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Arm Libya’s Rebels

Posted on March 16, 2011 by The Progressive Policy Institute

In endorsing a no fly zone over Libya, the Arab League has taken the extraordinary step of urging western intervention in the Middle East. Nonetheless, we should resist the invitation to make America the lead actor in the Libyan drama. Our task is to help Libyans win their own freedom, not to win it for them.

We may be running out of time. Over the past week, the tide of battle has turned decisively in favor of forces loyal to Muammar Qaddafi, who have dislodged rebels from several towns, opening the road to their Benghazi stronghold. By the time the ponderous machinery of United Nations consensus-building gets around to authorizing a no fly zone, if it ever does, the rebellion could be quashed.

The world needs to help the rebels check Qaddafi’s momentum now, not next month or the one after. It’s hard to see how that can be done without supplying the rebels with intelligence and the heavy arms — rockets, artillery and tanks — they need to match Qaddafi’s better equipped and organized forces. The rebels, a mélange of military defectors and valiant but inexperienced civilians, also need weapons and tactical training.

Continue reading at The Hill

Why High-Speed Rail Could Still Get Built in Florida

Posted on March 16, 2011September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Contrary to reports in the New York Times and elsewhere, high-speed rail in Florida is not yet dead. There’s a grassroots effort by municipal governments to revive the high-speed line between Tampa and Orlando that Gov. Rick Scott has so zealously tried to kill.

The cities of Tampa, Lakeland, Orlando, and Miami want to create an “inter-local” agency that would receive federal grant money and assume the responsibilities vacated by the state last month when Scott shut down Florida Rail Enterprise and dismissed its staff.

The cities have until the first week of April to create the new entity and bid for the $2.4 billion in federal money that Scott rejected. A major sticking point, once again, is the rookie Republican governor, who is threatening to forbid the Florida Department of Transportation from permitting rail construction along I-4 owned by the state.

The same kind of high-handed arrogance got Scott fired as CEO of Columbia/HCA in 1997 after the health-care giant was slammed with a criminal investigation of its billing practices. Scott insisted that nothing was wrong until several board members found out that the company was in deep legal trouble. Scott escaped the consequences of his actions, but HCA wasn’t so lucky. It paid over $2.6 billion to settle civil suits and federal fines.

So far, Scott has managed to roll over timid state lawmakers and beat back a lawsuit charging that he overreached his authority by rejecting rail funds approved by former Gov. Charlie Crist. A quirk in Florida’s government, however, may allow the rail program to go forward if other officeholders take a principled stand.

Florida is the only state to have three elected executives who serve collectively with the governor on the Florida Cabinet, the decision-making body for the state. This means that the Cabinet, not solely the governor, controls the right-of-way needed for the rail project. So a yes vote by Attorney General Pam Bondi of Tampa, Commissioner of Agriculture Adam Putnam of Lakeland and Chief Financial Officer Jeff Atwater of Palm Beach could re-start the project over the governor’s protestations.

New developments are undermining Scott’s case. The governor said that he rejected the rail project because he believed it would not attract enough ridership and that state taxpayers could be “on the hook” for operating losses. But a study released last week by Florida DOT estimated that ridership would actually be one-third higher than an earlier estimate and that the line would be profitable, earning $10.2 million in its first year of operation.

Scott also expressed concern that construction cost overruns could add as much as $3 billion to the project, which he said he could not let taxpayers absorb during the current fiscal crisis. But in his self-righteous claims of prudence he forgot to mention that private enterprise – not government – was stepping in to build the railway.

Eight international firms had expressed interest in bidding on the project. Several were expected to cover all potential construction overruns. But before they had a chance to bid on the project, Scott pulled the plug and rejected the federal funds. That’s when the municipalities decided to take ownership of the project.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has done Florida a favor by asking for bids next month on the federal funds rejected by Scott rather than handing the money over to California, New York and other states. This gives Florida another chance.

