bachmann is best known for her conservative activism on issues like abortion, but what I want to talk about today is economics. When I ask who she reads on the subject, she responds that she admires the late Milton Friedman as well as Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams. “I’m also an Art Laffer fiend—we’re very close,” she adds. “And [Ludwig] von Mises. I love von Mises,” getting excited and rattling off some of his classics like “Human Action” and “Bureaucracy.” “When I go on vacation and I lay on the beach, I bring von Mises.”
Reading Austrian economics on the beach sounds pretty elitist to me, but it’s important for Bachmann to build her credibility in that area, regardless of how it all might sound to swing voters or just regular folks.
Herman Cain pulled a much easier stunt to gain attention as a wingnut zealot: promising not to sign any congressional bills that were longer than three pages. This rule, of course, would have made impossible most of the significant legislation in U.S. history, but that’s not important to a candidate trying to convey his populist contempt for the pointy-heads trying to pull a fast one via too-demanding reading material.
Exercises like this illustrate the extent to which the 2012 presidential field seems to think there’s very little risk in primary-season extremism; certainly no one among them is going to oppose it. During last night’s first major presidential candidate debate in New Hampshire, candidates were given every opportunity to point and hoot at the growth rate assumptions of Pawlenty’s economic plan, but no one would go there. In sharp contrast to debates in 2008, no one rolled their eyes when Ron Paul went off on one of his patented tirades on monetary policy. And no one spoke up for the proposition that just maybe there was some economic peril involved in taking debt limit legislation hostage.
What made this atmosphere most interesting is that it occurred in New Hampshire, the place in the early caucus-and-primary season that is supposedly least dominated by social or economic policy ultras and most open to a “moderate” like Jon Huntsman. Such terms as “moderate” really do have to be used sparingly, if at all with respect to the 2012 GOP field, as the candidates themselves would probably protest the title. For Republicans in 2012, truly, extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue. The rest of us should get used to it; we’ll be hearing it in many debates.
“It’s been three years since the housing market collapsed. Millions of people have lost their homes, millions more are underwater on their mortgages, and the banking system continues to hold billions of dollars in overvalued mortgages. The crash in housing constructions shows no sign of recovery. Sales of new single-family homes are down 80% from their 2005 peak. Jobs in homebuilding have dropped nearly a half. While economists know it’s next impossible for the economy to recover without a recovery in the housing sector, Washington has been unable to come up with a solution.
“Policymakers are missing an easy way to take the existing funding for low-income rental housing support and instead use it to help stabilize the housing market. The plan is simple: Create 1 million homeownership vouchers, patterned largely on the nation’s existing rent voucher program. Pay for it by phasing out the low-income housing tax credit.”
Are recent U.S. productivity gains a statistical mirage? In a must-read column on Saturday, Washington Post reporter Steven Pearlstein explores the significance of what appear to be serious flaws in the government’s traditional measures of U.S. economic and competitive performance.
Pearlstein credits PPI’s chief economic strategist, Michael Mandel for uncovering this pervasive mismeasurement. Mandel notes that official government statistics do not account for the increased efficiency of global supply chains, and may in effect, give the United States credit for manufacturing productivity gains that occur abroad.
As Pearlstein notes, this would go a long way toward explaining a phenomenon that has baffled economists – the failure of U.S. wage growth to keep pace with what seem to be robust productivity gains:
“Economists also are discovering how the globalized supply chains of U.S. based-companies have led government statistical agencies to overstate the size and growth of the U.S. economy — and, along with it, the growth in labor productivity, particularly in manufacturing. The implication of this mismeasurement is that the decline in GDP during the recession was greater than originally thought and the growth since has been weaker, which perhaps helps to explain the disappointing jobs picture.
The source of this mismeasurement is rather technical, having to do with the price estimates for imported parts and material. If the prices of these “intermediate goods” were actually lower than assumed, and the volume higher, as economists now suspect, then the economic value that was added to them by American workers would have been overstated by the official GDP statistics.”
U.S. elected leaders are desperately searching for ways to reduce the nation’s colossal debt without casting career-damaging votes for hiking revenues and slashing spending. Policy-makers are now turning to a technical fix in how the government measures inflation not only to fight the deficit, but also to circumvent political backlash.
Currently, the Bureau of Labor Statistics accounts for changes in the cost of living through the Consumer Price Index (CPI). The traditional CPI measures the overall average change over time in the prices paid by urban consumers for a market basket of consumer goods and services. But there’s a hitch: many economists say CPI overstates inflation, resulting in higher cost-of-living adjustments for people who receive public benefits, especially Medicare and Social Security, while simultaneously increasing federal deficits unnecessarily.
The problem with the traditional CPI is its dubious assumption that consumers continue to purchase the same basket of goods regardless of relative prices. That is where the so-called “Chained CPI” comes in. Many economists believe it more accurately measures inflation by taking into account something called “consumer substitution bias.” Simply, what this means is that when the price of food or some other good rises, people will look for a cheaper alternative.
According to a new paper by The Moment of Truth Project, a bipartisan effort focused on overcoming the nation’s debt problem, switching to the Chained CPI would save the government serious money — $12 billion in Social Security, $33 billion in other federal retirement plans and $23 billion in deficit reduction from other areas of the budget. Chained CPI will conserve another $87 billion in a ten-year period, because it slows the growth of tax bracket thresholds and other factors. All told, using Chained CPI to gauge inflation and index the federal budget would reduce the deficit by $300 billion total over the next decade.
