Category: Uncategorized

Clean Elections Are Constitutional

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

When the U.S. Supreme Court last year ruled in Citizens United that incorporated entities have the same First Amendment rights as individuals to spend money in political campaigns, it upended a century of settled law aimed at limited special interest influence in American politics. The predictable result was a torrent of new spending in the 2010 midterm election, with nearly $300 million in electioneering ads by outside interest groups, half of which was undisclosed.

On Monday, the Supreme Court waded back in to the campaign finance issue when it heard oral arguments in McComish v. Bennett, concerning one of the most sweeping and successful forms of campaign finance regulation to emerge in recent years, publicly funded “Clean” or “Fair Elections”.

The case in question involves a challenge to the constitutionality of a specific “trigger funds” provision of Arizona’s Citizen’s Clean Elections Act of 1998, the law which established voluntary public funding for qualifying candidates for any state office in Arizona. Under the challenged provision, candidates who opt in to the Clean Elections system receive matching funds beyond their initial allocation if they are outspent by a privately funded opponent. The aim of the provision, as of the law in general, is to provide serious and hardworking candidates who attract broad-based constituent support in the form of small donations and who agree to forego private special interest contributions with enough money to mount a credible campaign.

The law is being challenged by a group of Arizona candidates and political committees who claim that triggered funds to participating candidates have a “chilling” effect on the First Amendment free speech of privately funded candidates and independent spenders. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the challenge last May, which concluded that no candidate or group had been prevented from spending money by the law.

Contrary to petitioners’ characterization of the Arizona law as curtailing First Amendment speech, Arizona’s Clean Elections program places no limits on the ability of privately funded candidates or independent spenders to enter the political debate, including by spending far in excess of the triggered funds provided to participating candidates. Instead, as argued by former Reagan Solicitor General Charles Fried in an amicus brief to the Court:

Arizona extends public financing to any candidate who meets certain qualifications and agrees to forego fundraising from private sources. Thus, if the government violates no one’s First Amendment rights, does not silence, suppress or deter anyone’s speech by speaking a contrary message in its own voice, so most assuredly it burdens no speech when it makes funds available to all comers on a viewpoint neutral basis. More speech may answer speech but it does not silence it. What effect speech has on its audience the First Amendment leaves up to the audience.

The brief, which was signed by a bipartisan committee of former Senators, Representatives, and Governors on behalf of Americans for Campaign Reform, established in no uncertain terms the constitutional imperative of voluntary public funding as an effective means of expanding and enhancing First Amendment free speech: “The law at issue in this case is not, in the words of the First Amendment, a law ‘abridging the freedom of speech.’ Rather, it adds voices to the political forum and thereby expands speech… If there is one fixed star in the constitutional firmament, it is that arguments seeking to compel a reduction in speech face an extraordinary hurdle.”

That message, at least, the Court heard loud and clear in the oral arguments on Monday: public funding writ large, regardless of the specific provisions of Arizona’s law, does not violate the Constitution. In the the post-Citizens United world of big spending by corporate and union interests, public funding may be the only means left to effectively combat the power of special interest money in politics.

A decision is expected before the end of the Supreme Court Term in June.

Whither Progressive History?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Over in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, Elbert Ventura has an excellent piece about progressives’ inability to develop a “coherent vision” – a guiding sense of history that can provide both context and narrative for progressive accomplishments and ongoing political struggles. Contrast this to the political right, which has, with relentless impetuousness, pushed a once-fringe view of American history that casts the 20th century as one big nightmare betrayal of founding principles, thus setting for itself the task of restoring the world’s largest economy to a golden age of agrarian farming.

“History is being taught – On TV and talk radio, in blogs and grassroots seminars, in high-school textbooks and on Barnes & Noble bookshelves,” writes Ventura. “In all of those forums conservatives have been conspicuous by their activity – and progressives by their absence.” (Full disclosure: Ventura is a friend and my predecessor as managing editor of ProressiveFix.com)

Perhaps, as Ventura goes on to suggest, “Part of it may be the progressive orientation – our eyes are always cast toward the next horizon, not the one behind.”

But let me toss out another possibility. Arguably, the political left lost its abiding faith in ideas by putting too much faith in ideas.

Let me explain: A previous era of liberal thought put great faith in the capacity of human rationality. But ideas led to hubris, and hubris led to overreach, and ultimately to policy failures. Lacking humility, liberals over-estimated their ability to achieve social justice ends in through top-down technocratic means. Constituencies who had been helped by the New Deal did not benefit from the Great Society, and instead grew anxious and angry.

In response, the idea of planning became socialism, which became communism. Critics repeatedly traced the facile road-to-serfdom syllogism that any attempt to improve the workings of society winds up with Stalin and Hitler.

For progressives, the lesson from the failure of 1960s idealism should have been to approach big ideas and grand narratives with a requisite caution. Instead, the lesson seemed to be abandoning big ideas altogether.

But what didn’t change for progressives was the political program. Instead, it became increasingly unmoored from a larger narrative. Lacking a grand story, progressivism increasingly decayed into a kind of interest group liberalism. A coalition once formed for a grander purpose became a tangle of single-interest groups fighting myopically to defend yesterday’s victory. Rather than being a means to the social justice ends it was designed to achieve, familiar liberal policies became ends in and of themselves.

The conservative story was different. Four decades ago, a kind of principled Burkean conservatism was a legitimate response to a genuine assessment that the Great Society had not turned out so great after all; Contra the great liberal narrative of progress through collective action, conservatism warned of the folly of grand gestures and the humility of human endeavors.

But then, in the grandest of all grand gestures, conservatism went ahead and embraced radical theories of its own — about economics, about tax cuts, about the role of government — and effectively went from simply yelling “stop!” to aggressively yelling “rewind!” Far from principled caution, conservatism took on a utopianism that put even the most liberal of 1960s liberals to shame.