Make no mistake, Scott’s opposition to fast trains is ideological, not fiscal. If he were on a crusade to rein in all transportation spending in tough economic times, that would be one thing. But Scott is proposing to spend billions of dollars to expand highways (including I-4) and dredge the Port of Miami for supercargo ships that are likely never to dock there, while denouncing “Obama rail” as imprudent.

His maneuvering is as transparent as Gov. Scott Walker’s bid to undercut unions and generally turn back the clock in Wisconsin. It should be recalled that Walker rejected federal rail funds last fall. Now Rick Scott wants to make a bigger splash by denying Obama credit for creating thousands of construction jobs in a swing state in time for the 2012 election.

In a recent letter the four mayors (two Republicans and two Democrats) outlined the economic benefits of fast rail linking world-class tourist attractions, top medical and educational centers and other institutions in central Florida. The Tampa-Orlando line would be a starting point for a comprehensive train system, with 170-mph-plus trains eventually linking Orlando with Miami and Jacksonville.

And what would happen if the project does not go forward? “The decision will not contribute one bit to reducing the federal deficit or lowering the federal taxes Floridians pay,” the mayors noted. What it would demonstrate is how devilishly difficult it’s become to build innovative public works in an era of sound-bite politics.

Tehran Seizes an Opening in Bahrain

Posted on March 16, 2011September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

On the surface, Bahrain’s invitation to Saudi forces is really bad. A small but all-powerful ruling class is fearful that internal calls for democracy could reach the undesirable fervor of the masses’ brethren in Tunisia, Egypt, and in the extreme, Libya. When you dig deeper, it’s even worse: sidelined by 30 years of bankrupt policy in the Middle East, America’s relative ambiguity is providing a unique opportunity for Iran to — however absurdly — identify with its oppressed Shi’ite cousins across the Gulf.

In an effort to snuff out the Libyan option amid ever more vehement protest, the Bahraini monarchy has tried to forge an awkward policy. In near-perfect English, Bahraini crowned prince Saman Bin Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa sought to appease at least the Western governments watching him:

We know that a significant portion of the electoral base feels that their voice is unheard. And they want the respect due to them by — to be given to them by the opposition. They want to sit with them and talk to them. So, you know, at the end of the day, we’re all going to have to live in the same country together. And we’re all going to have to talk to each other.

… while calling in the Saudi military in a desperate and potentially disastrous attempt at crowd control.

Stuck in the middle is the U.S., ally to both kingdoms and free democratic expression. It’s telling, for example, that Washington’s call for “restraint on all sides” was delivered neither from the presidential bully pulpit or Foggy Bottom, but from a lowly National Security Council spokesman. America’s relative inaction is due more to thirty years of bankrupt policy across multiple presidential administrations; while that may provide the White House a plausible excuse, there are still consequences.

Shi’ite Iran is filling the void left by a handcuffed and silenced United States. It’s a shameless and disingenuous target of opportunity, but could be ultimately effective: as the pro-democracy Shi’ite majority in Bahrain look abroad for apparently reform-minded backers, they see Tehran, not Washington, unambiguously standing with them.

It’s downright scandalous that this statement came from Iran’s Foreign Ministry and not the U.S. State Department:

The presence of foreign forces and interference in Bahrain’s internal affairs is unacceptable and will further complicate the issue… People have some legitimate demands and they are expressing them peacefully. It should not be responded to violently … and we expect their demands be fulfilled through correct means.

But it did. The Iranian government’s hypocrisy could not be more blatant — a scam 2009 election returned Mahmoud Ahmedinejad to power but brought the masses into the streets for weeks of protests. Dissent was ultimately crushed by the same repressive spirit fueling Bahrain’s rulers, a sentiment wistfully cast aside when the opportunism beckons.

The only question in my mind is whether Bahrainis see through Tehran’s lies or grasp on to any semblance of international support they can muster. The White House should speak up — and act — before they have to choose.

