Category: Uncategorized

The Defense Budget Sleight of Hand That’s Costing You Billions

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Look, I get it. If you’re not a budget wonk, I can understand how you might not care about this stuff. But if you’re a progressive and you’re concerned about the Tea Party destroying the EPA for no good reason, then that’s reason to pay attention.

I’ve written a policy memo about something else that is crucial to understand if we want to even the discussion of getting Defense spending under control: it’s simply vital that we end the practice of supplemental war funding bills.

Wait! Wait! Don’t fall asleep. Seriously. We’ve wasted $200 billion over the last ten years through a little-discussed system of back-door Pentagon budgeting, which essentially funds the stuff on DoD’s wish list by falsely calling them “emergency war necessities.” Why, for example, did Congress give Don Rumsfeld an $11 billion slush fund to spend as he pleases without any Congressional oversight?

We have to end this systematic abuse of your taxpayer dollars — start reading here to find out how.

Read the policy memo

A Serious Man

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As political handicappers weigh the impact on next year’s elections of Senator Jim Webb’s decision not to seek a second term, this much is certain: His departure will leave the Senate a less interesting place.

Webb is an original: Annapolis graduate, decorated Marine veteran of Vietnam, acclaimed novelist, Secretary of the Navy under Ronald Reagan and, following his improbable 2006 victory, Democratic Senator from Virginia.

Improbable not just because he started way behind, but also because he had previously been a Republican; because this erstwhile warrior rode a tide of anti-war sentiment to victory; and, because he is anything but a natural politician.  A private, self-contained man, Webb does not lust for the limelight or feed on public adoration.  He doesn’t like to press the flesh or ask fat cats for money. He is essentially a writer whose political model was the late intellectual-turned-legislator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

While marching to his own beat, Webb has quietly made his mark in the Senate over the past four years. He successfully pushed an expansion of G.I. Bill-style benefits for veterans, and drawn attention to an issue that isn’t on the nation’s political radar but should be: America’s overstuffed prisons and indiscriminate sentencing policies that lock up too many non-violent offenders. Following his own passions, Webb has specialized in foreign affairs, focusing especially on East Asia.

Also like Moynihan, Webb’s outlook has been shaped by a strong ethnic consciousness. Just as Moynihan drew on his Irish background in his studies of the ethnic melting pot, Webb, in Born Fighting and other books, has chronicled the Scots-Irish experience in America. Settled on the America frontier, Scots-Irish Protestants pushed relentlessly westward, battling Indians (and Mexicans) along the way. They form the core of a genuine warrior culture that, argues German writer Josef Joffe in Uberpower: the Imperial Temptation of America, has mostly disappeared from Europe but remains a key element of American exceptionalism.

Webb’s departure will be a significant political loss for Democrats, but not because it may put his Senate seat in jeopardy. More fundamentally, Webb is a rarity in today’s contemporary Democratic Party: a leader with an intuitive feel for the interests and values of white working class voters. Once the mainstay of the progressive New Deal coalition, their defection to the Republicans led to a generation of GOP ascendancy in national politics.

More than most Democrats, Webb has thought hard how about to win them back. He has chided his party for exhibiting anti-military attitudes, and for pushing economic policies that favor elites who profit from globalization to the detriment of working families, whose incomes have stagnated as good jobs have vanished over the last two decades. Bravely, he has taken on the “diversity” industry that promotes group preferences in hiring, government contracting and college admissions, even for recent female and minority immigrants who can by no stretch of the imagination be classified as victims of U.S. racism.

As it happens, the modern Democratic Party emerged under Andrew Jackson, America’s first Scots-Irish President. The “democracy” as it was often called was the party of ordinary people, while the Whigs represented economic and social elites. Much of middle America now feels estranged from the party of the people.

That’s an existential dilemma for progressives, not just a political problem. Jim Webb understands that, which is why I’m sorry to see him go.

The Coming Republican Crack-up

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

I am hardly surprised to read today’s news that the House Republican leadership is losing floor votes due to mini-revolts within the party. With 87 freshmen and a large contingent of Tea Party types who came to Washington with a head of steam and little loyalty to the Republican establishment, it always seemed dubious to me that anybody short of Joseph Stalin was going to be able to keep this coalition together. And you can say all the mean things you want about John Boehner; he is no Joseph Stalin.

Four weeks in, and not everybody in the Republican caucus is going along with what was supposed to be routine vote to temporarily extend anti-terrorism provisions in the Patriot Act. Though surely the bigger issue is that the party’s most conservative members are demanding $100 billion in domestic cuts instead of the mere $40 billion originally planned. My prediction: this is but a preview of a coming internecine war within the Republican Party.

The reasons for this are straightforward. By taking back the House on the wave of the mad-as-hell Tea Party voters, Republicans got a radical faction that demanded and frankly expected something big and revolutionary to happen. And if they didn’t get that something big and revolutionary they would damn well yell and scream trying.

As I wrote back in November: “Good luck, Speaker Boehner: If you aren’t aggressive enough, you will lose the mad-as-hell Tea Party voters. But if you are too aggressive, you will lose the majority of independents who are worried you are going too far. And you’ll need to please both to keep your majority.”

Being minority leader is easy, especially in the House. The instructions are simple: Vote no. Always. Do everything you can to embarrass and undermine the majority party. And if you throw enough sand in the gears, you can successfully campaign on how ineffectual the majority party has been. Stay disciplined. You will have your chance.

Being majority leader is hard. Once your team is in power, everybody has their ideas about what they want to do, and everyone thinks it’s their turn now. Being majority leader is especially hard when a significant part of your caucus is backed by an angry base hungry for a purifying hot tub time machine journey back to 1789, when America was a small upstart nation of farmers and healthcare involved leeches.

I suspect what we are seeing is just the beginning of a coming crack-up. And a lot of this is going to be over spending cuts.

The main fault line is not hard to follow: Republican leaders like John Boehner have been around politics long enough to know that when you start cutting (or even threatening to cut) programs, people who benefit from those programs get upset. Really upset (see:  attempt to privatize Social Security).

But the Tea Party base is riled up, and whatever Republican leaders propose, they are always going to be convinced that MORE is needed. Here are some of what I take to be representative comments from a National Review article on how Republican leaders are trying to come around to the $100 billion in cuts:

“Slash? Considering the size of our current and projected debt, $100 billion is but a nick.”

“back to 2008 level is at least 500 billion in cuts. Promise is not kept”

“I smell a rat. It’s inconceivable that more money cannot be cut from this bloated budget.”

So, stay tuned. These folks are not motivated by practical or even political concerns. They are motivated by a kind of messianic ideology. These are the people who don’t believe in compromise. So once more, good luck Speaker Boehner. Though really, I don’t think even luck can save you now.

Wingnut Watch: What to Look For at the CPAC Meeting

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Tomorrow every wingnut’s attention will be on Washington, where the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) begins its annual meeting and vetting session for Republican presidential candidates. The three-day affair will end with a straw poll of attendees that becomes, for better or worse, a data point in the nominating process (last year’s straw poll was sort of ruined, according to most accounts, when Ron Paul’s college-aged supporters packed the room and won it for him). The significance of the event has probably been increased by the late-developing presidential field; this really does represent, as Michael Shear of the New York Times put it yesterday, the “starter’s pistol” for the 2012 cycle.

There’s always some maneuvering about who shows up and doesn’t show up, and who’s behind the scenes manipulating things, at CPAC meetings. But this year is kind of special in that there has been a sustained and ostensibly ideological effort to boycott the event from the right. It’s been organized by social conservatives who are unhappy that a gay conservative group—known as GOProud, which is distinct from the better-known Log Cabin Republicans in that it is more explicitly conservative on issues other than GLBT rights—has been allowed to become one of the meeting’s many sponsors.

More generally, elements of the Christian Right may be using this brouhaha to send a message that they will not accept subordination to those in the conservative movement who demand an exclusive focus on fiscal issues. Indeed, in addition to the GOProud’s inclusion, one of the grievances against CPAC among social conservatives is the very fact that Mitch Daniels has been given a featured speaking slot, presumably as a possible 2012 presidential candidate. Daniels has enraged the Cultural Right by calling for a “truce” in the culture wars, which from their point of view means a continuation of the GOP’s longstanding refusal to go beyond lip service on issues like abortion, gay rights and church-state separation.

There’s a secondary behind-the-scenes issue with CPAC that’s drawn less attention outside the fever swamps of right-wing internecine warfare: anger among Islamophobes at the inclusion of a group called Muslims for America, which noted neoconservative agitator Frank Gaffney has attacked as a front for the Muslim Brotherhood. This brouhaha in turn reflects long-standing hostility among some conservatives to the efforts of anti-tax commissar Grover Norquist, long a fixture at CPAC meetings, to legitimize Muslim-American organizations and convince Republicans to pursue Muslim voters.

Finally, some conservatives have always had issues with CPAC due to concerns over the alleged financial irregularities of David Keene, long-time head of the American Conservative Union, the primary sponsor of the event. It’s often hard to untangle the personal from the ideological in these disputes, but they both definitely exist.

In any event, eight significant conservative organizations have joined the boycott of this year’s CPAC conference, the most prominent being the Heritage Foundation and the Family Research Council. But the boycott hasn’t had much of an effect on the would-be presidents invited to speak. According to Slate’s Dave Weigel, no-shows by Sen. Jim DeMint and House Republican Study Committee chairman Jim Jordan may be partially attributable to sympathy for the boycott, and/or for the complaints of social conservatives that their agenda is being deep-sixed.