That modern conservatism has not been effectively dismissed as antithetical to the traditional conservatism is truly remarkable. To quote Sam Tanenhaus, the New York Times book review editor who has proclaimed conservatism dead: “What passes for conservatism today would have been incomprehensible to its originator, Edmund Burke, who, in the late eighteenth century, set forth the principles by which governments might nurture the “organic” unity that bound a people together even in times of revolutionary upheaval.” Burke would be horrified at a Tea Party rally.

The question then becomes, why have we given conservatives a free pass on this? The answer is that it’s hard to challenge one narrative if you don’t have an alternative.

We can argue over what that progressive narrative ought to be, but let me offer up my preferred candidate: an embrace of progressivism’s relentless experimentation as a kind of philosophy in and of itself, the kind of pragmatism that FDR expressed when he famously said, “Do something. If it works, do more of it. If it doesn’t, do something else.”

Or put another way: a hopeful but humble faith that there is some rough-and-tumble thing called human progress, some long arch that does bend towards justice eventually, even if that eventually is far into the horizon. A telling of history that recognizes that there are no easy answers, only a series of hard problems that we must confront with humility. We must always strive, but never promise.

As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote in the conclusion of The Vital Center: “Problems will always torment us, because all important problems are insoluble: that is why they are important. The good comes from the continuing struggle to try and solve them, not from the vain hope of their solution.” (The same sentiment can be found in the writings of the progressive theologian Reinhold Niebuhr: “Democracy is finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems.”)

To me, this is a fighting faith, and a story. That the history of America has mostly been a history of, in FDR’s words, trying things and if they work, doing more of them, and if they don’t trying something else. It’s only in recent years that politics has become more about trying things, and if they don’t work, trying them again and again and blaming circumstances or your opposition if they still don’t work. This is not a fighting faith. It’s surrendering to faith.

We need something better. Conservatives have gone overtime in re-telling American history as a mistake that must be undone. We need to tell history in a way that moves forward.

Men’s Earnings Have NOT Declined by 28 Percent Since 1969!

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Tyler Cowen, of whom I’m generally a big fan, summarizes an interesting post by Michael Mandel on recent productivity growth (the lack thereof). But he ends by trumpeting Hamilton Project analyses claiming to show that men’s earnings declined by 28 percent between 1969 and 2009. This claim, like the Mandel analyses, reinforces Cowen’s argument that we are in a Great Stagnation, but it’s not true! Stop this meme!

I’ve not had much time to blog recently, so I submitted a brief critique in the comments to the Leonhardt post that introduced the world to this unfortunate study (co-authored, unfortunately, by a fellow classmate of mine from Harvard’s inequality program) and in the comments to the Hamilton post. Here’s the basic problem: the analyses assign all nonworking men annual earnings of $0, and since labor force participation among men has declined, the result is a big drop in median earnings over time. But a lot of that decline in labor force participation is attributable to earlier retirement (they include men as old as 64), later and longer school enrollment (they include men as young as 25), rising “disability” rates (which do not correspond in any obvious way with changes in health or job demands but which do correspond with increasing generosity in disability benefits), and other factors having nothing to do with the strength of labor markets.

I re-crunched the numbers as follows. I included all men age 20 to 59 except for those who said they worked only part of the year or not at all because they were retired, going to school, in the Armed Forces, sick or disabled, or taking care of home and family. Using the inflation adjustment that the Hamilton guys likely used, I find a decline in median earnings of 9 percent, not 28.

Note, however, that comparing 1969 and 2009 holds up a likely peak year (when the business cycle was at a high) to a trough year (when it was at a low). Comparing 1969 to 2007 is apples-to-apples, and when I did that, the median was EXACTLY the same in both years (to the dollar, which is a pretty crazy coincidence). Finally, if I use the Bureau of Economic Analysis “personal consumption expenditures” deflator, which I think overstates inflation somewhat less than other commonly-used deflators, median earnings among men rose 7 percent from 1969 to 2007.

Seven percent is no great shakes, but this figure is also too small for assessing how men’s economic fortunes have changed over time. None of these analyses account for the fact that as a group, husbands reduced their hours over time in response to rising work and wages among wives. Nor do they account for the rising share of non-wage benefits in total compensation (health and retirement benefits have eaten into wages, presumably following the preferences of the median worker). Nor do they include the impact of taxes (which have declined) and tax credits (which have increased). In addition, even my figures may overstate inflation, thereby understating the earnings increase over time–inflation measurement is much more tricky when choices within categories of goods and services and retail outlets explodes and when so much of what we consume is (thanks to the inter-web . Finally, the analyses do not account for changes in the composition of the population. For instance, the fact that more men today are nonwhite and foreign-born pushes the 2009 median down, but it is likely that the typical white, nonwhite, native-born, and foreign-born men are all doing better than the trend in the overall median implies. Someday I’ll get to a full analysis.

Subject for discussion (and a future post): how are we as a nation supposed to clearly understand the state of the economy and our living standards when even moderate think tanks and researchers are so eager to hype negativity? As I’ve said before, policymakers aren’t the only people who–individually or collectively–can talk down the economy.

Crossposted at The Empiricist Strikes Back

On Libya, Obama Doesn’t Swing Hard Enough

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

He kept tee-ing it up for himself, but seemed to stroke a few long drives that were barely the wrong side of the foul pole last night.

I wanted the president to come out with a thunderous defense of why humanitarian intervention is in our national interest. I sense he knew he had too, which is why he circled round to the issue no less than four times by my count. He spoke of the importance of protecting human life, of why a massive refugee crisis would be disastrous, and why non-intervention could ultimately lead to a higher cost in the future.

Here’s what I wanted him to say: “The United States’ strategic interest is in protecting human lives that would otherwise face murder at the hands of their tyrannical dictator. This serves America in two ways: First, we are protecting those who yearn for individual liberty that has been denied them for 42 years; and second, by standing up for those seeking their individual freedoms, we are creating a more stable world. Democratic countries are stable countries, and they make for a more secure America.”

On that note, I’ve just published a piece in Foreign Policy addressing American intervention, and Barack Obama’s foreign policy philosophy. I take on Stephen Walt, a self-proclaimed “realist”, and define the differences between neoconservatism and progressive internationalism. He mixes them up, and it’s important to explain why Libya is not Iraq. Read it here.