Kerry Builds A New Road To Infrastructure Bank

Posted on March 15, 2011September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Showing the kind of bipartisan leadership that has become all too rare these days, Senators John Kerry and Kay Bailey Hutchison have announced a new proposal to improve the way we fund infrastructure and unlock hundreds of billions in much-needed financing for new projects across the country. Their bill has one of those great acronym-friendly names that congressional staff labor to perfect: The Building and Upgrading Infrastructure for Long-Term Development Act of 2011, or for short: The BUILD Act.

Kerry and Hutchison announced the BUILD Act today in a packed Senate hearing room, flanked by the heads of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO, who both endorsed the proposal and spoke about the shared need that business and labor have for Washington to move beyond its political dysfunction to address the urgent needs for building and maintaining the backbone of our economy and help create jobs. Senator Mark Warner is as an original co-sponsor of the bill and also joined the press conference. Senator Warner issued a similar warning that he delivered at PPI’s infrastructure conference last fall, explaining that we must reverse the decline in U.S. infrastructure investment to make our country a more competitive place for attracting capital investment and jobs in the global economy.

The BUILD Act represents an entirely new approach to the idea of creating a National Infrastructure Bank, one that goes a long way to reconcile the huge levels of needed investment with the very real spending constraints facing the current Congress. Given the realities of the current political environment, their proposal launches the bank on a fiscally responsible scale, while preserving the best principles of political independence and economics-based decision making that make the bank worth doing in the first place. They do this by structuring their bank as a financing authority under the Federal Credit Reform Act, a model used by the U.S. Export-Import Bank and other existing federal lending entities, that allows the bank to shift enough lending risk to borrowers to keep the burden on the government and taxpayers low, which avoids the large capital requirements of traditional infrastructure bank proposals.

By combining a smart financing structure with a 50% cap on the federal share of any project’s total funding, the BUILD Act avoids the high price tag that other infrastructure financing bills often carry. That makes it an innovative approach that needs to be a part of the upcoming debates on the already underfunded transportation bill. As Chamber President Tom Donohue said today, it’s an invaluable part of the solution to how we pay for maintenance and improvements that we can’t afford to ignore, but it can only work if added to a strong foundation of spending in the transportation bill, which he said will also require increasing our 17 year-old gas tax, to meet our current needs and adjust to lower fuel consumption by more efficient vehicles.

PPI has long supported the idea of a National Infrastructure Bank, including the current House bill sponsored by Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the long-time champion for infrastructure in Congress. DeLauro joined other top political, business, and labor leaders to discuss the bank proposal at our infrastructure conference last fall. Economist and infrastructure heavyweight Ev Ehrlich released an excellent paper at that conference laying out some of the key benefits to the bank approach. The experts who participated in that conference agreed that there were many approaches to structuring a bank that would be acceptable and achieve the benefits Ehrlich described, with the caveat that we could not afford to abandon the principles of independence and project selection based on economics, not political logrolling. Senators Kerry and Hutchison have managed to apply those principles in crafting a workable proposal during this time of fiscal austerity, and we at PPI applaud them for their resourcefulness and leadership.

Why Dems Are Doing Worse in Some States than Others: It’s Race, Not the Economy

Posted on March 15, 2011September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

In 2008, Democrats enjoyed a solid advantage in partisan identification. By 2010, that advantage had largely evaporated. As I detailed in a previous post, in every state, the Democratic partisan ID advantage has declined, and by an average of nine percentage points.

But the decline has not been equal across the nation. In fact, there is a good deal of variation in the change in Democratic identification across states, ranging from a ranging from a drop of 22.2 percent in New Hampshire (from +13.2% to -9.0%) to a drop of just 1.6 percent in Mississippi (see this table for state-by-state numbers).

Why should these changes vary so much from state to state? Are there demographics that might explain this?

As it turns out, the only statistically significant predictor of the decline in democratic partisan affiliation advantage is the percentage of white people in the state. Surprisingly, the state economy (at least as measured by unemployment rate or change in unemployment rate) doesn’t seem to matter.

Unemployment

Let’s begin with the unemployment rate, since a good deal of the analysis around the 2010 election was an “it’s the economy stupid” story: voters blamed Democrats for high unemployment, and voted Republican to express their anger and frustration.