It’s also possible that the most notable no-shows, Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee, are being influenced by it; it’s hard to say, though in an interview with Christian Right journalist David Brody, Palin seemed to be saying in her elliptical manner that she had no problem with GOProud’s inclusion in the conference. Palin has now found reason to skip four CPACs in a row, and some of her detractors say she simply does not want to speak without a hefty fee and an unchallenged spotlight.

Others have interpreted Huckabee’s and Palin’s decision to take a pass as indicating they really aren’t running for president in 2012. Influential Iowa Republican activist Craig Robinson took this tack in ranking the presidential candidates’ potential appeal in his state’s pivotal caucuses, refusing to list Huckabee and Palin as members of the potential field.

So background noise aside, what should astute observers look for at CPAC, particularly in the cattle-call series of “featured speeches” that begin with Michele Bachmann tomorrow and conclude with fiery Tea Party congressman Alan West of Florida on Saturday? Obviously the straw poll results—and the frantic efforts of the winner and the losers to spin them—will be of interest. The speeches may get tedious to non-conservatives; this is not a venue for truth-telling challenges to conservative shibboleths, and the smell of red meat will be overpowering. You can count on metronomic shout-outs to the power and the glory of the Tea Party Movement, and vast quantities of Obama-bashing.

Since no one can rival Michele Bachmann in appealing to the conservative id, I’d keep an eye on her speech, particularly since she’s playing with the idea of running for president (probably if Palin does not run), and could be formidable in Iowa. Similarly, a much longer long-shot for the presidency, John Bolton, could use his Saturday address to play off the news from Egypt and challenge both the administration and his fellow-conservatives to treat the disturbances in the Middle East as an Islamist threat to U.S. security.

But the most interesting speeches may be from presidential wannabes not known for their ability to get conservative crowds growling and roaring. Tim Pawlenty, for example, is putting together a credible Iowa campaign and seems to be every Republican’s second choice, but desperately needs to show he can fire up the troops. Mitt Romney (who won the CPAC straw poll at this point in the 2008 cycle) needs to recapture the mojo that made him the “true conservative” candidate four years ago, particularly now that he’s being generally depicted as representing what’s left of the moderate tradition in the GOP. Rick Santorum is a good bet to bring the grievances of the Christian Right into the open. Haley Barbour could really use a speech branding himself as something other than a former tobacco lobbyist who can raise large stacks of cash when he isn’t displaying an unfortunate nostalgia for the Old South.

It should be a good show, and an illustration of the hard-core Right’s emergence from the sidelines of Republican politics into the very center of power and attention.

Photo by Gage Skidmore

Obama Raises his Bet on High-Speed Rail

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The White House won’t back down. That was the signal beamed yesterday when Vice President Joe Biden announced the administration’s plan to spend $53 billion on high-speed rail over the next six years. But questions remain: How can the administration convince a spending-skeptical public it’s a worthwhile investment? And how can it bring long-term funding predictability to high-speed rail?

Since winning control of the House, Republicans have been angling to cancel the administration’s high-speed rail program as part of their deficit reduction plan. Their goal is to halt the program before any new train segment is constructed in Florida and California (where plans are most advanced) and to rescind funds appropriated but not yet spent on other passenger rail lines under the stimulus act.

Yesterday, the administration called their bluff by asking for $8 billion for fast trains in the 2012 federal budget, followed by $45 billion over the next five years.

The proposal puts a bold but reasonable dollar sign on President Obama’s State of the Union pledge to bring high-speed rail to 80 percent of Americans within 25 years. The federal government now spends about $35 billion a year to maintain its highway system. Washington will have to spend considerably more to expand roads to accommodate a growing population if new train lines are not in the transportation mix.

Assets Matter

But to make high-speed rail happen, the White House needs to mount a better public education campaign. For starters, the president must hammer home the point that developing modern infrastructure matters just as much as cutting spending.

In other words, while we want to avoid government waste that raises the national debt, productive debt – or debt that creates future opportunities for all citizens – is not a burden, especially when money can be borrowed at record low interest rates.

A presidential trip to General Electric’s locomotive factory in Erie, Pa., could demonstrate that America has an existing manufacturing base for high-speed rail. This base needs to be tapped before more jobs migrate to countries that actually make things.

GE has pledged to develop high-speed trainsets aimed for the California and Florida lines. CEO Jeffrey Immelt could pitch in by tasking his big financial arm, GE Capital, to help finance promising rail projects.

President Obama should also lean on his newfound friends at the Chamber of Commerce. Joe Biden got it right yesterday by warning that “commerce is going to suffer and it’s going to show up on the bottom line” if the U.S. does not improve the flow of people and goods. Building and operating high-speed lines would also create tens of thousands of middle-class jobs.

Reforming Congressional Spending

Public persuasion must be matched by a more clear-eyed view of how to fund this long-term program without the uncertainty of annual congressional appropriations.

The six-year surface transportation bill coming before this session of Congress could be an excellent vehicle for the White House to develop a reliable source for high-speed rail funding. We have outlined in a policy memo how to restructure the transportation bill, now beset by wasteful congressional earmarks, into a productive program that leverages public money with private capital.

While the White House and House Republicans currently appear far apart on high-speed rail policy, there are areas of compromise. House Transportation Committee Chairman John Mica (R-Fla.) has been critical of stimulus money spent on existing rail lines for upgraded passenger service. Mica says he is in favor of “true” high-speed rail that operates above 150 mph and would support federal funds that reduce trip times along Amtrak’s busy Northeast Corridor.

There seems to be room for the White House to accommodate Mica’s concerns, including expediting an environmental impact study that currently hangs up progress in the Northeast Corridor, and ways for Mica to persuade his colleagues that reflexively obstructing rail projects is not the way to bequeath America a better transportation future.

Roots of Reaganolatry

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

I’m coming a bit late to the 100th birthday party of Ronald Reagan. But the amazing extent to which he serves as the sole secular saint of Republican and conservative-movement politics these days demands some comment.

As J.P. Green documented last Friday, the mythology of St. Ronald ignores an awful lot of inconvenient facts about the man and his actual presidency. And as Jonathan Chait explained today, the conservative refutation of these facts is a bit threadbare.

But I’m interested in why conservatives still hold so fiercely to Reaganolatry 22 years after he left office. I’d offer three reasons:

First and most important, particularly to older conservatives, was his status as de facto leader of the conservative movement long before his presidency. From the moment he was elected governor of California in 1966, he displaced Barry Goldwater as the conservative movement’s political leader, and sustained its hopes through the craziness and ultimate disaster of the Nixon administration. Indeed, Reagan’s only momentary rival for the affection of conservatives, Spiro T. Agnew, resigned in disgrace, making the Californian more than ever the True Leader as the Right washed its hands of complicity in the presidency that launched wage and price controls, recognized China, pursued detente, and signed the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts. Later Reagan fulfilled a generation of conservative fantasies by challenging a “moderate Republican” incumbent president, and nearly pulled it off. Said “moderate” proceded to lose against a relatively conservative Democrat, reinforcing the “A Choice Not An Echo” prescriptions of the Goldwater insurgency.

Second and equally important, Reagan won in 1980 as an outspokenly conservative Republican nominee–the first time, ever, that had happened, after a long series of defeats that dated back to the Taft candidacy of 1940, which was crushed, as was his 1952 candidacy, at the Republican National Convention. Remember that as of 1980, the last three elected Republican presidents had been Richard Nixon, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Herbert Hoover. Reagan killed off the assumption, which was very powerful in Republican Establishment circles, that you could not move Right and win. This is an empirical data point that is particularly important to today’s right-bent Republicans, who have successfully defeated the argument that after 2006 and 2008, the GOP needed to moderate its conservative ideology to reclaim power. The Republican nominees after Reagan–Bush, Bush, Bush, Bush and McCain–were either heretics or losers, from the conservative ideological point of view.

Third and finally, Reagan’s talking points have more historical resonance than his governing record. He was the president who proclaimed that “government isn’t the solution to our problems; government is the problem,” a line that defines today’s conservatives better than anything they are saying. He was the president who first suggested that cutting taxes was compatible with fiscal discipline, another contemporary GOP axiom. He was the president who seriously tried to slash domestic programs, even if he soon gave up on the project.

Until such time as Republicans find another idol (and we should remember that George W. Bush briefly auditioned for the role, particularly when the initial invasion of Iraq succeeded and he was hailed as a world-historical figure), Reagan remains the only available icon.

And so they continue to worship at his altar, until such time as a new leader emerges who can cleanse them of the failures of the Bush administration much as Reagan seemed to cleanse them of Nixon’s.

Cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist

Getting America Moving Again

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The following document was originally released on January 21, 2011

To: President Barack Obama

From: The Progressive Policy Institute

Re: Getting America Moving Again

As you prepare for the State of the Union address, you are no doubt focused on the generational challenges that this nation faces.

A decade of war, self-inflicted economic wounds, and political deadlock has taken a toll on Americans’ legendary optimism: only one in seven believe their children will have a better life than theirs; most erroneously think that China already has surpassed the United States as the world’s leading economic power; and many fear that a looming deficit crisis will smother our economy in debt while putting us deeper in hock to foreign creditors.

Even if these worries are exaggerated, the underlying trends are real enough. Our country is slipping behind in global competition, as once-mighty U.S. banks and auto-makers falter, and others take the lead in emerging markets for clean energy and high speed rail. Our economy is not yet generating enough good jobs to drive unemployment down to normal levels or keep inequality from growing worse. Our government’s debts are exploding, even as we need to invest more in modernizing our antiquated public infrastructure. Our schools are failing to prepare too many young Americans to meet the new standards for competitive success.