No wonder the switch to the Chained CPI has been endorsed by both the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform’s and the Domenici-Rivlin deficit reduction plans. The fiscal commission’s co-chairs, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, set up Moment of Truth to advocate for the Bowles-Simpson commission’s plan.
According to the authors of the Moment of Truth report, Adam Rosenberg and Marc Goldwein, Chained CPI can fully account for the substitution bias that arises from consumer behavior by using market baskets from two successive months. The combination of baskets creates a chaining effect that links price changes to shifts in consumption.
Even though it is a technical fix, Congress still needs to approve adopting Chained CPI. In today’s hyper partisan times, fixing the CPI would be a less painful way politically to reap budget savings while providing a more accurate understanding of how inflation changes consumer behavior.
As if the damage to fair and accountable campaigns in Citizens United was not enough, a decision this week in the Federal District Court of Virginia raises the daunting prospect that the Supreme Court’s logic in favor of corporate speech can be extended to a second, more direct, form of political participation: contributions to political candidates. The verdict of the case, United States v. William Danielczyk Jr. & Eugene Biagi, found that Virginian corporations could legally donate directly to Virginian Congressional candidates. It goes one step beyond the Citizens United verdict that permitted campaign donations from corporations to political action committees and run advertisements impacting campaigns, but not the candidates themselves. (Before Citizens United, corporations had previously been unable to financially support political candidates and had been restricted in their political spending.) This latest ruling directly challenges more than a century of settled campaign law.
That corporate contributions will now become the norm is far from certain or even likely; nevertheless, the prospect of making campaign reforms in a judicial environment that is hostile to restrictions on spending invites more focus on alternative means to promote plurality and fairness in our democracy.
In Danielczyk & Biagi, Judge James Cacheris of the Virginia District Court this week upheld his earlier ruling that “the flat ban on corporate contributions [to candidates] is unconstitutional”, while clarifying that this decision was limited to the case’s particular circumstances. However, if other judges adverse to reform embrace Cacheris’ reasoning, then their combined opinion could have widespread implications.
Central to Cacheris’ decision is his reaffirmation of Citizens United: “the First Amendment does not allow political speech restrictions based on a speaker’s corporate identity”. Current caps on individual contributions are supposedly sufficient to avoid the risk or appearance of quid pro quo arrangements, which provide a historical basis for some restrictions on speech under the landmark Buckley v. Valeo decision in 1976. Given the inability of the law to discriminate between individuals and corporations, the Danielczyk decision states that if the Buckley v. Valeo contribution limits are sufficient for individuals, then they must be equally sufficient for corporations.
The Virginian court’s argument is open to a number of challenges, particularly over its implicit assumption that allowing corporate, in addition to individual, donations to candidates will not increase the risk of quid pro quo arrangements. A more ominous possibility however remains that Citizens United has opened the floodgates against laws that prohibit indirect corporate spending or candidate contributions in elections.
There remains at least one avenue for meaningful reform available to democracy advocates: offering significant public funds matching small donations to qualifying candidates. This type of systematic reform is not subject to the same legal challenges and would do more to promote a plural and open democracy than previous reforms focused on capping spending.
An example currently before Congress is the Fair Elections Now Act, which would for Congressional race donations of $100 or less, provide $5 for every $1 raised by candidates. Participating candidates must accept limits on the size of donations they are able to receive.
Such reforms would not limit the donations that corporations can offer, but rather encourage candidates to turn down such offers in order to qualify for matching funds. It doesn’t limit free speech, but rather offers a more speech alternative.
Research by Americans for Campaign Reform suggests that such measures would allow candidates relying on small contributions to be competitive, even against those candidates backed by large corporate war chests. The relationship between money spent and votes gained is strong up until about the $1 million mark in the average House race, a level at which most candidates can establish their name and get their message out to prospective voters. After that spending threshold, there is little correlation between spending and votes.
Public funding would enable more candidates to get over this crucial threshold without requiring support, whether it is direct or indirect, from private interests. The presence of such candidates would in itself create a strong argument against politicians accepting large contributions, and so reduce the role of money in politics. Overturning the century-long ban on direct corporate contributions to candidates is indeed a worrying sign and one that directly violates the Supreme Court’s recent findings; but the avenues for meaningful reform are far from closed.
The KIPP Charter School network is widely hailed as among the nation’s most effective, so naturally charter skeptics are always looking for chinks in its armor. Among the most thoughtful of those skeptics is the Century Foundation’s Richard Kahlenberg. In a recent blog post, Kahlenberg cites this eye-catching statistic: only 33 percent of middle school KIPP graduates go on to receive a degree from a four-year college.
That sounds low, but of course the relevant question is, compared to what? According to the same source Kahlenberg cited, about 75 percent of students who graduate from suburban schools get a college degree. But among low-income students in high poverty districts, only 8.3 percent graduate from college. That’s the only valid comparison, since KIPP operates almost exclusively in such districts and overwhelming educates poor, minority students.
More than 85 percent of KIPP students have gone to college, as opposed to 40 percent of low-income students nationwide. KIPP reports that more than 90 percent of its students outperform their district counterparts on standardized tests.