Yet, what’s remarkable about this scatterplot (above) is that the story doesn’t hold up. If anything, the relationship seems to be slightly opposite what the conventional wisdom would lead us to expect: the Democrats appear to have lost more support in states that have relatively lower unemployment rates. However, it is not statistically significant.

Still, it’s possible that what matters is not the absolute unemployment rate, but rather the change. Yet, once again, the scatterplot (below) shows that this is not the case. The more unemployment dropped between November 2008 and November 2010, the less the average decline in Dems’ partisan ID advantage. Though the relationship is actually stronger than above, it is still not a statistically significant one.

These numbers just don’t fit with the story of voters turning against Democrats for a failing economy. Take Nevada: Unemployment jumped from 8.0 percent to 14.3 percent, yet Democrats partisan ID declined by only; Similarly, California: Unemployment goes up from 8.4 percent to 12.4 percent.

On the other side, consider New Hampshire: Unemployment goes up from 4.3 percent to 5.4 percent (both among the lowest in the nation), but Democrats lose 22.2 percentage points in partisan ID advantage; Or South Dakota: Enemployment up from just 3.4 percent to just 4.5 percent, but the Dem partisan ID advantage falls up 10.4 percent.

Manufacturing

Another possibility is that what matters is the economic make-up of the economy, and in particular, perhaps states that rely disproportionately on manufacturing are more likely to have a lot of anxious voters, since manufacturing is a dying industry. But if we plot the decline in Democratic partisan ID and the manufacturing as share of the state GDP, there is no relationship.

Seniors

Another possibility is that Democrats are losing out in states with more seniors, since senior citizens are reportedly turning against Democrats. A scatter-plot shows a clear relationship, though not quite a statistically significant one (but close!). Generally, the more seniors in a state, the more Democrats have lost in their partisan ID advantage. However, the number of seniors explains only three percent of the variation in the Democratic vote share decline.

Whites

Finally, we come to the share of white voters. Here we have a consistent pattern, and one that is statistically significant (and explains 13 percent of the state-level variation). For every ten percent increase in white voters as a share of the electorate, the predicted decline in Democratic ID advantage is almost one full percentage point (the one outlier in the lower left is Hawaii, which is highly Asian. Without that outlier, the relationship would be even stronger).

This re-emphasizes the problems that Democrats seem to be having with white voters. (Democrats have not enjoyed parity with Republicans among white voters in 20 years, but 2010 was especially bad, with white voters breaking 62-to-38 for Republicans in the mid-term elections.)

This explains why the Democratic decline in diverse states like California (47 percent white) and Nevada (66 percent white) is less than in lily-white states like South Dakota (90 percent white) and New Hampshire (95 percent white), even though California and Nevada have much higher levels of unemployment.

These results exist regardless of economic circumstances (these findings are robust even in a statistical model that controls for all the other possible factors discussed).

Conclusions

The brief summary of this analysis is that race may matter more than the economy for why voters have been identifying more and more as Republicans for the last two years.

Of course, there are obvious caveats to this interpretation, most significantly the fact that I am playing around with state-level data, as opposed to individual-level data.

But the patterns are discouraging for Obama and the Democrats. Much prognostication has argued that the number one factor for 2012 will be the unemployment rate, because historically, the unemployment rate has been a very strong predictor of whether the incumbent party wins or not. This analysis suggests that something else is going on as well. Democrats are having a hard time with seniors and particularly white voters, and it’s not just a story about the state of the economy. Democrats ignore these scatterplots at their peril.

Update: I’ve written a response to some of the comments entitled “Am I a Race-Baiter?”

How Gallup’s Partisan ID Numbers Could Mean Trouble for Obama in 2012

Posted on March 15, 2011September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

In looking ahead to 2012, I’ve been playing around with Gallup’s State of the States numbers on political party affiliations. Gallup asks people whether they identify as Democrats or Republicans, and really pushes Independents to pick a side, which means that you can get a pretty good picture of where voters are

In 2008, Democrats had a party affiliation advantage in 42 states, and that affiliation advantage was at least 10 points in 28 states. In 2010, just two years later, Democrats enjoyed an affiliation advantage in 28 states, and had an advantage of more than 10 points in just 12 states. On average, Democratic Party affiliation advantage has gone down by 9.0 percentage points. In other words, the country went from being solidly Democratic to just slightly so. But it gets a little more troubling for Obama when translated into Electoral College math.