Discussing The Future of Nuclear Power After Fukushima

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Nuclear power should remain an important part of our energy mix. Despite a worst-case scenario, the older generation Fukushima reactor has held up remarkably well. And yet, serious obstacles remain, not the least of which is the public’s irrational fear of nuclear disaster.

Such were some of the conclusions from a PPI Policy Briefing on the future of nuclear power, held today in the Rayburn House Office Building. The panel featured: Dr. James Conca, Director of the Waste Sampling and Characterization Facility (WSCF), U.S. Department of Energy’s Hanford Site; Margaret Harding, President, 4 Factor Consulting; and Micheal A. Levi, Director of Energy Security and Climate Change Program, Council on Foreign Relations.

PPI’s Scott Thomasson moderated, and Mitchell Baer, of the Office of Policy and International Affairs, U.S. Department of Energy, introduced the panelists.

Conca kicked off the discussion making the case for a 2040 energy mix that is the one-third fossil fuels, one-third renewables, and one-third nuclear, as laid out in his recent PPI Memo, “Getting Real About Energy: A Balanced Portfolio for America’s Future.”

“This mix decreases carbon dioxide emissions by half, costs 20 percent less than the baseline, and it’s achievable, though it takes strong political will,” Conca said.

As the discussion moved to the future of nuclear, the first issue was the legitimacy of the old fears raised again by the Fukushima collapse.

“One of the things about radiation is that it’s very scary,” explained Conca. “That was the whole point of the Cold War – to scare everybody about nuclear weapons. But we forget to distinguish between weapons and energy. Weapons are bad. Energy is good.”

But, Conca noted, just because we can detect radiation in the air it doesn’t mean that it is harmful.

Harding noted that there has not yet been a single radiation death from the Fukushima plant, and all 128 people with reported contamination are now fine.

But while safety is obviously an important issue, Levi added that the real barrier to nuclear gaining ground in the U.S. is not safety, but cost. In short, nuclear requires an increasingly insurmountable upfront investment that takes decades to recoup.

“The price of building a plant has steadily risen,” Levi said. “The bottom line is that without a significant incentive on carbon emissions, and with natural gas prices where they currently are, you will not expect to see a large number of nuclear power plants built.” (Levi’s guess was five by 2035).

“It’s not clear that Three Mile Island killed nuclear,” he added. “Costs were already going up when it occurred.”

But, on a more optimistic note, Conca said that “The longer you run the plants, the more cost-effective they’ll become. You’re going against the short-term investment of certain groups. We need to decide where we want to be in 2040.”

“Humans are very good at engineering things,” he added. “But we don’t do the social and political stuff as well.”

The panelists also discussed improvements in technology that have made nuclear plants much safer and more effective. New Generation 3 reactors probably could withstand a similar stress with even less damage.

“The next generation of reactors have significant passive safety systems, and the reactor could not have any other support for three days and be okay,” said Harding. “The whole event would have played out differently if one of these had been installed.”

But Levi cautioned that innovations in safety could actually slow the regulatory approval process because it will take a long time for regulators to become familiar with the new technologies.

“With new technologies we have to redo our regulatory assessment and the first few times we don’t know what will happen,” he said. “It introduces regulatory uncertainty and increases financing costs. We need managed innovation.”

Harding reminded the audience that, “In the 1970s, each plant was unique, and that adds to complexity in the regulatory space. The goal should be to make the next generation plants more like cars.”

Despite notes of caution, the panelists overall were optimistic about the future of nuclear power. Conca re-emphasized the need to get started now, because things take a while to get moving.

“If we start now with something ambitious, we will make a significant change,” he said. “But if you wait, you move that 30-year window out and out. You have to come up with a plan that gets you where you want to go.”

Getting Clarity on Libya

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Bowing to criticism across the political spectrum, President Obama will try to clarify U.S. goals in Libya tonight in a speech to the nation. Expect him to argue that, however confusing our policy may seem, it’s working.

Aided by NATO airstrikes, Libya’s rebels have resumed the offensive and are driving westwards toward Tripoli. Meanwhile, an economic embargo is making it difficult for the regime to provide people under its control food, water, gas and other necessities.

Whether the rebels can defeat Moammar Qaddafi’s better-trained security forces remains to be seen. But there’s no question that international intervention has prevented Qaddafi from quashing the rebellion, indiscriminately slaughtering civilians, and carrying out his vows to exact merciless vengeance on regime opponents.

Obama’s critics, nonetheless, have a point. He has not spelled out with precision what our ultimate goal there is, or how we will achieve it.

The reason for this seeming incoherence, however, is not as mysterious as Obama’s critics make it out to be. Put simply, U.S. aims in Libya and those of the international community are not aligned. What America wants – and no doubt France and Britain as well – is Qaddafi’s ouster. But the United Nations doesn’t do regime change. Russia and China, with long histories of autocratic and repressive rule, are adamantly opposed to political interference in the sovereign affairs of other countries.

U.N. Resolution 1973 therefore authorized only a humanitarian intervention aimed at protecting civilians from attack. The problem, of course, is that humanitarian crises invariably have political roots, and the Libyan opposition will never be safe from retaliation until Qaddafi and his henchmen and mercenaries are gone.

With NATO airstrikes clearing the way for rebel advances, it’s clear that the humanitarian mission is something of a fiction, a fig-leaf for the coalition’s real aim, which is to hasten Qaddafi’s fall. Our European allies fear that their publics have little stomach for a long engagement in Libya. So the international coalition has taken sides in the Libyan revolt, and must now confront the reality that rebel offensives in Tripoli and other regime strongholds will put civilians at risk.

This is a strategically and morally sustainable position. In the long run, it’s the best way to minimize civilian deaths and free Libya from a loathsome tyrant. Yet the Obama administration has been less than forthcoming about its true aims, for fear that absolute candor will unravel the international consensus behind the Libyan intervention.

At the same time, the White House has been eager to toss the hot potato of leading the Libyan intervention to NATO. Yet its attempts to downgrade America’s role from lead actor to stagehand have failed to answer doubts about the operation shared by liberals and conservatives. On the contrary, they’ve made the administration look both weak and furtive.