Kahlenberg maintains, while KIPP has impressive statistics on attrition and high school graduation rates, the model continues to fall short in overcoming poverty and segregation. This may be true, but KIPP’s mission is not to combat poverty. Instead, the network is “dedicated to preparing students in underserved communities for success in college and in life.”
The KIPP network’s goal is to see 75 percent of its students graduate from college, essentially matching the performance of students from high-performing suburban schools. This would be a staggering achievement. It’s fair to ask how KIPP plans to more than double its college completion rate. But it’s unfair to demand miracles from an organization that has existed for just 17 years, and only recently opened its doors in 2004 to elementary and high schools.
This is relevant because KIPP, like many other charters, does not have a vast array of data to work with and only graduated its first class of high school students in 2008 from Houston High School. It’s worth noting that the data KIPP and outsiders rely on comes from middle school students served by KIPP ten years ago, most of whom have not attended a KIPP school since eighth grade.
Finally, Kahlenberg and other skeptics discount KIPP’s successes on the grounds that its schools benefit from a selection bias, in that only the most motivated low-income families try to get their kids into KIPP. This claim, while controversial, is contested by KIPP and certainly merits further study. In the meantime, progressives ought to embrace and support KIPP’s efforts to build on its undeniable successes in educating low-income kids.
General Chen Bingde, head of the general staff of China’s People Liberation Army (PLA), has confirmed that his country is constructing its first aircraft carrier, an ex-Soviet Varyag set to begin sea trials next year. Spy-masters in Washington and London have been monitoring the ship’s progress for some time, but Gen. Chen’s comments are the first public commentary on its existence. Purchased from a Ukrainian shipyard in 2002 for $20million by a Macau-based company, the original contract stipulated that the vessel could not be used for military purposes. The buyer claimed the ship would be converted into a floating amusement park, complete with a hotel and casino. Whoops.
Adding an aircraft carrier to its fleet continues to amplify the PLA’s global reach capabilities, and at a time when China is asserting a more aggressive strategic posture in the South China Sea. China has made maritime territorial claims there, drawing ire of the United States and countries in the region, which have insisted instead freedom of international waterways.
That’s why, in part, confirmation of the aircraft carrier is likely to raise the hackles of policy makers in Western capitals, fearful–despite Beijing’s claims to the contrary–that the addition of a major instrument of power projection represents an obvious threat.
While such fears are well-founded, it’s also important to place the Chinese military expansionism within a proper context. In that vein, PPI has offered a series of memos on China’s military over the course of 2010, including this piece explicitly on its Navy. U.S. Naval War College Professor Mike Chase concludes:
[T]he U.S. will need to strengthen its ties to key countries in East Asia and develop strategic and tactical military concepts and capabilities that would allow it to counter China’s growing military power. Meanwhile, U.S. policy makers must seek collaboration with the Chinese military in an effort to highlight the benefits of being a global stakeholder to Beijing.
Other pieces in the series are on China’s military budget and priorities and Beijing’s anti-access/area-denial strategy. Read them here. And finally, back in December, PPI did a fantastic panel discussion featuring Chip Gregson, Asst. Secretary of Defense for Asia, Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), as well as Joe Nye, Jim Fallows, and the aforementioned Mike Chase. Check out the video here.
Whether U.S. Presidents succeed or fail often depends on a big factor beyond their control: the timing of the business cycle. Lucky Presidents – Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush – experienced downturns early in their first term, leaving plenty of time for an economic rebound to lift them to reelection.
Barack Obama, who took office months after the Great Recession started, must be cursing his luck. Just at the point when investment and jobs normally would be coming back, the U.S. economy has taken a sickening swoon.
Last month’s feeble job numbers – just 54,000 jobs created, far short of the 300,000 or more needed each month to return unemployment to pre-crisis levels – reinforced the public’s growing economic gloom. They also suggested that the administration has erred in viewing the economy’s problems as cyclical.
If that were true, the White House strategy of waiting for the economy to heal itself might make sense. But if America faces structural impediments to growth, we can’t just wait for the economy to revert to normal.
Since the Great Recession officially ended in the fall of 2009, the economy has grown just 2.8 percent per year, well below the average 4.6 percent growth that follows typical recessions, economist Lawrence Lindsey said. And instead of declining steadily, unemployment is rising again.
From GOP presidential aspirant Jon Huntsman to liberal columnist Paul Krugman, commentators across the spectrum are rightly talking about a “lost decade” of economic growth. According to the Wall Street Journal’s Gerald Seib, America has endured 11 straight years of lackluster growth since 2000, the last year in which economic growth exceeded four percent.
The job picture is even worse. As this useful chart shows, the U.S. economy created 23 million jobs on Clinton’s watch and 16 million on Reagan’s. Bush’s job-creation record is a paltry 3 million. And we can’t just blame the Great Recession. Even before it hit in December 2007, the rate of job growth lagged well behind the record of the previous decades.
No doubt about it: the aughts under Bush were a lost economic decade. While no president can be blamed for cyclical downturns, it is fair to say that Bush’s economic policies did little to address the structural roots of slower economic and job growth. On the contrary, his purblind economic policy mix – coupling a spending binge with deep tax cuts – helped dig America into a deep fiscal hole.
Nonetheless, the lingering economic malaise has cast a shadow over Obama’s reelection prospects and boosted Mitt Romney’s political stock – the two are now running neck-in-neck in the polls. The 2012 election will largely be a contest over which party has the most credible plan for reviving U.S. economic dynamism.