We have no doubt that the American people are ready to do their part. The question is whether U.S. political leaders are willing to do theirs. The hyper-partisanship on display these days in Washington is more than discouraging – it suggests a political class whose idea of problem-solving is to blame the other party for everything that’s gone wrong.

Mr. President, you have a real opportunity here to rise above partisanship, and to rally a restive country behind the bold and difficult steps required to spark a national economic resurgence.

Your message should be simple: it’s time to get America moving again. It’s time to champion big ideas that can move us past the partisan deadlock, and towards a more prosperous future.

In this memo, the Progressive Policy Institute outlines 10 big ideas, grounded in a spirit of radical pragmatism, for rebuilding America’s economic strength.

1. Removing Obstacles to Growth: A Regulatory Improvement Commission

Innovation is America’s biggest comparative advantage in global competition and the best hope we have for driving sustainable job growth. As you recognized in this month’s executive order, one source of inadvertent obstruction is the dead weight of accumulated regulations, which slows innovation and prevents the economy from reaching its full potential.

Your executive order was a positive step toward a healthier, more dynamic environment for innovation in the U.S., but we believe that goal requires a more direct and results-driven approach. We advocate a review process that looks broadly at the full patchwork of regulations and draws on many perspectives from outside government, rather than relying on the agencies themselves to look critically at their own regulations in isolation.

We propose a periodic review process conducted by a Regulatory Improvement Commission, modeled loosely on the BRAC Commissions for military base closures. This Commission would take a principled approach to evaluating and pruning existing regulations, solicit balanced input from all stakeholders (not just industry groups or agencies themselves), and do so in a manner that ensures we protect public health, safety, and the environment.

Once appointed, each Commission will have a limited time and budget to complete its work. After agreeing on a package of regulations to eliminate or simplify, the Commission will send it to Congress for a fast-track, up-or-down vote without amendments or filibusters. This bill would then require your signature for the changes to take effect.

If we are to maintain trust and confidence in our regulatory system, it’s essential that we have a process by which the government can periodically be held accountable for its regulations by the people and businesses subject to them.  This will ensure not only that our private-sector economy remains vibrant and healthy, but that our public sector does as well.

2. Internal National Building: A National Infrastructure Bank

After decades of wasteful spending that too often directed taxpayer dollars to Congressional pork projects while neglecting to invest in our most critical infrastructure, states and local governments are now confronting massive rebuilding challenges they can no longer avoid.

We need to think more strategically about prioritizing infrastructure projects that have significant national and regional benefits. And we need smart, innovative financing solutions that enable us to restore the backbone of our economy.

A well-structured National Infrastructure Bank can play this role by leveraging public dollars with the participation of private-sector investors, as we have seen in Europe and in several states here in America as well.

You should ask Congress to provide the start-up capital this year for a publicly-owned, independent Bank focused on lending for projects that produce real economic returns. Doing so means the Bank could generate enough returns to pay for itself over time, and it won’t require continued support from the federal budget every year.

It’s a great deal for taxpayers, and for state and local governments who will benefit from lower borrowing costs for new projects.  It’s also a solid way to help create thousands of productive jobs and billions in new investments – involving private investors who can tap into the $2 trillion in cash that corporations are now keeping on the sidelines.  And it sends a clear signal that your administration has shifted away from short-term, sugar-high stimulus toward a longer-term economic strategy focused on investment for sustainable private-sector job growth.

3. A Way to Pay for High-Speed Rail

The most recent transportation reauthorization bill in Congress ended up in the same state as our transportation system itself: overextended, underfunded, and suffering from a prolonged lack of public attention.  Given the country’s pressing infrastructure needs and the economic benefits of modernizing transportation, it’s time to make this bill a priority and to use it as an opportunity to reshape the administration’s spending plans for high-speed rail (HSR).

Now is the time to prioritize the high-speed rail initiative by concentrating public resources on a small number of strategic, viable projects that already have participation from private investors, and to identify a stable, long-term source of funding for those projects.

We propose restructuring the Highway Trust Fund into a Surface Transportation Trust Fund that recaptures its original mission—to build and maintain an efficient national transportation network—and updates that mission to reflect 21st-century priorities, including upgrades to our passenger and freight rail systems.  Instead of continuing to throw $50 billion a year into our current pork-laden Trust Fund, we must create a results-oriented transportation fund that can move viable HSR projects forward and provide seed money for public-private partnerships.  Congress could easily allot $5 billion a year for HSR construction – without an increase in the gas tax – by cutting out earmarks and formula-based grants that now soak up billions of dollars. While this amount would not be enough to fund an ambitious, full-scale national HSR system, it would go a long way toward making smart projects a reality in the Northeast Corridor, Florida, and California.

4. Restoring Fiscal Discipline in Washington

The national debt is on course to reach 90 percent of GDP by the end of the decade. This is economically and politically unsustainable. Restoring fiscal discipline in Washington is integral to America’s economic comeback.

Some urge you to give priority to economic growth over deficit reduction. We are glad you have rejected this false choice. Fiscal restraint is a crucial ingredient of a new growth strategy. It will yield a bigger U.S. economy, as Americans divert less of their savings from interest payments to productive investment. It will boost investor confidence in the essential soundness of the U.S. economy. And it will safeguard America’s economic sovereignty by reducing our reliance on foreign lenders.

If restoring fiscal discipline is sound economics, it’s also sound ethics. This is particularly true of the independent and moderate voters progressives need to reach. To them, big deficits stand as a symbol of an insular and irresponsible political class that misspends the people’s money to entrench itself in power.

For all these reasons, we urge you to include in your State of the Union Address a credible plan for long-term deficit reduction. Following the general contours of your Fiscal Commission’s proposals, such a plan should include these key steps:

  • Radically prune tax expenditures, which are nothing more than backdoor spending through the tax code. These subsidies, totaling over $1.1 trillion a year, are popular, but many of them are outdated, inefficient, or regressive. Scaling them back would allow us to narrow budget deficits and lower individual and corporate tax rates.
  • Restore budget discipline by capping domestic spending, including for defense, and adhering to strict PAYGO rules that demand offsets for all new spending or tax cuts. These measures would take effect next year, and can be adjusted if economic demand remains weak and unemployment high.
  • In addition to the cuts Defense Secretary Gates has proposed, the Pentagon can contribute to restoring the fiscal stability by eliminating supplemental spending bills, which have been used to evade normal budget controls. Combining future appropriations into one defense budget per year would effectively represent a hard cap on cost growth and force appropriators to make hard choices that prioritize battlefield needs.
  • Slow mandatory spending. The unsustainable growth of public health and retirement costs is driving America’s long-term fiscal dilemmas.  We believe the progressive way to get automatic entitlement spending under control is to trim benefits for affluent future retirees, rather than raises taxes on working families.  PPI also proposes a health care budget which would oblige Congress to periodically reconcile spending and revenue for public health programs.

5. Setting National Targets: A Balanced Energy Portfolio

After the failure by Congress to pass comprehensive energy and climate legislation last year, U.S. energy policy has been left adrift, with no clear direction or vision for how we are going to meet our growing energy needs.  As a starting point for defining that vision, the country needs some idea of what our target should be for an energy mix that will best serve our nation’s interests over the next three decades.  Such a framework will guide specific trade-offs and policy choices, and allow us to mark progress on the way to a clean energy economy.

Specifically, PPI proposes a national Balanced Energy Portfolio with a target fuel mix allocated into thirds by 2040: one third of our electricity generated by renewable resources, one third by nuclear power, and one third from traditional fossil fuels. This approach recognizes that while our use of clean energy must be dramatically increased, the promise of renewable energy technologies has not yet reached the potential for wholesale replacement of other energy sources in the next 30 years. So for now we must focus on managing our current resources and technologies to move us closer to ensuring both sustainable economic growth and responsible environmental stewardship.

By setting these realistic goalposts with a Balanced Energy Portfolio, we can have an honest debate about our energy future and focus on the specific policies necessary to make this vision a reality.  This approach complements but does not replace other proposals such as carbon pricing or adoption of Clean Energy Standards, which set minimum thresholds for states and utilities to use low-carbon generation sources like wind, solar, nuclear, clean-coal technology, along with credits for efficiency measures and new natural gas resources used to replace aging coal plants. And since any realistic plan to reduce greenhouse emissions during this period must include strong support for nuclear power, we call on Congress and the administration to speed the review of applications for new reactors and resolve inter-agency disputes and funding uncertainties for nuclear loan guarantees.

6. Greening the Pentagon: An Energy Security Innovation Fund

Necessity is the mother of invention, and our armed forces have made it clear that the need for energy innovation has become a critical national security priority.  The military is already “greening” because it can’t afford to rely exclusively on fossil fuels, whose transportation to the war zone is long, dangerous and expensive. This past year, for example, the US Navy flew an F-18A Super Hornet on nothing but domestically-produced biofuels.  But there’s a real problem for other worthy green fuel products—they often lack the capital necessary to get from the test-lab to the battlefield, and maybe beyond.

We need an Energy Security Innovation Fund, housed in the Pentagon, to help companies bridge the gap. Such a fund would leverage public dollars with private money to support research and deployment of the most promising green products.  The most successful could be transferred to the public market, just like radar, GPS, and the Internet, all of which began life as military products. This would follow the lead of CIA’s In-Q-Tel, program, which began in 1999 to help small companies develop technologies for the intelligence community. For a relatively paltry $50 million a year, In-Q-Tel has spawned $1.4 billion in innovative products for the CIA.