Obama needs to do a better job tonight of acknowledging the tensions between U.S. and international policy towards Libya, and reaffirm his resolve to see Qaddafi go. But his critics also need to understand that Obama can’t simply issue unilateral ukases if America is to share the burden of intervening with others.

Armchair strategists demand that Obama spell out America’s policy with Euclidean precision. Foreign Affairs editor Gideon Rose, in The Washington Post, offers out an eminently logical set of criteria for intervention, in which Presidents clearly define mission and goals, select means to match the ends, develop plans for what happens when the fighting ends, and have backup contingencies in place when things don’t go as expected.

But military interventions, especially multilateral ones, unfold in the context of international politics. And international politics is just as illogical, imprecise, and unscientific as domestic politics. Sometimes, candor and coherence have to be sacrificed to achieve enough consensus to get traction against big problems. That’s why humanitarian or other kinds of interventions launched in the name of collective security today are likely to be messy affairs, to have limited and even muddled aims, and be prosecuted in a spirit of continuous improvisation rather than rigid adherence to war plans.

Rigorous rules of intervention are useful intellectual and strategic exercises. But ultimately what matters to Americans are results, not theory. They support wars – yes, even wars of choice like Panama, the 1991 Gulf War, and Bosnia and Kosovo – that entail manageable costs and are over quickly. Over time, they come to oppose those that drag on, cost too many lives and too much money, and begin failing a cost-benefit test of national interest.

Whatever President Obama says tonight to rally support for his policies, he should act in ways that ensure the endgame in Libya – Qaddafi’s fall – comes sooner rather than later.

The Case For Supporting Syrian Democracy

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

UPDATE: We are re-posting this piece from Friday as events over the weekend continue to highlight the need for American attention on pro-democracy protests in Syria. Over the weekend, 12 people have reportedly died during demonstrations in the northern port city of Latakia–where the military has reportedly been deployed–and some 4,000 people gathered again in Daraa.

You may not have noticed between the new war in Libya and the nuclear crisis in Japan, but the latest Arab country to see popular protests is Syria. Unlike Egypt and Tunisia, Syria has been an opponent of the peace process and allied with Iran.

Yet, like President Mubarak and President Ben-Ali, President Assad is following what seems to be the traditional playbook in response to a week of intensifying and pitched protests, again making noises about reexamining the country’s decades-old emergency law barring free political expression. Unlike these gauzy allusions to “reform,” however there has been nothing vague about the soldiers and anti-terrorism units attacking Syrian citizens in the streets.

The Obama administration must do more to help Syrian democracy and human rights activists to expose this regime for what it is. The Administration should start by dispatching Ambassador Robert Ford to Daraa, where dozens were slaughtered in the streets this week by government security forces firing on crowds and attacking those rallying for freedom from Bashar al-Assad’s tyranny. From Daraa, Ambassador Ford should call for a full UN Security Council investigation into what happened during the recent protests. His mere presence can bring hope to those brave enough to stand up to Assad’s thugs. America owes them that much.

Not many more died in Egypt, where the armed forces never fired on crowds. Yet we’ve heard far stronger words from the White House about Egypt than we have about Syria thus far. A statement by the White House Spokesman was a start, but the President should speak out himself and up the ante.

The Assad regime should also be put on notice that interfering with the Ambassador in this context would vitiate the purpose of our renewed high-level presence in Syria. The entire point of sending Ambassador Ford to Damascus – a move welcomed by Syria – was to establish an American presence on the ground. It’s time to put it to use.

We can do more. Congress should enhance the Syria Accountability Act to account for Assad’s renewed crackdowns on dissidents, and the Treasury Department should sanction those responsible for attacks on the Syrian people. IAEA pressure on Syria’s illicit nuclear program, which bears increasing scrutiny in any event, should be ratcheted up. The censure of the United Nations should be brought to bear on the murder of Syrian citizens by their government. Syrian opposition and institution-building groups should be funded and supported by the U.S. and our Western Allies – all the better to create an alternative to Assad’s rancid regime. The benefits of weakening the Assad regime cannot be underestimated.

This regime plays a pivotal role in the arming of Hezbollah, a non-state military that has killed more Americans than any terrorist group except Al Qaeda. It is the host to eleven terrorist groups based in Damascus and for years its border was like a turnstile at an amusement park for terrorists heading to Iraq to kill American soldiers. And none of that takes into account violence and repression that Assad visits on his own people.

For decades the United States has been denigrated across the Middle East for our policies, not chiefly regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict, but more fundamentally for our hypocrisy. President Obama has a historic opportunity to align our interests with our values in helping dissidents and democracy activists repressed by an unfriendly regime find their voice. We need to seize the opportunity, and stop looking this gift horse in the mouth.

This administration has gambled that communication with hostile regimes is preferable to stubborn silence, and that being on the ground is preferable to self-righteous absenteeism. Fair enough. Now is the time to talk advantage of the diplomatic presence we have in Syria. Ambassador Ford should head to Darra, and he should demand explanations.

TODAY: The Future of Nuclear Power After Fukushima

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In the wake of the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant, new questions are being raised about the future of nuclear power. The President has reaffirmed his support for nuclear power, but the public is still looking for answers. U.S. regulators are currently conducting an exhaustive review of safety systems at the nation’s 104 reactors.

Should nuclear power continue to be an integral part of our national energy mix? What long-term impact will the Fukushima incident have for nuclear power in the US and around the world? To find out the answers to these and more nuclear power-related questions, please come to a PPI Policy Briefing TODAY, March 28, from 12-1 p.m., at the House Science and Technology Committee Hearing Room, Room 2325 of the Rayburn House Office Building.

Featured panelists will be:

  • Mitchell Baer, Office of Policy and International Affairs, U.S. Department of Energy;
  • Dr. James Conca, Director of the Waste Sampling and Characterization Facility (WSCF), U.S. Department of Energy’s Hanford Site;
  • Margaret Harding, President, 4 Factor Consulting; and
  • Micheal A. Levi, Director of Energy Security and Climate Change Program, Council on Foreign Relations.