The Republicans have a simple fiscal theory that leads to an equally simple solution. They see the size and cost of government as the chief obstacle to growth. Cut public spending, and the economy will sit up on its haunches again and roar.
Many liberals, including Krugman, seem stuck in the Keynesian paradigm, arguing that the problem is inadequate demand, which means government needs to spend more until the economy recovers its “animal spirits.”
Obama is smart enough to reject a witless choice between less or more government. He has, however, yet to develop a plausible plan for restructuring the U.S. economy to unleash economic innovation, capture its benefits in good jobs that stay in America, and boost our ability to win in world markets.
Above all, Obama needs to spell out big, concrete initiatives that can inspire public confidence that his administration has properly diagnosed the economy’s structural ills and prescribed realistic remedies.
PPI has developed bold proposals that meet this standard: An independent National Infrastructure Bank, to unlock hundreds of billions of private investment in state-of-the-art transport, energy and water systems; pro-growth tax reform that closes inefficient tax expenditures and reduces the corporate tax rate; and a base-closing style commission charged with periodically pruning regulations that impede economic innovation and business start-ups, the engine of most new American job creation.
America can’t afford another lost economic decade – and neither can progressives. This is an FDR moment for Obama – a time for “bold, persistent experimentation” to get America’s economy moving again.
Last week’s less-than-positive jobs report revived ever-hopeful mainstream media talk that economic issues would decisively trump cultural or constitutional issues in the Republican Party’s councils. And indeed, some reporters saw this long-awaited sign even in the entrails of the Christian Right: the annual Washington get-together of Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition, which attracted most of the GOP presidential field. Here’s how Reuters described the confab, under the title, “Social issues fade as Republicans court conservatives”:
Christian conservatives looking to put a Republican in the White House heard a lot about the economy on Friday in a sign that their social issues may take a back seat in 2012…. In contrast to some previous presidential campaigns, social issues like gay marriage and abortion have not been prominent topics for Republicans hopefuls seeking to replace President Barack Obama in next year’s election.
That’s a Beltway wish-fulfillment view of the FFC event, and of contemporary Republican politics generally.
But it’s also not exactly right: There was lots of talk about those supposedly forgotten “social issues” at Ralph’s soiree. The proto-candidate for president who defines the left wing of the GOP these days, Jon Huntsman, did not consign these issues to the “back seat.” Here’s what he had to say:
“As governor of Utah I supported and signed every pro-life bill that came to my desk,” Huntsman said, rattling off legislation that made second trimester abortions illegal, a bill that he said allowed “women to know about the pain that abortion causes an unborn child,” a bill “requiring parental permission for an abortion,” and another piece of legislation “that would trigger a ban on abortions in Utah if Roe vs. Wade were overturned.”
“You see,” Huntsman explained, “I do not believe the Republican Party should focus only on our economic life to the neglect of our human life.”
Turning the “social issues don’t matter” meme on its head, another supposedly non-social-conservative candidate, Mitt Romney, argued that economic and fiscal problems represented a “moral crisis.”
Most MSM treatment of the FFC event missed the rather central point that Ralph Reed’s organization is not a full-on Christian Right group purely devoted to social issues, but instead a “teavangelical” effort explicitly designed to merge the religious and limited-government impulses of the GOP. There is already a massive overlap of affiliation with Tea Party and Christian Right identities. And there’s a more important if less understood overlap in the Tea Party and Christian Right theories of what’s gone wrong with America: an emphasis on alleged judicial usurpations of state and private-sector powers going back to the New Deal, and a hostility to supposed cultural elites who favor both secularization of American society and maintenance of the progressive legacy of New Deal/Great Society programs.
There’s really not that much tension between the economic and social wings of today’s conservative movement. And both appear to converge in an aggressive foreign policy, focused especially on the Middle East. FFC Speaker Rep. Michele Bachmann ended her remarks with a prayer that concluded:
Our nation hangs precariously in the balance financially, morally and also in our relationship with the rest of the world — with our position toward Israel.
Another already-announced presidential candidate, who reportedly received the most impressive response, Herman Cain, told FFC attendee:
“The Cain doctrine would be real simple when it comes to Israel: You mess with Israel, you mess with the United States of America,” he said to a long standing ovation.
In general, bad economic indicators don’t seem to be tilting the conservative movement or the Republican Party in any sort of economics-only direction. Indeed, to the extent that Republican economic policy now focuses on short-term federal spending cuts and long-term elimination of New Deal/Great Society entitlements, it converges with non-economic policies aimed at a cultural counter-revolution remaking America according to mid-twentieth-century values and opportunities. The very people who want to criminalize abortions and restore “traditional marriages,” also want to get rid of unions and collective efforts to make health care or pensions universally available.
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On the presidential campaign trail, Mitt Romney formally declared his candidacy, but on the same day, in Boston, Sarah Palin spoke out against the Massachusetts health reform plan. Palin’s impossible-to-divine ambitions received vast attention. … Michele Bachmann has reportedly recruited Ed Rollins, Mike Huckabee’s 2008 campaign manager, to her cause. … Newt Gingrich followed up his disastrous campaign launch by suddenly announcing a two-week vacation to the Greek Islands, subsequently losing his Iowa political director. … Jon Huntsman became the first candidate to officially announce he was skipping Iowa. And polls consistently show Mitt Romney narrowly leading a field of candidates who will soon be attacking him on many grounds, most notably RomneyCare. While Romney appears to think his economic message and resume will make him ultimately irresistible to both primary and general election voters, it’s unclear he can overcome hostility to his health care record among the former, and coolness towards his Wall Street Republican orientation among the latter. We’ll soon know if what Romney has to do to get the Republican presidential nomination will prove to be too much for him, or too much for the November 2012 electorate.