7. Bringing Public Education into the 21st Century

We are strong supporters of your school reform agenda, which incorporates many innovations PPI has long championed: public charter schools, early learning, performance pay for teachers, and a commitment that the federal government stop funding failure and instead demand real accountability for results. Nonetheless, we urge you to take even bolder steps to speed the pace of school innovation and improvement. Our country cannot be satisfied with the persistence of large achievement gaps between white and minority students, or our students’ mediocre performance on international tests.

America’s standard school model—whose roots lie in the late 19th century—is obsolete. We need to replace it with a 21st century school system organized around two principles: high, common standards benchmarked to those of our fiercest competitors; and individualized learning enabled by digital media and online-instruction. Here are several ways your administration could accelerate the radical innovations we need to transform, not just reform, our public schools:

  • Encourage exponential growth of high-performing charter schools, to expand high quality options for disadvantaged youth. We urge you to endorse Rep. Jared Polis’s “All Star” proposal, which would offer competitive grants to states that want to scale up proven charter management organizations. Your administration also could fund pilot projects in the states that enhance funding for the best charters, giving them the means to expand and grow.
  • End tenure as we know it. Your Race to the Top initiative gives states incentives to link teacher pay to classroom performance, and to include student growth as a factor in teacher evaluations. It’s time to go a step further and reward efforts to abolish the old tenure system. It shields incompetent teachers from accountability, discourages talented people from entering the profession, and keeps teachers from achieving the professional status they deserve.
  • Spur a national network of Innovation Zones. Last year, New York City created the first such zone to produce at least 100 schools based on dramatically new approaches to instruction. Many are experimenting with new school designs that use cutting edge technology to customize instruction for different learning styles. Your administration should give other states or localities incentives to push the envelop of innovation in public schools.
  • Create a Digital Teacher Corps. Efforts to use digital tools and social media to develop new and more individualized approaches to learning are in their infancy. A key reason is that education training programs don’t teach teachers how to use them. We commend an idea from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Studios: establish a national Digital Teachers Corps to train teachers is the use of digital tools to customize student learning.

 

8. Lifting Housing Markets: One Million Homeowner Vouchers

Many economists believe that a sluggish housing sector continues to hold back our economic recovery. So far, federal initiatives to shore up the housing sector, costing tens of billions of dollars, have been ineffective and ill-targeted.

An innovative way to jump-start the housing market would be for the federal government to provide a million vouchers that allow low-income renters to become homeowners. We should also allow some of the two million holders of rental vouchers to convert them into homeownership vouchers.

Because the plan would substantially increase the demand for owner-occupied dwellings, inventories of unsold homes would decline and prices would rise in many markets. The net costs of the initiative (about $2.5 billion, according to Urban Institute economist Robert Lerman) would be less than funding an equivalent number of rental vouchers at current levels, since the carrying costs are substantially lower than the fair market rent in most areas.

The homeownership voucher proposal would speed up demand for owner-occupied housing, while reducing the housing burdens on a large number of low-income families.

9. Align Innovation and Immigration

America’s ability to compete for high-wage jobs in a fiercely competitive world increasingly depends on a high-skilled workforce capable of ceaseless innovation. We particularly need more workers with high-order technical skills, or what we call “knowledge capital”. While comprehensive immigration reform may be a bridge too far in 2011, less sweeping changes can help the United States fill its need. Specifically, we urge two reforms:

  • First, we need to make it easier for foreign students who receive advanced degrees from U.S. institutions in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) to stay in the U.S. and join the workforce. Our current immigration system makes it unnecessarily difficult for STEM advanced-degree graduates who are here legally to gain employment. Those students have to compete with foreign-educated and more experienced workers for only 65,000 H1-B visas and 80,000 priority worker and advanced-degree green cards issued every year. By stapling a green card – granting lawful permanent residence – to every foreign student’s post-graduate STEM degree diploma, we can encourage capable young immigrants to establish U.S. citizenship and contribute their skills to our knowledge economy.
  • Second, we should offer an expedited pathway to citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants who go to college or engage in meaningful national service. Every year up to 65,000 undocumented children graduate high school. While it’s not illegal for them to attend college, universities and colleges have given new scrutiny to immigration status in the wake of 9/11, which has had a chilling effect on undocumented immigrants’ enrollment. We salute you for fighting last year to pass the DREAM Act. We hope you will propose similar legislation this year to grant conditional permanent-resident status to undocumented immigrants who entered the U.S. before their 16th birthday, lived here for at least five years, are of good moral character, and either graduated from high school or attained admission to college.

10. Taking Power from Special Interests: A Fair Way to Finance Elections

A major obstacle to enacting any of the progressive reforms offered here is our current state of political paralysis. Instead of a search for common ground upon which reasonable compromises can be forged, politics has degenerated into a zero-sum shouting match in which each side attempts not just to defeat their opponents, but to delegitimate them.

On both sides, ideologues lay down gauntlets of purity tests that few moderates can survive, and special interests threaten scorched-earth responses should they not get their favored outcomes. This means that while calls for political civility, compromise, and tolerance are important, we must also tackle the structural roots of our dysfunctional national politics.

As long as congressional campaigns are privately funded, and as long as the big donations come primarily from ideologues and special interests, pragmatic candidates are going to have a tough time raising the resources they need to get started, and a difficult time winning in all-important low-turnout primaries.

Like you, Mr. President, we support a hybrid Fair Elections system introduced by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) to allow federal candidates to choose to run for office without relying on large contributions by using federal money to match small donations. Such a funding system has already been proven successful in seven states and more than a dozen cities. We urge you to give this reform the presidential push it needs.

The Bottom line

Last year’s elections showed once again that voters are deeply frustrated by the failure of either party to rise above partisanship and put their country’s interests first. That’s why many independent and moderate voters have restlessly switched back and forth between the parties. They keep searching for some political configuration that will break the partisan impasse in Washington, reverse our economic slide, and keep the American dream alive for their children.

This hunger for purposeful action creates a fresh opportunity for you to govern in a post-partisan way that taps into the great can-do spirit of American pragmatism. More than anything else, Americans need an economic success story we can believe in. We believe these ideas are part of that story.

 

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Another Look at the Leveling Off of Lobbying

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Washington Post’s reporting on the apparent leveling off of Washington lobbying expenditures has a misleading but telling lede: “Could the great lobbying gold rush be over?”

The more banal misunderstanding tied up in this framework is the tendency to overhype small changes, which,  of course, is the nature of a news business in which every new piece of information demands a story. But if lobbying is indeed a gold rush (more on this shortly), it’s hard to see how this gold rush could be over when organizations are still spending $9.5 million a day (or $3.5 billion a year) on it.

Rather, given the amount of money that is still spent, it seems like it’s still very much a booming business, and as I’ve written before, my strong guess is that this is but a hiccup in what has been and will continue to be a steadily increasing interest in lobbying. Any speculation about the demise of lobbying is presumably much over-rated.

The more significant misunderstanding is that lobbying is a gold rush, and I think this is a more pervasive misunderstanding. Do companies and other organizations come to Washington to pursue special programs, earmarks, tax breaks? No doubt many do, and this is a non-trivial part of the lobbying business.

But look at who the heaviest spenders on lobbying are, and you’ll not find a lot of gold rushing.

I stole the excellent chart below from the Center for Responsive Politics, which does an invaluable service in collecting federal lobbying data.

Client 2010 Total 2009 Total Difference % Change
U.S. Chamber of Commerce $132,067,500 $144,496,000 -$12,428,500 -8.6%
PG&E Corp. $45,460,000 $6,280,000 $39,180,000 623.9%
General Electric $39,290,000 $26,400,000 $12,890,000 48.8%
FedEx Corp. $25,582,074 $16,370,000 $9,212,074 56.3%
American Medical Association $22,555,000 $20,720,000 $1,835,000 8.9%
AARP $22,050,000 $21,010,000 $1,040,000 5.0%
PhRMA $21,740,000 $26,150,520 -$4,410,520 -16.9%
Blue Cross/Blue Shield $21,007,141 $23,646,439 -$2,639,298 -11.2%
ConocoPhillips $19,626,382 $18,069,858 $1,556,524 8.6%
American Hospital Association $19,438,358 $18,347,176 $1,091,182 5.9%
Boeing Co. $17,896,000 $16,850,000 $1,046,000 6.2%
National Cable &
Telecommunications Association		 $17,710,000 $15,980,000 $1,730,000 10.8%
National Association of Realtors $17,560,000 $19,477,000 -$1,917,000 -9.8%
Verizon Communications $16,750,000 $17,680,000 -$930,000 -5.3%
Northrop Grumman $15,740,000 $15,180,000 $560,000 3.7%
AT&T Inc. $15,395,078 $14,729,673 $665,405 4.5%
United Technologies $14,530,000 $8,100,000 $6,430,000 79.4%
National Association of Broadcasters $13,710,000 $11,090,000 $2,620,000 23.6%
Pfizer Inc. $13,330,000 $25,819,268 -$12,489,268 -48.4%
Southern Co. $13,220,000 $13,450,000 -$230,000 -1.7%

First, it’s worth noting that that among these top 20 lobbying organizations, two-thirds (65 percent) of these organizations spent more on lobbying in 2010 than they did in 2009.

But more importantly, it’s worth peeking under the hood of these numbers and seeing what it means to spend eight or nine figures on lobbying.
Last year was certainly not a gold rush for The Chamber of Commerce, which accounts for four percent of all lobbying. Mostly, I suspect they’ve been playing quite a bit of defense, trying to shape intellectual environment by spinning narratives and doing everything they can to advance a free-market, pro-business perspective.