Conca is the co-author of the recent PPI Policy Memo, “Getting Real About Energy: A Balanced Portfolio for America’s Future,” which argues for a 30-year target energy mix for electricity generation of one-third fossil fuels, one-third renewable sources (wind, solar, biomass, hydro), and one-third nuclear generation.

TO RSVP for the event, click here.

The Case For The Kerry-Hutchison Infrastructure Bank

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

You could almost see the eyes rolling last week as Senators John Kerry and Kay Bailey Hutchison introduced the latest version of a bill to create a National Infrastructure Bank. After all, President Barack Obama calls for an infrastructure bank in every budget, and bills have been in play every session since 2007.

Today we live in an age of austerity. How does yet another government institution fit into this picture?

As a small business owner who helps people think through infrastructure issues, I’m struck by the extraordinary opportunity here. We’re all aware of the need: A national infrastructure bank that uses federal borrowing authority to leverage private investment for roads, bridges, water systems and power grids is the only way for the U.S. to increase infrastructure investments in tight fiscal times.

And the technical opportunity is irrefutable. Why not raise money for infrastructure at a time of historically low borrowing costs? What’s more, every major economy in the world has an infrastructure bank, so we should have one, too. Need is not the issue.

Opportunity is. We need a model for smart government. Forget the weirdly inefficient, old-style European model.

Re-engineering an old public sector is nearly impossible, and no one has the patience for it anyway. Think about a national infrastructure bank as an exercise in creating smart government, in an area that is strategically important for the future of our country.

Doubling Annual Investment

A high-functioning infrastructure bank would have three characteristics, shaping its overall role of doubling our annual investment in infrastructure, from $150 billion a year to $300 billion.

First, the role of the infrastructure bank is catalytic rather than managerial. Rather than creating a large bureaucracy, the bank would assemble a corps of focused professionals: engineers, financiers, economists and what I term strategic leaders — people who get things done, driven by a vision to make this country more competitive.

Their job will be to set projects in motion, then to make sure that those projects meet or exceed guidelines. Monitor, not manage; act strategically, not operationally. Move fast, don’t get bogged down, get the job done.

The result will be an elite, rapid, infinitely smaller and infinitely more qualified leadership team than what we have today, an instructive model for other infrastructure related agencies at every level of government.

Energize Private Sector

Second, the function of the infrastructure bank is to guide and energize the private sector. An infrastructure bank goes into the guts of the process — project selection — and gets at the frightening issue of cost. Our costs are often twice that of our European brothers for urban mass transit projects, 10 times those of China.

The bank’s day-to-day business will be to invest in ventures and networks of ventures that serve for 20, 30, 40 even 50 years, providing a competitive return throughout that period. In this sense the bank will be a welcome, violent change agent, smashing open three areas in the infrastructure project-creation process that are costing this country a fortune:

— It takes more than 10 years on average for a project to move through the approval process, a period that would need to be reduced to three years for projects to be bankable.

— At least 50 percent of large U.S. projects suffer cost overruns in the 30 percent-or-greater range. This would be eliminated through bank leadership.

— The selection of projects tends to be willy-nilly, based on political interests. A bank ideally would be a model of focus, restricting its attention to projects that generate competitiveness.

Results Oriented

Lastly, the infrastructure bank will be results oriented and transparent: your bank, investing in your public assets. The bank will be a great experiment in the Facebook Age, bringing in funds from all over the world to build our strategic infrastructure.

The very nature of the smart-government model is to set goals and report performance. This new institution will go beyond that, creating knowledge, developing metrics and pioneering ways of communicating: from project approvals, to performance reporting to championing new technology.

Maybe the Kerry/Hutchison proposal is the opening salvo in a bipartisan effort to build smart government. Thinking about an American infrastructure bank in this way makes an attractive experiment that we have to explore. Creating a model in an area critical to our economic future is a strategic option we can’t ignore.

Recognizing that the bank would double our infrastructure investment and increase the efficiency of each dollar spent is a good deal for every citizen.

This piece is cross-posted at Bloomberg Government

 

Republicans for Environmental Progress: An Endangered Species

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

For most of modern American history, the two major political parties in America have largely agreed on the desired long-term environmental outcomes for the country: there was a consensus among Republicans and Democrats that it was a good thing to press for cleaner air and water, less toxins in the environment, biodiversity preservation, and mitigation strategies for clean energy and, mostly recently, climate change.

The disagreements were largely centered around how to achieve these outcomes, and to some extent the pace of change and the absolute targets. Democrats by and large preferred a heavier regulatory approach (i.e. “command and control”) that set specific firm-level emissions limits, prescribed permissible technologies, and set industry-wide energy and fuel efficiency standards. Republicans tended to support more market-oriented policies, with cap and trade foremost among them.

Nowadays, the arguments are no longer over the methods to achieve environmental progress, but whether we should support such progress in the first place. This situation is unprecedented. Those who believed that divided government would lead Republicans to take a more moderate and constructive role have so far been proven wrong. It is hard to imagine the situation being much worse for America’s environmental quality, which is directly linked to the quality of life for all Americans.

The modern Republican Party has absolutely no affirmative environmental agenda whatsoever, and goes so far as to contest the entire rationale for continued environmental progress. Ironically, this extremely reactionary environmental agenda is coming at a time when the ideas that Republicans once championed are now widely accepted as the best ways to structure environmental policy.

The cap and trade bill that died in the U.S. Congress in 2010 was based on market-oriented principles that were the centerpiece of George Bush Sr.’s cap and trade policy for sulfur dioxide, enacted in 1990. It permitted maximum flexibility in achieving its goals of greenhouse gas reductions over a long time horizon, giving businesses plenty of time to adjust and adapt. The bill’s intellectual foundations were so strongly rooted in conservative economics that then-presidential candidate John McCain was a huge supporter of the measure and included it in his presidential platform.