Last week reports emerged about attempted cyber attacks against the internal networks of three major U.S. defense contractors: Lockheed Martin, L-3 Communications, and Northrop Grumman. All of the attempted hacks tried to access the companies’ internal networks using compromised remote-access security tokens, which are believed to be linked to yet another hack that occurred at a different government contractor, RSA, in March.
Amidst news of last week’s attacks, DoD is preparing a formal cyber strategy and a list of deployable cyber weapons. The strategy is not in response to the incursions, but as the first formal cyber strategy written by the Pentagon, it obviously has bearing on USG’s response to them, as well as future assaults.
The strategy is not yet public, but two important provisions are known: First, that the Pentagon may use conventional force to respond to a cyber attack against the U.S.; second, that the strategy explicitly contains an authorization framework, reportedly requiring the military to obtain presidential approval before deploying cyber weapons.
While it’s time that the U.S. government assembled clear policies to respond to cyber attacks, it is important to recognize the unique challenges contained therein. Two of the most important are 1) assigning responsibility for an attack and 2) assuring that any retaliation avoids excessive collateral damage.
First, unlike attacks with conventional weapons, an attacker has more opportunities to hide his origin in cyberspace. For example, state actors can create plausible deniability behind contracted criminal groups, a tactic likely used by Russia and China. It’s unclear how the new strategy will deal with this point.
Second, if the U.S. government is able to correctly attribute an attack, its response would have to comport with international law, specifically a statute known as the Law of Armed Conflict (LoAC). The United States is bound to the LoAC through multiple treaties such as the 1907 Hague Conventions and the 1949 Geneva Conventions, as well as through customary international law. Two elements of the LoAC pose particular challenges in the cyber realm: proportionality and distinction.
Proportionality may be a particularly tough nut to crack, as we know that the Pentagon’s policy will permit retaliating against a cyber attack with conventional weapons. It’s new ground, and the argument could be made that launching a missile in response to a computer-based attack is inherently disproportionate. However, we must recognize that a cyber attack has the ability to cause actual loss of life if, for example, it were aimed at air traffic control systems and caused planes to crash. Under the new policy, only an attack of this magnitude would allow a conventional response to a cyber attack, and it is imperative that such a response be proportionate.
Distinction is another problematic element of the LoAC because cyber weapons can have unintended consequences. The amount of damage that a conventional weapon does is known before it is used even though it may damage unintended targets. Not so in the cyber world: Vital military and civilian assets may reside on the same network, thus making it difficult to limit damage to the legitimate military target. Furthermore, cyber weapons are different because entities that reside in cyberspace are interconnected on a global scale: attacking a target on a server in China can also cause damage to another server in Canada. This actually happened in 2010 when the U.S. military took down a jihadist website hosted in Saudi Arabia that led to disruption to more than 300 servers in Saudi Arabia, Texas, and Germany.
These are only a couple of considerations that complicate the use of cyber weapons, and developing a strong cyber capabilities must occur within the context of these considerations. With so much of its vital national assets relying on the Internet, the U.S. must equip itself with both the strong defensive capabilities and project power in cyberspace, as well as with robust policies to regulate these capabilities.
Amid the high drama of fiscal brinkmanship in Washington, it’s easy to forget that reducing budget deficits isn’t the biggest economic challenge we face. Even more important is kick-starting the great American job machine and reversing our country’s slide in global competition.
Critical to both goals is shoring up the decaying physical foundations of national prosperity. Without world-class infrastructure, the United States won’t be able to attract private investment, sustain rapid technological innovation and productivity growth, or keep good jobs from going overseas.
According to a new Gallup poll, general economic concerns (35 percent) and unemployment (22 percent) top voters list of worries, with federal deficits and debt a distant third at 12 percent. Fiscal restraint is important, but it must be balanced against the larger imperatives of jobs and global competition. Among other things, this means leaving room for public investment to replenish the nation’s stock of physical capital.
America can’t build a more dynamic and globally competitive economy on the legacy infrastructure of the 20th Century. Thanks to their parents’ far-sighted public investments, baby boomers grew up in a country that set the world standard for modern infrastructure. But after a generation of underinvestment, compounded by politicized spending decisions, we now face a massive infrastructure deficit that exerts a severe drag on U.S. productivity.
Meanwhile, China and other fast-rising countries are building gleaming new airports and bullet trains. To keep from falling farther behind, the United States needs to make large-scale capital investments in repairing decrepit roads and bridges; upgrading air and sea ports; building “intelligent” transportation systems and smart energy grids; modernizing the air traffic control system; speeding up our pokey rail networks; and leading the world in deploying ultra-fast broadband.
But with the government strapped for cash, it’s reasonable to ask where the money to rebuild America will come from. The answer is that we need to look more to the private sector. U.S. companies are sitting on $2 trillion in idle cash, and pension funds, overseas investors and sovereign wealth funds also are looking for places to invest. Although the federal government will have to put up seed capital, its main role should be to leverage private investment in state-of-the-art infrastructure.