If you take a look at one of the Chamber’s quarterly lobbying reports from last year, you should be impressed at the length of the thing. The first quarter report runs 92(!) pages.

Here are the listings from a sample page, listing the Chamber’s lobbying on a single issue, category: “ENG – ENERGY/NUCLEAR”:

H.R. 3246/ S. 2843, Advanced Vehicle Technology Act of 2009 H.R. 3534, Consolidated Land, Energy, and Aquatic Resources Act of 2009 H.R. 5320, Assistance, Quality, and Affordability Act of 2010, including an amendment by Rep. Diana DeGette which would establish disclosure requirements regarding materials used in the hydraulic fracturing process S. 1462, American Clean Energy Leadership Act of 2009 S. 1792, A bill to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to modify the requirements for windows, doors, and skylights to be eligible for the credit for nonbusiness energy property S. 2818, A bill to amend the Energy Conservation and Production Act to improve weatherization for low-income persons, and for other purposes S. 3177 / H.R. 5019 / S. 3434, Home Star Energy Retrofit Act of 2010 S. 3072, Stationary Source Regulations Delay Act S. 3663, Clean Energy Jobs and Oil Company Accountability Act of 2010 S. J. Res. 26, A joint resolution disapproving a rule submitted by the Environmental Protection Agency relating to the endangerment finding and the cause or contribute findings for greenhouse gases under section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act

Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act (bill number not yet assigned) Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2011 (bill number not yet assigned)

Draft climate legislation expected to be sponsored by Senators Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman (not yet introduced) Draft legislation to provide incentives to deploy nuclear power (not yet introduced) Various issues relating to the Kerry-Lieberman “American Power Act” (draft legislation, not yet introduced) Legislation to reauthorize the “Diesel Emissions Reduction Act” (not yet introduced)

NHTSA Proposed Rulemaking on Notice of Intent to Prepare an Environmental Impact Statement for New Medium- and Heavy-Duty Fuel Efficiency Improvement Program (see June 14, 2010, Fed. Reg., Vol. 75, No. 113, Docket No. NHTSA-2010-0079) EPA Proposed Rulemaking on National Ambient Air Quality Standards for Ozone (see January 19, 2010, Fed. Reg., Vol. 75, No. 1, Docket ID No. EPA-HQ-OAR-2005-0172) EPA Proposed Rulemaking on Identification of Non-Hazardous Secondary Materials That Are Solid Waste (see Januaray 2, 2009, Fed. Reg., Vol. 75, No. 107, Docket No. EPA-HQ-RCRA-2008-0329) EPA Proposed Rulemaking on National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants for Major Sources: Industrial, Commercial and Institutional Boilers and Process Heaters (Boilers MACT) (see June 9, 2010, Fed. Reg., Vol 75, No. 110, Docket ID: EPA-HQ-OAR-2002-0058)

General issues including: policy for storing nuclear waste, the Department of the Interior’s moratorium on offshore oil and gas exploration in the Gulf of Mexico, DOE Loan Guarantees for Rare Earth Elements, and Endangerment and Cause or Contribute Findings for Greenhouse Gases Under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act (specific legislation not yet introduced)

Or similarly, here are the listings for “CSP – CONSUMER ISSUES/SAFETY/PRODUCTS”

H.R. 1521, Cell Tax Fairness Act of 2009 H.R. 2271, Global Online Freedom Act of 2009 H.R. 2309, Consumer Credit and Debt Protection Act H.R. 2221, Data Accountability and Trust Act H.R. 690 / S. 144, Modernize Our Bookkeeping In the Law for Employee’s Cell Phone Act of 2009 H.R. 3458, Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009 H.R. 2267, Internet Gambling Regulation, Consumer Protection and Enforcement Act H.R. 3924, Real Stimulus Act of 2009 H.R. 3126, Consumer Financial Protection Agency Act of 2009 H.R. 6038, Financial Industry Transparency Act of 2010 H.R. 4173, Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009, all issues pertaining to Title X, the Consumer Protection Bureau H.R. 5777, To foster transparency about the commercial use of personal information, provide consumers with meaningful choice about the collection, use, and disclosure of such information, and for other purposes (BEST PRACTICES Act) H.R. 1346 / S. 540, Medical Device Safety Act of 2009

S. 139, Data Breach Notification Act S. 43, Permanent Internet Tax Freedom Act of 2009 S. 773, Cybersecurity Act of 2009 S. 1490, Personal Data Privacy and Security Act of 2009 S. 1192, Mobile Wireless Tax Fairness Act of 2009 S. 788, m-SPAM Act of 2009 S. 1597, Internet Poker and Game of Skill Regulation, Consumer Protection, and Enforcement Act of 2009 S. 3155 / H.R. 4962, International Cybercrime Reporting and Cooperation Act S. 3480, Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010 S. 3386, Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act S. 3742, Data Security and Breach Notification Act of 2010 S. 3579, Data Security Act of of 2010

Legislation Regarding Offline and Online Privacy (draft released by Rep. Boucher)

What impresses me is the sheer range of issues on which the Chamber is lobbying. The Chamber has the resources to make sure that every time a piece of legislation comes up that touches on some aspect of the broader business community, it can get in to see the right folks to explain why a particular piece of legislation would be good or bad for business, and help people on the Hill to “improve” legislation in a way that the Chamber approves of. There’s something to be said for being ubiquitous, I’m sure.

General Electric, third on the list, also has a similarly expansive quarterly lobbying report at 35 pages, covering an impressive range of issues. Again, pulling from the Center for Responsive Politics, here are the areas on which General Electric lobbied in 2010:

Issues

Issue Specific Issues No. of Reports*
Defense 26 39
Fed Budget & Appropriations 23 34
Taxes 20 33
Finance 17 24
Transportation 13 19
Railroads 13 17
Copyright, Patent & Trademark 10 17
Radio & TV Broadcasting 11 16
Trade 9 14
Telecommunications 4 11
Health Issues 9 11
Energy & Nuclear Power 9 11
Environment & Superfund 7 8
Clean Air & Water 4 8
Aviation, Airlines & Airports 5 6
Banking 6 6
Labor, Antitrust & Workplace 3 6
Medicare & Medicaid 5 5
Aerospace 3 5
Advertising 4 4
Law Enforcement & Crime 3 4
Torts 2 4
Retirement 2 4
Roads & Highways 1 4
Science & Technology 3 4
Foreign Relations 1 1
Government Issues 1 1

Yes, General Electric is a major conglomerate and an important part of the American economy. But again, one can’t help but be impressed by the range of issues on which GE is lobbying. It clearly wants to be part of the debate on just about everything.

Institutions like the Chamber, GE, and others are permanent parts of the Washington policymaking community. They are not part of a gold rush, and they are certainly not going away.

More broadly, if you look at the top 20 spenders on lobbying for 2010, it turns out that they represent $524 million in expenditures, or about 15 percent of all lobbying expenditures. There are about 15,000 organizations that have hired lobbyists in Washington, but the distribution of expenditures is highly skewed: a handful of large organizations (mostly companies and business groups) dominate.

From this vantage point, lobbying in 2010 looks a lot like lobbying in 2009: Mostly dominated by a handful of large important companies and business lobbying groups who want to have a say on a wide range of issues, and more broadly, to ensure that any conversation that might impact on them does not happen without them.

When Did the Innovation Shortfall Start?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

I’m responding to the posts by Arnold Kling andcritiquing  Tyler’s The Great Stagnation. Let me just throw out some thoughts, from the perspective of someone who thinks that The Great Stagnation is a terrific book.

1. I agree wholeheartedly with Tyler that the current crisis is a supply-side rather than a demand-side problem. That explains why the economy has responded relatively weakly to demand-side intervention.

2. From my perspective,  the innovation slowdown started in 1998 or 2000, rather than 1973–sorry, Tyler.  The slowdown was mainly concentrated in the biosciences, reflected in statistics like a slowdown in new drug approvals, slow or no gains in death rates for many age groups (see my post here),  and low or negative productivity productivity in healthcare (see David Cutler on this and my post here).  This is a chart I ran in January 2010 (the 2007 death rate has been revised up a bit since then)–it shows a steady decline in the death rate for Americans aged 45-54 until the late 1990s.

The innovation slowdown was also reflected in the slow job growth in innovative industries, and the sharp decline in real wages for young college graduates (see my post here). (Young college grads, because they have no investment in legacy sectors, inevitably flock to the dynamic and innovative industries in the economy. If their real wages are falling, it’s because the innovative industries are few and far between).

3. The apparent productivity gains over the past ten years have been a statistical fluke caused in large part by the inability of our statistical system to cope with globalization, including: The lack of any direct price comparisons between imported and comparable domestic goods and services; systematic biases in the import price statistics (see Houseman et al  here, for example); and no tracking of knowledge capital flows. I’ve got several posts coming on this soon.

4. I agree with Tyler that regulation of innovation is a big problem.  That’s why I’ve suggested a new process, a Regulatory Improvement Commission, for reforming selected regulations.

5. I’m of the view that we may be close to another wave of innovation, centered in the biosciences, that will drive growth and job creation over the medium run.  If we want growth and rising living standards, we need to avoid adding on well-meaning regulations that drive up the cost of innovation.

Cross-posted at Mandel on Innovation and Growth

Why The Middle East Needs Economic Opportunity

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Uprisings across the Middle East have exposed the futility of America’s Faustian bargain with “moderate” Arab despots. Whatever happens in Egypt, it’s time for the United States to switch course and throw its weight unequivocally behind popular aspirations throughout the region for political freedom and economic opportunity.