And yet today, the Republican-led House of Representatives has voted to deny the science of climate change and strip the EPA of its authority to regulate greenhouse gases, which was granted to the agency by a 5-4 decision in the very conservative-leaning Supreme Court. The GOP-led House has proposed gutting the EPA’s budget as well. And it gets worse.

The Republicans in the House have refused to end the subsidies for oil companies (as these firms continue to rake in record profits), and while they seek to reduce food stamps, they have made it clear that they will not touch the billions in agricultural subsidies that disproportionately benefit big agribusiness. Adding insult to injury, House Republicans even reintroduced Styrofoam into the House cafeteria after Democrats had removed it during the last Congress.

I have been involved in environmental policy for almost 20 years and have never seen anything like the current Republican assault on the environment. It is truly astounding. To be clear, the Republicans leading this charge against environmental progress are in no way following conservative principles ― they are doing the exact opposite. Those who profess to support conservative economics should be leading the charge against subsidies for big business and taking a firm stance in favor of the “polluter pays principle,” which states that those producers and consumers whose actions degrade the environment should pay for the damage. (You know we’re living in an upside down world when the one avowed socialist in the Senate, Bernie Sanders, has been the most vociferous opponent of oil company handouts.)

There is absolutely nothing “free market” about letting polluters trash the environment for free. In fact, this fits the definition of a market failure, not a well-functioning capitalist system. What the Republicans are currently practicing is crony capitalism of the worst kind: rewarding industry at the expense of the public interest and future generations.

It is the Republican rank and file who should be the most offended by these policies. Public opinion polls consistent show that both Democrats and Republicans care deeply about the environment, and support clean energy policies and strong environmental safeguards. Unfortunately, the once proud environmental ethic of the Republican Party has been snuffed out by a small group of radical Tea Party extremists who are deeply confused both about true conservative principles and the proper role of government in society. And once moderate Republicans who supported sensible environmental policies are nowhere to be seen. Until true conservatives retake the Republican Party we will be left doing little more than damage control, and the chances of a new comprehensive affirmative environmental agenda are slim to none.

Labor Boosted by Proposed Merger

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

America’s embattled labor movement hasn’t had much to celebrate lately, so it’s worth noting when a major union welcomes a business mega-merger.

The Communications Workers of America strongly endorsed AT&T’s proposed $39 billion acquisition of T-Mobile. Deals this big – the merger would create the nation’s largest mobile-phone carrier, with about 39 percent of the market – have to run a bruising, multiple-agency regulatory gauntlet. Some consumer groups worry that it will reduce competition in the lucrative telecommunication sector, dampening incentives for innovation and possibly pushing up consumer prices.

No doubt the deal merits close scrutiny. But having one of America’s largest private unions (700,000 strong) in its corner can’t hurt AT&T’s chances.

C.W.A. represents 42,000 AT&T wireless workers and regards the company as reasonably friendly to unions. The merger gives it a better shot at organizing T-Mobile workers in the U.S. and in Germany (the company is owned by Deutsche Telekom, whose stock zoomed after the announcement.) For those workers, being absorbed into AT&T will mean “better employment security and a management record of full neutrality toward union membership and a bargaining voice,” said C.W.A. president Larry Cohen.

This rare bit of good news for organized labor follows successful efforts by Republican governors in several states to curtail public workers’ right to collective bargaining. Although polls show majorities of Americans are opposed to denying bargaining rights, high profile battles in Wisconsin, Indiana and New Jersey have drawn the public’s attention to the adverse impact on state budgets of generous compensation schemes for state employees, especially pension and health care benefits.

This is a huge problem for organized labor, which in recent decades has experienced growth only in the public sector. The picture is especially dismal in the private sector, where less than eight percent of workers are unionized.

If they are going to reverse their long pattern of decline, U.S. labor unions need to redefine their economic role and relevance to American workers in a post-industrial economy. Cohen’s statement pointed to a mission that would be good for both U.S. workers and employers: building modern infrastructure to underpin America’s ability to win in global markets. “For more than a decade, the United States has continued to drop behind nearly every other developed economy on broadband speed and build out,” he said.

In fact, a big national infrastructure push represents common ground on which big labor and big business can meet. In an “odd couple” pairing last week, AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka and Tom Donahue, head of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, showed up to endorse a new proposal for a national infrastructure bank. Drafted by a bipartisan group of U.S. Senators including John Kerry, Mark Warner and Kay Baily Hutchinson, the bank would leverage billions of private investments in new transport, energy and water projects.

If labor and business can get behind an ambitious project for “internal national building,” our equally polarized political parties surely should be able to follow their example. And that bodes well for an American economic comeback.

More College Graduates, More Democratic Voters?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

This week, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced competitive grants to encourage states to increase their college graduation rates, with a goal to add eight million college graduates by 2020.

Sure, there are plenty of legitimate policy-related reasons why we might want to increase the number of college graduates. After all, as Secretary Duncan put it, “We all know that the best jobs and fastest-growing firms will gravitate to countries, communities, and states with a highly qualified work force.”

But, for those who can’t imagine Obama doing anything without an ulterior motive, consider the graphs below that show that increasing the number of college graduates might also increase the number of Democratic voters and reduce the number of Republican voters.

 

The first graph shows the state-level relationship between the percentage of individuals identifying as Democrats (data from Gallup) and the percentage of individuals with bachelor’s degrees. There’s a clear, statistically significant relationship that explains 28 percent of the state-level variation in Democratic identification. For every one percentage point increase in college graduates in a state, the percentage of Democratic identifiers increases by 0.75 percent.

The second graph shows the state-level relationship of Republican identifiers and college graduates. As you’d expect, it’s pretty much the reverse. For every one percentage point increase in college graduates, the percentage of individuals identifying as Republicans decreases by 0.76 percentage points. This simple regression explains 30 percent of the variation.

Now let’s look at the relationship of state-level education to state-level liberals and conservatives. Here the relationship is even more significant:

For every one percentage point increase in state-level college graduates, the percentage of liberals also increases by 0.75 percentage points. Impressively, education level explains 66 percent of variation in state-level percentage of liberals.