That’s why America needs a National Infrastructure Bank. As proposed by the bipartisan trio of Senators John Kerry, Kay Bailey Hutchison and Mark Warner, the bank would use a modest, one-time appropriation of $10 billion to leverage enormous investments — $640 billion over 10 years — for projects with the greatest potential to put Americans to work and enhance U.S. competitiveness.
President Obama has repeatedly endorsed a national infrastructure bank and proposed the idea again in the budget he sent to Congress in February. But the Senate bill (and a separate House proposal championed by Rep. Rosa DeLauro) have decided advantages over President Obama’s proposal. The president’s approach starts with a smart idea to create programs that work more with the private sector to find financing solutions. But unlike the Kerry proposal, it does not focus enough on the most powerful tools for leveraging private investment: loan programs that include a reasonable cap on the federal share of project costs. Obama’s bank would also be housed within the Department of Transportation, whereas the Kerry bill would make the bank an independent, quasi-public entity. That’s an important difference, because to attract hard-headed capitalists who expect a real economic return on their investments, the government’s financing facility must be genuinely free of political interference.
An independent infrastructure bank would select projects based on their ability to generate real economic returns rather than their influential political patrons. As a self-sustaining entity that would not rely on future appropriations from Congress, the bank would not be subject to the pork barreling and earmarking that distorts federal and state infrastructure spending, especially on transportation.
It’s time to get serious about our dilemma: the U.S. economy is creating too few jobs to bring down unemployment to pre-recession levels. For that, we’d need nearly 12 million new jobs, or about 100,000 more on average than the 200,000 the economy is creating each month. Big capital projects would immediately create those jobs where they are most desperately needed–in the hard-hit construction industry, which is still struggling with a 20 percent unemployment rate.
In the short run, a big national push to build modern infrastructure could create high-skill jobs that can’t be exported. In the long run, it will ensure America’s return to being an engine of production, not just a global center for consumption. That’s why, as Congress struggles to contain federal deficits and debt, it needs to make room for a National Infrastructure Bank to rebuild America.
If Newt Gingrich’s self-destructive criticism of Paul Ryan’s Medicare proposals pushed Republicans more firmly into Ryan’s corner (e.g., Tim Pawlenty’s forced statement that he would sign a bill implementing Ryan’s budget as president, even though he intends to present his own “ideas”), you might think the results of last Tuesday’s special congressional election in New York would then exert counter-pressure against Ryan’s plan. After all, it’s pretty clear that Republican candidate Jane Corwin’s support for Ryan’s budget was the central issue in the campaign, and contributed to her loss in a strong GOP district. But for the most part, conservative opinion-leaders are resisting the pressure, either rationalizing Corwin’s loss as attributable to other factors (mainly through an unconvincing claim she would have won without the presence of self-proclaimed Tea Party candidate Jack Davis splitting the GOP vote), or simply arguing that Republicans need to do a better job of explaining Ryan’s proposal.
In any event, last week’s results guarantee that Democrats will keep relentlessly tarring the entire GOP with the unpopularity of Ryan’s specific take on Medicare. Whatever individual Republicans actually think, they probably calculate they’d rather take their chances on a general election loss over Medicare than invite a primary challenge by dissing Ryan. Many also undoubtedly hope the president will eventually give them “cover” by supporting a budget deal including enough changes to Medicare and Medicaid that makes it describable, accurately or not, as Ryan Lite.
Elsewhere, it’s been another wild week on the Republican presidential campaign trail, particularly on the Wingnut Right. Three national polls of Republicans have shown Georgia-based radio talk host Herman Cain leaping past more highly-regarded competitors to a high-single or low-double digit position of support, despite low name ID and meager (up until now) media coverage. The Hermanator (as he likes to call himself) has already been regularly winning straw polls after candidate speaking engagements, and is at this point the unquestioned favorite of Tea Party activists around the country. He’s been wowing audiences in Iowa in particular, and a Public Policy Institute poll of likely Caucus-goers in the Hawkeye state to be released later today will reportedly show him running second.
The media attention Cain has now earned will be a mixed blessing, making him more of a national conservative celebrity, but also inviting the kind of negative scrutiny he has avoided as a fringe candidate. It could well produce both effects, as illustrated by the mockery he’s already getting for conflating the Declaration of Independence with the Constitution in his announcement speech. In Wingnut World, it’s gospel that the latter document incorporates the former, which is how both Christian Right and Tea Party folk import God, natural law, and an implicit right of resistance against Big Government into the Constitution. Odds are Cain wasn’t being ignorant, but was simply blowing a dog whistle to conservative activists. His insouciance about foreign affairs could be a bigger problem, as could publicity about his past support for TARP and his service on the Federal Reserve Board back in the 1990s. Above all, Cain’s new prominence will bring race back into the national political discussion with a vengeance, even though many of his supporters seem to feel he represents sort of definitive rebuttal against charges that anti-Obama sentiments reflect racial undertones.
Even as polls have been raising Cain, however, an even bigger phenomenon could be unfolding as Sarah Palin—assumed to have been driven away from a 2012 run by poor poll numbers, savage Republican Elite criticism, and her highly remunerative day jobs—is suddenly behaving very much like a proto-candidate. First up, it came out that she had commissioned a full-length feature film centering on her persecution by the forces of Establishment Evil, to be released next month in Iowa, followed by other early primary states. Then she sprang into action by becoming the chief Celebrity Guest at the annual Rolling Thunder motorcycle rally in Washington, and is on the verge of launching a bus tour that will eventually make its way to Iowa. By all accounts, she’s viewing this re-emergence on the national scene as a test of whether she could launch a viable candidacy while pursuing an “unconventional campaign” that apparently would involve low-substance “patriotic” appearances with her large and famous family in tow.