No doubt this will be risky: If friendly autocrats go down, who knows what will take their place? Already there’s chortling in Tehran, because the fall of pro-western rulers could tilt the regional balance of power toward Iran and its satraps, weakening U.S. influence and further isolating Israel. For American strategists, however, such risks must be measured against the enormous costs of perpetuating a rotten status quo in the Middle East.

U.S.-backed regimes are far from the region’s worst, but they have contributed to the dismal conditions – stunted political and economic development, systematic abuse of human rights, endemic nepotism and corruption – that breed popular discontent and, at the extreme, the violent ideology of radical Islam. Washington’s support for authoritarian rulers has yielded neither lasting stability nor moderation, though it has compromised our own liberal values and engendered anti-American sentiment on the street.

Now, amid rising popular demands for change, America should aim not at stability, but at transformation in the Middle East. We should side with the young, civic activists and political reformers who want to throw off strongman rule; knock corrupt elites from their privileged perch; bypass central bureaucracies that stifle enterprise and dole out economic favors as a means of social control; empower civil society and women; and, in general, open Arab and Muslim societies to the modern, interconnected world.

Given our embrace of realpolitik in the Middle East, America doesn’t have a lot of credibility in the eyes of people now protesting in the streets of Cairo and other Arab capitals. But while our influence on political developments may be limited, there’s nothing to prevent the United States from addressing the economic frustrations that feed today’s revolts.

As PPI has documented in a series of policy reports (see here and here), the Middle East is the great outlier in today’s system of economic globalization. If you take out oil, the region’s share of world trade has remained strikingly small (about two percent of farm and manufacturing products), even as its population has nearly doubled over the past three decades. Exports are up in some countries, including Egypt and Pakistan, but the region as a whole attracts very little foreign investment. Poverty rates remain high – in Egypt, just under half the population is poor – and, according to the International Labor Organization, the Middle East has world’s highest unemployment rate: 10.3 percent compared to a global average of 6.2 percent.

This picture of economic stagnation is particularly grim for the young. Fully a quarter of them can’t find work. Little wonder that, as young men pour out of schools and universities into barren job markets each year, some are susceptible to Islamist extremists who offer them not only pay and adventure, but also a compellingly simple account of who is to blame for their misery – corrupt rulers in cahoots with the infidel West.

One practical way the United States can counter the radical narrative is to champion economic freedom and prosperity in the Middle East. The principle instrument here is trade and investment, rather than development aid. What these countries need is economic reforms that facilitate their integration into global markets, not wealth transfers from rich countries that end up lining the pockets of corrupt elites. To spur reform and growth, President Obama should ask Congress to pass a massive tariff-reduction bill based on the successful precedent of the Africa and Caribbean free trade agreement. A Greater Middle East Trade Initiative would provide the levers for lowering barriers to trade and investment in the region, promoting financial transparency, encouraging all countries to join the World Trade Organization, and removing obstacles to individual enterprise.

The nexus between trade and investment and economic reform is critical. As Peruvian economist Hernando De Soto has shown, massive state bureaucracies and bad laws smother entrepreneurship and drive a lot of economic activity underground. In Egypt, more people work in the underground economy than in either the private or public sectors. His studies also show that a low-income entrepreneur has to negotiate with scores of government agencies to start a business, and it years to get clear title to land.

Of course, Washington should press harder for political reforms and fair elections in the Middle East as well. But many in the region simply don’t trust Washington to embrace democracy if it produces outcomes we don’t like. By focusing on poverty, unemployment and jobs, the United States can work around such suspicions. Making life better for ordinary people is the best way to advance U.S. interests in the Middle East.

Nine Questions About the Muslim Brotherhood

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Events unfolding in Egypt are cause both for celebration and concern.   Extremely important questions for American national security are at stake in the orientation of the Egyptian government that emerges from this period of upheaval.  A fundamental question looms large: Will the Egypt that emerges be a reliable US ally and a force in for peace and security in the Middle East?

Key questions surround the Muslim Brotherhood, a well-organized force in Egyptian society. Though reformist factions exist within the Muslim Brotherhood’s leadership, the group’s stated opinions on issues of sharia law, women’s rights, relations with Israel, and the legitimacy of terrorism should give American policymakers pause.

As we begin to assess the Muslim Brotherhood, here are nine questions we should all ask of and about the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies:

1. Can the Muslim Brotherhood participate in a government where Egypt continues its obligations to Israel under the Camp David Accords? Could it lead such a government?
Muslim Brotherhood party leader Mohamed Ghanem said on Iranian TV that Egypt should stop selling gas to Israel and prepare the Egyptian army for a war with the Jewish State, echoing the 2010 declaration of Muslim Brotherhood Chairman Mohammed Badie that the Camp David Accords violate the laws of Islam and have “lost all credibility.”­  Likewise, a Brotherhood leader told NHK TV this week that as soon as there was a post-Mubarak government it must break peace with Israel.

2. Can the Muslim Brotherhood lead or even be part of a government that continues extensive counter-terrorism cooperation with Israel and the United States, as conducted by the last government?
In 2008 Muslim Brotherhood Supreme Guide Muhammad Mahdi Akef in 2008 declared that that violence against civilians of the kind practiced by Osama Bin Laden is justified against “occupiers” and opponents of Islam.

3. Under the Muslim Brotherhood, would the Egyptian government continue to fulfill Egypt’s international obligations and keep the Suez Canal open for all international shipping, including that of America and Israel?

4. Can the Muslim Brotherhood participate in an Egyptian government that maintains the Western-backed closure of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip? Could it lead such a government?
In June 2010 Muslim Brotherhood Guidance Bureau member Essam El Erian announced that the border of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip should be opened.

5. Would the party sit in a coalition government with female cabinet ministers? Could it lead such a government?
In 2008 Muslim Brotherhood Executive Bureau member Mahmoud Ghozlan insisted that “women and non-Muslims don’t have the right to lead or govern Muslim states,” echoing the sharia-based gender segregation in all sectors of life called for by Muslim Brotherhood founder al-Banna.

6. Given Iran’s support of the Muslim Brotherhood’s sister terrorist organization Hamas, under the Muslim Brotherhood, would Egypt participate in the international sanctions regime against Iran?

7. Does the Muslim Brotherhood intend to push Egyptian lawmakers to adopt Koran-based law for Egyptian Muslims and former Muslims, including mandating death for apostasy?

8. Does the Muslim Brotherhood intend to push Egyptian lawmakers to adopt Koran-based law in regard to Egyptian non-Muslims, including denying full legal recognition to religious minorities such as Copts?
In a 2008 interview by Supreme Guide Muhammad Mahdi Akef insisted that Copts could not lead Islamic states such as Egypt.

9. Would a Muslim Brotherhood government seek to execute homosexuals as do other sharia-guided states?
In a 2008 interview Muslim Brotherhood Executive Bureau member Mahmoud Ghozlan emphasized that homosexuality needed to be outlawed.

Healing the Teaching Profession

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Just before the holidays, the National Center for Teacher Quality released a report evaluating 53 institutions* that train and educate students for the teaching profession in Illinois. Immediately and predictably, all hell broke loose. Schools responded that the report methods and data collection were skewed and lazy—the NCTQ responded back that its methods are well-founded and that great volumes of data were reviewed to inform their judgment.

The debate swirls on with US News and World Report’s recent announcement that it will be using NCTQ’s rating system to form its annual ranking of education prep programs. That’s okay. Debate is good, particularly around something like education, which is an undeniably big deal. But debate can also be obscuring.

At almost exactly the same time that NCTQ revealed its findings about Illinois’ teacher prep programs, another report was released, to relatively little fanfare, let alone debate. Prepared by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, the 40-page document argues that the training of teachers needs to be “turned upside down”—more clinical experience, more rigor, more accountability, more careful placement for new teachers. In short, pre-ed should look a lot more like pre-med.

Citing both medicine and education as practice-based fields, the NCATE report argues that a doctor can’t practice from books alone. In fact, she can’t even begin to conceptualize practice without actual patients. Education works similarly.

This report is also hardly alone in the analogy—the National Research Council points out that this argument has been made in various forms since the ‘80s, and at least one Boston program has been placing “teacher residents” in city classrooms since 2003.

There are clear similarities between education and medicine: both draw from a rich body of knowledge, scientific inquiry, and multi-disciplinary information. Both seek to impact the body or mind to some degree, dealing both with internal structures and external stimuli. Both aim for betterment and regulation, though differently defined.

The biggest disconnect between the two might be the argument that education is not practiced to achieve a singular, universally agreed upon outcome—though I think any randomized sample of doctors would might have more to say (medicine to heal, to prevent, to improve, to harmonize, etc.). In both fields, technique is easy once you know the basics. And opinions on the purpose of your vocation will ultimately be self-generating. In education, it’s a common starting point that’s missing.

What would it look like if we were to train teachers they way we train doctors?

It would look interdisciplinary. It would look reflective. It would look more holistic than it does today—meaning, technique (how to get your 17-year-olds to pay attention to you for 42 minutes) and theory (17-year-olds are at a particular developmental phase, are suffering from over-taxed short-term memory, and are having difficulty building cognitive schemas that they need to organize and access information) would be linked, rather than siloed into separate classes or disciplines.

And it would look hard, I think. There’s a reason for the high attrition in freshman O-Chem courses. There’s no reason to assume that the demands of learning to teach should be any less. Being able to nurture an intellectual life is just as important as being able to save one on the operating table.

The old axiom “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach” is standing in the way. But if we also value the statement that “Education is the silver bullet” (I’m quoting West Wing there, but the idea behind this statement saturates the panic about educational achievement we live with today) maybe it’s time to change axioms for good.