By contrast, for every one percentage point in college graduates, there is a 0.88 percentage point decline in the share of conservatives, and this by itself explains 58 percent of the state-level variation in the number of conservatives.

Does this mean that there is a simple causal story that education makes people more liberal either because (in the conservative telling) it turns them into elitist snobs, or (in the liberal telling) it gives them enough knowledge to understand how the world works?

Maybe. Maybe not. Perhaps liberal, Democratic states invest more in education, which is why those states have more college graduates. It’s also important to note that 1) these are state-level, not individual-level relationships, and 2) this is a static relationship, not a time series.

Nonetheless, the graphs are quite telling. The more college graduates, the more Democratic (and especially more liberal) the state. The fewer college graduates, the more Republican and (and especially more conservative) the state. There’s clearly something going on here, and I’m actually quite curious to hear how conservatives would respond.

Increasing the number of college graduates by eight million would bring the number of college graduates in the United States from approximately 83 million (27 percent) to 91 million (about 29 percent in 2020). That’s two percentage points, and if the relationship between state-level education and voting is indeed causal, it would mean a 1.5 percentage point increase in the share of Democratic identifiers and a similar decline among Republican identifiers. This could tip some states.

Well, now I’ve given conservatives an argument against increasing the number of college graduates.

Republicans By the Book

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The American Prospect‘s Paul Waldman has done us all a great favor by reading and interpreting the latest batch of “campaign books” from prospective 2012 presidential candidates, including Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee and Tim Pawlenty. And after duly noting the relatively low political value of such books, and the low standards governing the genre, he offers some key insights about what they reveal about the Republican zeitgeist of the moment:

Despite their surface differences, the books raise some common questions. How do we answer key policy questions? How important is God to our politics? Is Barack Obama merely wrong about everything, or is he actively attempting to destroy our country? Just how great is America?

Actually, that last question is something the candidates all agree on: America is stupendously great, awesomely great, so great that “great” doesn’t begin to describe its greatness — and Obama just doesn’t get it.

Aside from a peculiar emphasis on “American exceptionalism” that appears to exempt this country not only from healthy self-doubt but from ordinary logic and the lessons of human history, notes Waldman, the books are dominated by an equally unreflexive attitude towards the 44th president, who is always wrong:

In their attempts to understand Obama, the candidates again and again reach the conclusion that when Obama does or says something they like, he’s either shrewdly hiding his real intentions or has been cornered by political reality. When he does or says something they don’t like, he has revealed his true self. So Romney can claim, without any supporting evidence, that “another of President Obama’s presuppositions is that America is in a state of inevitable decline,” just as Palin avers that Obama “seems to see nothing admirable in the American experience.” How do they know this? Well, they just do. None of the candidates provides any quotations in which Obama apologizes for America because he never actually has. And don’t bother bringing up the hundreds of speeches in which Obama has lavished praise on this country, because as Romney says, “President Obama is far too gifted a politician to say in plain words that America is merely one nation among many.” However, if we take some things Obama has said out of context and make a series of absurd leaps in logic to arrive at the worst possible interpretation of them, then we will learn the truth.

America is great, and Obama wants to destroy it. That’s the overriding theme of proto-candidates working in the most expansive format they’ll ever use.

As it happens, I was involved as a “ghost” in a “campaign book” for a candidate running against an incumbent president in 2004, and I can tell you that George W. Bush’s sins and shortcomings were in the background, not the forefront, of the policy-heavy tome. And while the book was full of invocations of America’s greatness, they were deployed not to congratulate Americans for their superior virtue, but to encourage them to meet common challenges, most of which have yet, seven years later, to be seriously addressed.

It’s an open question as to whether GOP presidential candidates can make it all the way through the nomination process–and for the winner, all the way to November of 2012–on a message that essentially tells Americans there is nothing wrong with their society that firing Barack Obama can’t fix. I guess if you get all your information from Fox News, that’s a credible argument. But for everyone else, a positive agenda that goes beyond telling a suffering nation and world that they need to shut up and salute the flag (and oh yes, cut taxes and regulations allegedly afflicting their economic masters, from whom all good things come) might prove necessary.

 

Crossposted at The Democratic Strategist

Failing the Right Side of History Test in Bahrain?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Though it would be fair to say Obama administration has struggled to keep pace with the groundswell of popular protest from Morocco to Yemen, the White House’s rhetoric and actions have thus far enshrined it on the proverbial “right side of history.” That is, through the lens of historical scholarship, the president’s course of action in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya will be judged as just in the face of non-democratic and violent forces.

Then there’s Bahrain.

The small island nation — home to a non-democratic Sunni ruling family and allied with the U.S. as host to the Navy’s 5th Fleet — has had a steady stream of pro-democracy demonstrations since January. While paying lip service to Shi’ite Bahrainis’ grievances, last week the royals called in Saudi and Emirate military muscle to quash a popular uprising before it gained steam. Pearl Square — the protesters’ main gathering place — was shut down immediately after the foreign troops’ arrival; at least eight people have been killed and dozens are reported missing.

As it stands, the Obama administration runs a serious risk of ending up on the wrong side of history in Bahrain. Until the weekend, the administration had said and done comparatively much less than the multiple statements on Egypt, issuing just one quiet statement from a (relatively) lowly National Security Council spokesman. Secretary Clinton reiterated the original statement on Saturday, saying:

We have made clear that security alone cannot resolve the challenges facing Bahrain… Violence is not and cannot be the answer. A political process is. We have raised our concerns about the current measures directly with Bahraini officials and will continue to do so.

Fair enough — sounds good enough, right? But whereas statements regarding Tunisia and Egypt, as well as the UN resolution and subsequent military action on Libya outpaced events (if barely), the White House’s attention to Bahrain may be too little, too late.

Are the U.S. Navy base and Saudi/ Emirate support for the Libyan situation complicating factors in America’s flat-footed response? Of course. But rather than sitting on its hands, the White House would do well to channel former Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel’s mantra — never let a crisis go to waste — and use the opportunity to start reorienting American policy that corrects over 30 years of an inherently unstable Faustian bargain with Arab despots. I’ll pass on the specifics of “how” for now, but getting on the right side of history in Bahrain through tougher and earlier public diplomacy is a good start if the protest movement beats the odds and rekindles itself.