The impact of all this turbulence on the rest of the field is an interesting sub-plot. As someone whose candidacy would be mortally endangered by a Christian Right/Tea Party coalescence around Cain, or a campaign by her doppelganger Palin, Michele Bachmann had quite the nerve-wracking week, including a damaging and clumsily handled no-show at an important Iowa Republican fundraiser she was supposed to headline. Meanwhile, Mitt Romney, considered the likely beneficiary of any surge of support for a presumably unelectable right-wing candidate like Cain or Palin, made his first appearance in Iowa in many months. As he sought to maintain a delicate balance between dissing Iowa and committing to the kind of full-tilt campaign in the state that undid him in 2008, Romney delivered a shirt-sleeve speech to an audience at a state facility in Des Moines. But before he could get into his altar call, fire alarms went off and Romney had to cut short his remarks and urge the crowd to calmly head to the exits. Ever snake-bit in Iowa, the Mittster was foiled on this occasion by someone overcooking a bag of microwave popcorn.
Football, they say, is a game of inches. So too, is Middle East peace making — both figuratively, and in some cases quite literally. President Obama was reminded of that last week when his comments about terms of reference for future Israel-Palestinian peace negotiations provoked a significant public debate, and in some cases, a furious reaction.
Many Republicans – some acting out of purely political motives – and many Democrats, myself included – acting out of genuine concern – reacted quickly and negatively when President Obama adopted as American policy on Israeli-Palestinian peace talks what had previously been described by this Administration as a “Palestinian goal”– that is, a Palestinian state “based on the 1967 lines, with mutually agreed swaps.”
In the view of some, including the White House, that statement was not new U.S. policy. Those views assert that negative reactions suggesting otherwise “misrepresented” the president’s statement, or perhaps more importantly, his intended meaning.
But as we know, when it comes to issues about Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict, nuance matters. This is a place where inches count.
Reaction to that one passage in the “Winds of Change” address, and the media’s almost singular focus on the matter, overshadowed what was one of the most important and impressive speeches of President Obama’s tenure. And in the end it was only a handful of missing words, representing real-world American commitments that were at the heart of the commotion.
There was so much to celebrate in his address: From the soaring and inspiring vision of a boundless future of prosperity for billions of people across the Middle East who have never known freedom, to the impressive and important commitments to Israel’s security, and to America’s determination to stand up for its values and interests in defeating efforts to isolate and delegitimize Israel at the United Nations and beyond.
In fact, an address that was billed as a landmark speech about change in the Arab world was one of the President’s most impressive and pro-Israel addresses of his presidency.
But you’d probably never know that. And that’s a shame.
By saying that an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal should be based on the 1967-lines with mutually agreed swaps, but omitting the next key phrase – “that take into account demographic changes and realities on the ground” – it was by just a few inches that the president missed the goal line of putting his statement in line with a half century of his predecessors.
It was the vagueness of his remarks, and the omission of a key few words, which necessarily go hand-in-hand, that caused so much alarm.
The truncated phrase was treated with great significance, because this Administration has consistently declined to affirm the validity of a 2004 official letter of commitments from President Bush on behalf of the United States to the Prime Minister in Israel, in which among other key commitments, the U.S. reaffirmed its promise to ensure that Israel would have “defensible borders” distinct from the 1967 lines that would accommodate demographic changes and reality on the ground – ie, major Israeli population centers in the West Bank.
Furthermore, despite the president’s repeated calls for a Jewish State, he has yet to embrace the position taken and assurance provided by Presidents Clinton and Bush that under any final peace accord, the refugee question will be addressed within the borders of a Palestinian State, and not Israel.
Had the Obama Administration previously embraced that letter and those critical U.S. promises, there would have been not nearly the outcry.
But that inexplicable breakdown, seeming to call into question America’s commitment to assurances made in writing by an American president to the State of Israel, codified by Congress, and endorsed in the Clinton Parameters of January 2001, laid the groundwork for the stinging reaction to the President’s incomplete reference to the ’67 lines.
In that context, like Tonto to the Lone Ranger, the Israelis were left asking, ‘What do you mean by swaps, Kimosabe?’
A few days later, President Obama gave another speech on the Middle East, this time even more pro-Israel, but once again, you may not know that, either.
Among the important things President Obama made clear in his second address on the Middle East at the AIPAC policy conference, was that, indeed, he agreed with his predecessors, Presidents Bush and Clinton, that any changes on the ground in a peace agreement must reflect today’s demographic realities and Israel’s unique security needs. His statements on that matter put him firmly in-line with American leaders going back to the 1960s, when President Johnson first established America’s policy that no one could expect Israel to go back to its indefensible 1949/1967 lines.
Why does that matter? History and perspective, of course. Consider the Israeli perspective: In the 1967 Six-Day War, in which Israel survived a miraculous third attempt by a combined force of Arab armies to ‘drive the Jews into the sea’, the nascent Jewish state made important territorial gains.