Making it happen, of course, is the sticky wicket. The NCATE report suggests that the solution might be in the change itself. It advocates involving clinical hosts (districts, schools, principals and individual teacher mentors) at the start of the training process.

This means not only co-designing goals and strategies for their achievement, not just providing placements, but also allowing for networks of critical reflection and feedback between the college classroom and K-12 learning site. Going beyond superficial partnership to create a deeply interconnected learning system does more than just give stakeholders a seat at the table—it changes the way they think about that table, and allows for a ripple effect of changing values.

Teach for America has long grounded its successes in the quick leap from its participants’ boot camp training to their presence in actual classrooms, and some charter schools or alternative certification programs have followed their lead to create their own quick-start or feet-wetting recruitment programs that often bypass traditional, certification-earning coursework for teachers—and often lead to high attrition and rapid teacher turnover.

Instead of squabbling over efficacy, traditional teaching colleges and university programs should learn from the best these programs have to offer (rapid introduction to clinical practice) and incorporate it into the just-as-necessary academic content they’re most equipped to provide: study in cognitive and learning sciences, developmental and psychological theories, and the most recent neurological findings that impact kids’ learning.

It’s not the NCATE report that’s ignited the firestorm of debate. But I would argue it should be. We’re used to a few key scapegoats for kids’ low achievement in schools (unions, assessment measures, etc.). But placing blame at that level disregards the source of the problem.

Re-tooling how teachers are educated seems to get us much closer to the root of the problem of our broken educational system. If nothing else, training teachers on a med-school model might provide some desperately lacking consistency in the field. The single-word summation of the NCTQ Illinois report was not, despite the responses it garnered, “evil” or “incompetent.” It was “inconsistent.” So maybe that’s the surest foothold to climb out of the teacher quality trap, stop placing blame, and start doing something.

*I would be remiss not to note, as a student and employee at DePaul University, one of the institutions in reviewed in the NCTQ Illinois report, that my views here are wholly my own and are not to be considered representative of the school.

Just before the holidays, the National Center for Teacher Quality released a report evaluating 53 institutions* that train and educate students for the teaching profession in Illinois. Immediately and predictably, all hell broke loose. Schools responded that the report methods and data collection were skewed and lazy—the NCTQ responded back that its methods are well-founded and that great volumes of data were reviewed to inform their judgment.

The debate swirls on with US News and World Report’s recent announcement that it will be using NCTQ’s rating system to form its annual ranking of education prep programs. That’s okay. Debate is good, particularly around something like education, which is an undeniably big deal. But debate can also be obscuring.

At almost exactly the same time that NCTQ revealed its findings about Illinois’ teacher prep programs, another report was released, to relatively little fanfare, let alone debate. Prepared by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, the 40-page document argues that the training of teachers needs to be “turned upside down”—more clinical experience, more rigor, more accountability, more careful placement for new teachers. In short, pre-ed should look a lot more like pre-med.

Citing both medicine and education as practice-based fields, the NCATE report argues that a doctor can’t practice from books alone. In fact, she can’t even begin to conceptualize practice without actual patients. Education works similarly.

This report is also hardly alone in the analogy—the National Research Council points out that this argument has been made in various forms since the ‘80s, and at least one Boston program has been placing “teacher residents” in city classrooms since 2003.

There are clear similarities between education and medicine: both draw from a rich body of knowledge, scientific inquiry, and multi-disciplinary information. Both seek to impact the body or mind to some degree, dealing both with internal structures and external stimuli. Both aim for betterment and regulation, though differently defined.

The biggest disconnect between the two might be the argument that education is not practiced to achieve a singular, universally agreed upon outcome—though I think any randomized sample of doctors would might have more to say (medicine to heal, to prevent, to improve, to harmonize, etc.). In both fields, technique is easy once you know the basics. And opinions on the purpose of your vocation will ultimately be self-generating. In education, it’s a common starting point that’s missing.

What would it look like if we were to train teachers they way we train doctors?

It would look interdisciplinary. It would look reflective. It would look more holistic than it does today—meaning, technique (how to get your 17-year-olds to pay attention to you for 42 minutes) and theory (17-year-olds are at a particular developmental phase, are suffering from over-taxed short-term memory, and are having difficulty building cognitive schemas that they need to organize and access information) would be linked, rather than siloed into separate classes or disciplines.

And it would look hard, I think. There’s a reason for the high attrition in freshman O-Chem courses. There’s no reason to assume that the demands of learning to teach should be any less. Being able to nurture an intellectual life is just as important as being able to save one on the operating table.

The old axiom “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach” is standing in the way. But if we also value the statement that “Education is the silver bullet” (I’m quoting West Wing there, but the idea behind this statement saturates the panic about educational achievement we live with today) maybe it’s time to change axioms for good.

Making it happen, of course, is the sticky wicket. The NCATE report suggests that the solution might be in the change itself. It advocates involving clinical hosts (districts, schools, principals and individual teacher mentors) at the start of the training process.

This means not only co-designing goals and strategies for their achievement, not just providing placements, but also allowing for networks of critical reflection and feedback between the college classroom and K-12 learning site. Going beyond superficial partnership to create a deeply interconnected learning system does more than just give stakeholders a seat at the table—it changes the way they think about that table, and allows for a ripple effect of changing values.

Teach for America has long grounded its successes in the quick leap from its participants’ boot camp training to their presence in actual classrooms, and some charter schools or alternative certification programs have followed their lead to create their own quick-start or feet-wetting recruitment programs that often bypass traditional, certification-earning coursework for teachers—and often lead to high attrition and rapid teacher turnover.

Instead of squabbling over efficacy, traditional teaching colleges and university programs should learn from the best these programs have to offer (rapid introduction to clinical practice) and incorporate it into the just-as-necessary academic content they’re most equipped to provide: study in cognitive and learning sciences, developmental and psychological theories, and the most recent neurological findings that impact kids’ learning.

It’s not the NCATE report that’s ignited the firestorm of debate. But I would argue it should be. We’re used to a few key scapegoats for kids’ low achievement in schools (unions, assessment measures, etc.). But placing blame at that level disregards the source of the problem.

Re-tooling how teachers are educated seems to get us much closer to the root of the problem of our broken educational system. If nothing else, training teachers on a med-school model might provide some desperately lacking consistency in the field. The single-word summation of the NCTQ Illinois report was not, despite the responses it garnered, “evil” or “incompetent.” It was “inconsistent.” So maybe that’s the surest foothold to climb out of the teacher quality trap, stop placing blame, and start doing something.

*I would be remiss not to note, as a student and employee at DePaul University, one of the institutions in reviewed in the NCTQ Illinois report, that my views here are wholly my own and are not to be considered representative of the school.

The President’s New “Better Buildings Initiative” Builds on a PPI Memo

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

President Barack Obama today announced a major new policy agenda to improve energy efficiency in commercial buildings by 20 percent by 2020, and it looks like he’s been reading PPI’s memos.

Last November, PPI released a policy memo calling on the President to support commercial retrofits as a key to powering America’s economic recovery. It called for a “targeted set of short- and long-term policies to spur jobs and drive investment in retrofitting commercial buildings”. With one in four construction workers unemployed, an aggressive plan to upgrade commercial buildings will not only create jobs, but it will also make small businesses more competitive.

The President’s new Better Buildings Initiative (announced on today’s visit to Penn State University to spotlight the school’s recently developed “Energy Innovation Hub”) is a signal of support for commercial retrofits as a driver of America’s economic recovery. The White House estimates that this will generate energy savings of $40 billion by 2020 for American businesses.

To meet this goal, the President proposed a number of policy actions. The most significant is to change the existing “Energy Efficient Commercial Building Tax Deduction” into a tax credit. Currently, the tax code provides an incentive to building owners for retrofitting buildings through a tax deduction of $1.80 per square foot.

Bipartisan support for the tax deduction already exists. Recent legislation from Senators Bingaman (D-NM) and Snowe (R-ME) on energy tax incentives would increase the deduction to $3.00 per square foot. Groups such as Rebuilding America, a broad-based coalition of labor, business, utilities, manufacturers, and policy groups, support updating the commercial building tax deduction to make it more usable for existing buildings. Rebuilding America issued a press release saluting the President’s Better Buildings Initiative.

Other elements of the Better Buildings Initiative include a ramp up of energy efficiency financing opportunities for commercial retrofits, with support from the Small Business Administration; a competitive grant program at the state and local level called “Race to Green”; an initiative to encourage CEOs and universities to commit to increase the energy efficiency of their buildings, called the “Better Buildings Challenge”; and a Building Technology Extension Program.

Jones Lang LaSalle, the nation’s second-largest commercial property manager, called the President’s proposal “exactly what’s needed to jump-start major energy and carbon reduction initiatives and to create jobs and efficiencies that enhance our global competitiveness.” (A White House fact sheet is available here.)

The President’s announcement on commercial retrofits sets the stage for renewed efforts in Congress to pass clean energy legislation. This will be part of deliberations in Congress over the President’s Budget. Over the past year, energy efficiency policy has garnered the support of Republicans and moderate Democrats alike. The Better Buildings Initiative goes a long way to outline a strategy for innovation and competitiveness in America and should be supported in the debate over the President’s Budget.

Can Mubarak Follow South Korea’s Path?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As the world holds its breath to learn if the Egyptian people’s amazing struggle for democracy ends with a breakthrough or a bloodbath, President Hosni Mubarak would do well to consider the South Korea option.  Ultimately, Korea’s dictators and democracy were both winners.