U.S. Needs to Stay the Course on Libya

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Obama administration has tried to keep a low profile in the Libyan crisis. When the shooting starts, however, it’s hard for a superpower to avoid the limelight.

Having unleashed U.S. cruise missile and B-2 bomber attacks on Libya’s air defenses, the administration faces incoming criticism on all sides – from Arab leaders who are getting cold feet after having initially called for a no-fly zone, and from Republicans who want to know what America’s “endgame” is. Meanwhile, Muammar Gaddafi wasted no time playing the anti-American card, accusing the United States of scheming to steal Libya’s oil.

Most disappointing was the criticism from Amr Moussa, secretary general of the 22-nation Arab League. The League’s call for a no-fly zone only a week before was widely interpreted as a sign of political maturation; an acknowledgement that tyrants like Gaddafi pose a bigger threat to Arabs than U.S. “imperialism.” After the Libyan regime made what appeared to be spurious claims about civilian casualties, however, Moussa changed his tune: “What has happened in Libya differs from the goal of imposing a no-fly zone and what we want is the protection of civilians and not bombing other civilians.”

Continue reading at Real Clear World

Wingnut Watch: Confused Obama-haters

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Recent events in Libya have left conservative Obama-haters a bit confused. Up until this week, conservative gabbers frequently took easy shots at the president for inaction on Libya; you didn’t have the sort of divisions on the Right often seen during the Egyptian crisis, when some (notably John Bolton) defended Mubarak as a stout U.S. ally and many others warned that Egyptians rebels were or would eventually be dominated by radical jihadists. Qaddafi has no conservative fans.

In the wake of the administration’s support for a U.N. resolution authorizing the use of force in Libya, and the robust U.S. participation in the first stages of the multinational military campaign, virtually no conservatives have gone so far as to praise Obama, other than backhanded “better late than never” comments. The prevalent sentiment is that the administration has demonstrated its fatal weakness once again by flip-flopping into an internationally led and insufficiently clear military commitment, too late to secure a rebel victory. Among the 2012 presidential possibilities, no one has even bothered to make the ritualistic “salute the flag” gestures of vague support owed a current commander-in-chief by prospective future commanders-in-chief.

One very specific and highly characteristic right-wing complaint has been that Obama sought sanction for military action from the United Nations but not from the current conservative power lode, Congress. A Washington Times editorial went so far as to call it “Obama’s illegal war:”

The president cannot be seen as a mere instrument of the United Nations, which would relegate the U.S. Constitution to second-class status behind the U.N. Charter. If U.S. troops are going to be put in harm’s way, the authority must come from elected representatives in Washington, not from a bunch of international bureaucrats hanging out in Turtle Bay.

The editorial (like many other conservative commentaries on Libya) stressed George W. Bush’s pursuit of congressional approval before launching the Iraq War. They seem to have forgotten how long the Bush White House resisted this step, or the arguments Bush’s defenders never stopped making that congressional approval was unnecessary in light of the president’s inherent national security powers.

If the Libya intervention devolves into a difficult passage wherein Qaddafi is stopped from destroying the rebels yet cannot be dislodged from control of much of the country, you can infallibly expect many conservatives to default to their traditional claim that liberals like Obama always increase the risk associated with military interventions by using insufficient force and worrying about the opinions of Europeans and Muslims.

Ironically, the Libya crisis comes at a time when the longstanding Republican united front favoring ever-expanding military commitments and ever-rising defense spending is showing some cracks. Last week probable 2012 presidential candidate Haley Barbour made a speech in Iowa calling for greater scrutiny of the defense budget as part of an overall deficit reduction effort, and also suggested he might favor winding down troop levels in Afghanistan because of an insufficiently clear mission.

While Barbour may back down on this provocative message, it could well blow open a long-implicit conflict between the GOP’s Tea Party rhetoric on federal spending and the party’s long pro-defense-spending posture, often posited as the glue that held economic and social conservatives in harness. Last summer Sarah Palin made some noise about convincing the Tea Folk to explicitly place defense spending off-limits to cuts. And for the most part, conservative appropriations and budget schemes have let the Pentagon alone, aside from a disputed acceptance of the elimination of weapon systems the Pentagon itself no longer wants. Certainly the Ron Paul/Rand Paul wing of the GOP has long been eager to pare back overseas commitments as a matter of isolationist principle as much as fiscal probity. But Barbour is the most prominent Conservative Establishment figure to drop hints in this direction.

It was almost certainly no coincidence that immediately after Barbour’s speech in Iowa, Tim Pawlenty told an audience in South Carolina that he didn’t favor defense cuts, and also didn’t favor any troop draw downs in Afghanistan unless they were asked for by Gen. David Petraeus. And then predictably, neo-con pundit William Kristol poured gasoline on the embers of the dispute with a column entitled, “T-Paw Versus Hee-Haw,” a not very subtle dig at Barbour’s Boss Hawg reputation, compounded by additional insults:

This is a) childish, b) slightly offensive, and c) raises the question of how much time Barbour has spent at the Pentagon—apart from time spent lobbying for defense contractors or foreign governments.

Nasty as it was, this is probably a pale echo of the kind of pounding Barbour will receive from other precincts of the conservative movement if he persists in talking about treating defense like other forms of federal spending or cutting short the U.S. commitment in Afghanistan. It will be interesting to see what other proto-candidates for president say if this suddenly evolves from being the Great Unmentionable among conservative posing as maximum deficit hawks, into a regular topic on the campaign trail. Mitt Romney has long sought to make toughness on foreign-policy-and-defense issues his calling card for 2012, and Newt Gingrich is clearly preparing to depict himself as a visionary Churchillian figure determined to defend America from the Islamic hordes. So this could turn into a white-hot fight pretty quickly, unless Barbour shuts up about defense spending and goes back to savaging Medicaid and offering to remake the U.S. economy to resemble Mississippi’s.