The city of Jerusalem, after 19 years of Jordanian rule that suppressed freedom of worship for Jews and Christians, was liberated and reunified. The West Bank, known for millennia and in the Old Testament as Judea and Samaria, was brought back into contact with the rest of Israel. The Golan Heights, for years a launching pad from which the Syrian army terrorized Israeli towns, was won in an epic and heroic battle. And the Sinai Desert and Gaza Strip, soon to be offered to Egypt in exchange for peace, were conquered.
Like the Sun rises, Russia and other Arab allies at the United Nations pressed their condemnations of Jewish State. In a typically hypocritical move targeting Israel, some in the world body demanded that for the first time in history land won in a defensive war be fully returned to the aggressors.
The United States – defending its ally Israel, our interests in the region, and basic fairness – rejected that approach. Our elected leaders understood that it was the very indefensible boundaries of 1949/67 encouraged Arab aggression and dreams of destroying the Jewish State and the Jewish People. The United States understood that Israel could not ever be expected or pressured to go back to what became know as ‘the Auschwitz borders.’ That is why America fought so hard to ensure that UN Resolution 242 specifically did not force Israel had to relinquish all of the land it had captured in its war of self-defense, did not force Israel back to indefensible borders and need not exchange territory in a one-to-one ratio.
That is the diplomatic tradition many feared the president was undermining, at a time when Israel is under threat from a genocidal Hezbollah to the north, an unstable Egypt and Syria to its south and northeast, and a Hamas/Fatah unity government that seems ready to abandon the peace process on multiple fronts. The Palestinians rushed to enshrine the president’s position as new preconditions for talks.
But they’re likely to be disappointed. The president made it clear during his second AIPAC speech that he is aligned with those decades of American diplomacy stretching back to the U.S. stand on UNSC 242. That is precisely the diplomatic tradition that the President embraced during his AIPAC speech, a clarification that – again – has been under-appreciated by some.
Perhaps realizing that his first remarks were incomplete and left an impression he had not intended, President Obama, in his speech to AIPAC, built on the pro-Israel foundation of his Winds of Change Address, not only completing the thought he’d begun the prior week, but expanding on several themes in praise-worthy ways.
President Obama powerfully restated in emphatic and unmistakable terms how strenuously the United States will oppose Palestinian efforts to attain unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state in the absence of peace and an end to all claims. This clear leadership stance, and the president’s forceful denunciation of efforts to delegitimatize and isolate Israel are deeply appreciated and underscore the President’s commitment to safeguarding the Jewish state.
Notable was the President’s statement that Israel cannot be expected to negotiate with Hamas, which he rightly called a terrorist organization. His explicit call once again for the Iranian proxy to meet the quartet conditions – recognizing Israel and its right to exist, renouncing violence, and accepting prior agreements between the PA and Israel, was fundamentally important, and ensures that Hamas must fundamentally change, or else remain a pariah.
The President also explicitly signaled his support for a long-term, but not permanent, Israeli military and security presence in the Jordan Valley. This stance is vital, and like his effort to align administration policy with administrations past, is not just commendable, but significant. And in both speeches, the President stressed not only “ironclad” American support for Israel’s security, but insisted that a future Palestinian state be demilitarized.
His remarks on issues beyond the narrow question of the Israel-Arab dispute are also vitally important – in particular, Iran. Again, President Obama said clearly and unequivocally that Iran cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons and that it is American policy to prevent them from doing so.
Both speeches were strongly pro-Israel in the broadest sense. From the President’s vision of a Middle East made up of progressive Arab states more focused on investing in their own human capital and building tolerant, prosperous societies – rather than scapegoating Israel, to his embrace of Israel and its future as a Jewish state with peaceful neighbors, there is much to appreciate. It’s time to say so.
In the era of big money, it is a familiar, if sobering, theme in modern presidential administrations, and this week President Obama’s administration took its turn.
It’s been a bad month for cap and trade.
It’s a nostrum of American politics that presidential candidates do best by first playing to the party base in competitive primaries, but then “moving to the center” to appeal to swing voters in close general elections. As a result, one of the strategic pitfalls for candidates is to go “too far” in the primaries in a way that makes “moving to the center” impossible.
Are recent U.S. productivity gains a statistical mirage? In a 
U.S. elected leaders are desperately searching for ways to reduce the nation’s colossal debt without casting career-damaging votes for hiking revenues and slashing spending. Policy-makers are now turning to a technical fix in how the government measures inflation not only to fight the deficit, but also to circumvent political backlash.
The KIPP Charter School network is widely hailed as among the nation’s most effective, so naturally charter skeptics are always looking for chinks in its armor. Among the most thoughtful of those skeptics is the Century Foundation’s Richard Kahlenberg. In a recent blog post, Kahlenberg cites this eye-catching statistic: only 33 percent of middle school KIPP graduates go on to receive a degree from a four-year college.
Whether U.S. Presidents succeed or fail often depends on a big factor beyond their control: the timing of the business cycle. Lucky Presidents – Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush – experienced downturns early in their first term, leaving plenty of time for an economic rebound to lift them to reelection.
Last week 
Ryan’s budget as president, even though he intends to present his own “ideas”), you might think the 
Football, they say, is a game of inches. So too, is Middle East peace making — both figuratively, and in some cases quite literally. President Obama was reminded of that last week when his comments about terms of reference for future Israel-Palestinian peace negotiations provoked a significant public debate, and in some cases, a furious reaction.