Like Egyptians, South Koreans endured decades of American-backed dictatorship.  In the spring of 1987, Korea’s military government held sham elections not unlike the ones held in Egypt last November. However, in both places, a combination of repression and rising expectations proved a combustible mix. If the actual trigger for Egyptians was the sudden overthrow of Tunisia’s dictatorship last month, Koreans drew inspiration from the “People Power” overthrow of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines the year before. Indeed, “Marcos” became a code word for Korean reporters to describe their own dictatorship.

As in Cairo today, student-led demonstrations drew hundreds of thousands into the streets of Seoul 24 years ago. Like Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Korea’s Christians played a supporting role at the outset. After weeks of clashes and tear gas, on June 29 the government announced that a free and fair direct presidential election would be held within six months. Given that almost exactly seven years earlier, the military unleashed a crackdown that killed over 200 citizens, the question we must ask is, what had changed?

When facing persistent social unrest, all dictators invariably undertake a cost-benefit analysis of cracking down versus opening up. In 1980, Korea’s coup leaders correctly determined that there would be little or no cost for killing. Indeed, within months of wiping the blood off of his hands, General-turned-President Chun Doo-hwan was one of President Ronald Reagan’s first foreign guests at the White House. Later that same year, Seoul was awarded the 1988 Summer Olympics.

China reached a similar conclusion in June of 1989. After two weeks of martial law, the butchers of Beijing calculated that firing on demonstrators in Tiananmen Square would be of great political benefit and little cost. Indeed, foreign investment actually increased in 1990 and exploded thereafter.

Far from incurring any costs, China and Korea’s dictators were rewarded for their bad behavior. For the United States, the price was much higher. A generation of Koreans became virulently anti-American because of our support for a hated regime. Can the U.S. afford such blowback in Egypt?

In Korea in 1987, by contrast, not only were the demonstrations much larger than in 1980, but the Reagan Administration was now insisting that the Chun regime begin the transition to democracy. More importantly, Korean military leaders revealed later that they had considered a crackdown, but feared losing the Olympics if they had turned the streets of Seoul red.

Many pundits have declared that the United Sates is a mere bystander to the struggle for democracy in Egypt, powerless to shape the outcome. This could not be further from the truth. Not only does the U.S. provide $1.3 billion a year in foreign aid (largely to the military no less), but the U.S. is also Egypt’s leading trade partner.

Since last Friday, the Obama Administration has only hinted that future U.S. assistance could be linked to the government’s behavior. If he has not already done so behind the scenes, President Obama must not waste a moment to make it clear to Mubarak that if the Egyptian army opens fire on innocent demonstrators, U.S. aid stops and sanctions begin. Thugs will prove unequal to the task of quashing the uprising. If Mubarak still decides to clamp down, then it is time to reevaluate all U.S. overseas assistance. If we cannot shape outcomes in the country that is our second leading aid recipient, then it is time to conduct our own cost-benefit analysis.

If President Mubarak has time to read to the end of the Korean case, he might even fully embrace the decision to open up. Largely free and fair elections were held in South Korea in December 1987 as scheduled, but due to a divided opposition, the military’s candidate (and a leader of the previous coup and crackdown no less) managed to win the election. We will never know if there would have been a military coup had one of the opposition candidates won. Once a civilian was elected president five years later, Chun and his successor did briefly spend time behind bars, but they are now living out their days as elder statesmen.

Korea’s transition to democracy was conservative and gradual, but democracy was the ultimate winner. Korean legislators may still favor fistfights over filibusters, but Korea is now the most vibrant democracy in Asia. It is not too late for Mubarak to start Egypt down that path.

Reviving Jobs and Innovation: A Progressive Approach to Improving Regulation

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Today, the U.S. is suffering from a regulatory paradox: Too few and too many regulations at the same time. On the one hand, financial services were clearly under-regulated during the 2000s, making financial reform essential. Similarly, President Obama’s healthcare reform bill was a key first step to reining in medical costs.

But in other areas we see an accumulation of rules and regulations over the past decade. The trend started with the vast expansion of homeland security regulation under the Bush administration and continued through the first two years of the Obama administration.

That’s why President Obama should be applauded for issuing his executive order “Improving Regulation and Regulatory Review” on January 18. The order asked agencies to pay more attention to promoting innovation as part of the regulatory process. In addition, agencies were directed to come up with a plan for reviewing their existing significant regulations.

However, the president’s executive order did not go far enough. A regulatory ‘self-review’ process has been tried repeatedly in the past, and it’s always fallen far short of expectations. Regulators have a tough time trimming their own regulations, given internal bureaucratic pressures. But don’t blame the agencies—neither Congress nor the executive branch has a good way of reviewing and reforming existing regulations, even when they have become outdated or burdensome.

The regulatory system needs a mechanism to address this need for periodic review. We propose a Regulatory Improvement Commission (RIC), an independent body analogous to the BRAC Commissions for evaluating military base closures. This is designed to build on the president’s executive order, and in the process improve its effectiveness. The RIC will take a principled approach to evaluating and pruning existing regulations, gather input from all stakeholders (not just business or just agencies), and do so in a manner that ensures we protect public health, safety, and the environment.

Download the entire memo

Introducing Wingnut Watch

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

This is the inaugural edition of a new P-Fix feature entitled “Wingnut Watch,” which will appear each Wednesday.  I’d like to take a few moments to explain why we are doing this.

It’s our belief that the conservative movement, and through it, the Republican Party, is on an ideological bender at the moment that has become one of the primary obstacles to any sort of bipartisan effort to address the country’s most pressing problems.  It’s hard to say exactly when this bender began. There has always been a hard-core conservative faction in the GOP that opposes any cooperation with the partisan “enemy,” that deplores most of the bipartisan domestic policy accomplishments that have occurred since the Great Depression, and that counsels Republicans to seek political victory by polarizing the electorate as much as possible.

Not since the 1964 presidential campaign, however, has the conservative movement been so radicalized, or so dominant in the GOP.  The wingnut right’s rise to power is in part attributable to an ideological sorting out of the two parties over the last thirty years, but also to the persistent belief—crystallized by the policy failures and corruption of George W. Bush’s administration—that lack of strict fidelity to “conservative principles” and complicity in “big government” were preventing the GOP from consolidating a majority coalition in the electorate.  This faith in a “hidden majority” favoring extremism is common to ideologues of all stripes, but has gone viral among conservatives since 2008, thanks to the virtual conquest of the GOP by the Tea Party Movement (the latest incarnation of the party’s conservative “base”) followed by a smashing midterm election victory.

At this point, a vast array of issue positions and perspectives considered exotic until very recently have become common among conservative opinion-leaders and Republican pols alike: economic troubles are always the result of “big government” and excessive taxation and regulation; global climate change is a hoax designed to create a rationale for government takeovers of businesses; centrist market-based approaches to universal health coverage once associated with moderate Republicans are “socialist” efforts to destroy private-sector medicine; the Second Amendment is designed to enable “patriots” to prepare for armed resistance to “big government;” the constitutional jurisprudence of the last seventy-five years should be overturned in favor of Gilded Age limitations on the federal government;  states should be able to nullify federal legislation; treaties, alliances and international law threaten U.S. sovereignty; safety net programs represent an immoral “redistribution” of income; progressive taxation and/or taxation of income is incompatible with economic growth; a return to the gold standard is advisable—it goes on and on.

A superficially confusing feature of contemporary radical conservatism is the projection of extremism onto the opposition, which has led not only conservatives but many “neutral” commentators in the mainstream media to blame ideologues and partisans on both sides of the barricades equally for polarization and gridlock.  Without question, there are “moonbats” on the left who can rival the “wingnuts” of the right in terms of policy extremism, ferocious opposition to bipartisanship, subscription to conspiracy theories, and policing of politicians according to ideological litmus tests.  But at present, there is no comparison between the political power of the radical left and right.  There is no “triangulation” permitted by Republicans against the hard right, and rarely any public grousing in question of the wisdom and values of the Tea Party Movement.  Those who identify with the GOP orthodoxy of just a few years ago are ruthlessly attacked and systematically exposed to primary challenges, regardless of the impact on Republican general election prospects.

While some on the Democratic left are bitterly angry with the policies and political strategies of the Obama administration, they’ve had remarkably little impact on rank-and-file voters, much less elected officials, and there is nothing remotely like Fox News as a propagator and enforcer of ideological and partisan unity. Moreover, the radical left’s claim that the political center is a dead end for Democrats has been heavily dependent on the wingnut right’s efforts to undermine bipartisanship and paint all Democrats as leftist.

So those who favor pragmatic progressivism have a special interest in understanding, and if possible, bringing to an end, the current extremist trend on the right.  This column will pursue the former in hopes that it will encourage the latter.

But I’m not interested in conducting a carnival sideshow that cherry-picks and mocks radical conservatives who do not have any actual political power.  I won’t follow the birthers and the white supremacists, won’t indulge in Nazi analogies, and won’t assume that every raving from the lips of Glenn Beck has been internalized as marching orders by Republican politicians.  The degree of craziness in the conservative mainstream right now is large enough that exaggeration is unnecessary as well as unfair.  And where conservatives do try to exert some control over their more delusional comrades, I’ll give credit where credit’s due.

Next week’s column will include, among other things, a preview of the Conservative Political Action Committee conference in Washington, which used to be one of the primary vehicles for hard-right vetting of Republican pols (particularly presidential candidates), but which has now, in a revealing sign of the times, become suspect as insufficiently intolerant of diversity and dissent.  Stay tuned.