Since Democrats seem to enjoy a party affiliation advantage in Gallup’s polling that is slightly higher than the state voting patterns (Gallup thinks this is because Republicans vote at higher rates), in 2008, the state with the lowest Democratic affiliation advantage that went to Obama was Virginia, which was +9.0% Democrat. If that threshold carries over to 2012, and the party affiliation numbers remain the same, the Republican candidate would pick up at least 358 electoral votes, possibly more, since a couple of states that had even higher Democratic advantages than +9.0% voted for McCain in 2008.

Looking ahead to 2012, the key will be the states in the more than five percent but less than ten percent Democratic advantage range. Here we have a whole bunch of probable swing states: Iowa (+5.1%), North Carolina (+5.2%), Minnesota (+5.4%), Ohio (5.6%), Pennsylvania (6.4%), Michigan (+7.3%), and Washington (+7.7%). If Obama takes these seven states (but still loses West Virginia, which is +9.7% Dem, but he lost last time at +18.9%) Dem, he gets 271 electoral votes, just enough to win.

Key swing states that have fallen below the five percent Democratic advantage now include: Nevada (+4.5%, down from +11.3%), Florida (+3.1%, down from +9.1%), Wisconsin (2.6%, down from 17.8%(!)), Colorado (+2.6%, down from 10.7%), and Virginia (-0.3% down from +9.0%).

Obviously, there is a fair amount of time between now and November 2012, and things could shift back in the other direction. Since we know independents broke strongly for Republicans in 2010, it’s a decent bet that a fair amount of the shift toward Republicans comes from independents, and that those independents could be won back. Moreover, the Republican presidential field continues to look week.

In a subsequent post, I’ll be dealing with what I think is a very intriguing question raised by these numbers: that there is a good deal of variation in the change in Democratic identification across states, ranging from a ranging from a drop of 22.2 percent in New Hampshire (from +13.2% to -9.0%) to a drop of 1.6 percent in Mississippi (already a pretty red state).

Why has the Democratic advantage fallen much more precipitously in some states than others? And could knowing why help Democrats at all? Stay tuned.

A Navy Fighter Pilot’s Perspective on the No-Fly Zone

Posted on March 14, 2011September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

In 1999, I was a Navy F-14 pilot enforcing a no-fly zone over Southern Iraq. As I climbed into my cockpit, I was confident – confident in our mission to destroy Saddam Hussein’s brutal Republican Guard units, confident in my ability to distinguish foes from the innocent Iraqi civilians we were protecting, and confident in the legitimacy and wide support of an United Nations-backed mission.

If I were to suit up today to enforce a no-fly zone over Libyan to help depose dictator Muammar Qaddafi, I would be conducting a murkier – and more dangerous – mission. First of all, I would not have a clear mission to guide me. Is it to destroy all Libyan aircraft, to identify and destroy only Qaddafi’s forces, or to just protect civilians from airborne assault? I would not be able to easily distinguish rebels from government forces on the ground. Both fighting forces look pretty much the same when you are flying at high speed or high altitude. I would have none of the policy cohesion and global support that I had in 1999. Washington, DC would still be trying to sort out what to do. At the current pace of international negotiations, I probably would have neither United Nations nor NATO support.

I am proud that the United States is considering military actions to “lead from the front” to stop Qaddafi’s planes and tanks from killing civilian protesters. Yet, the Libyan situation is one that is best resolved with global (or at least regional) consensus. Unilateral action is ill-advised as we have considerable burdens in Iraq and Afghanistan currently. Adding a unilateral military force to the Libyan conflict could unnecessarily burden our military, put additional strain on America as it fights to right its economic course post-recession, and provide additional fodder to those that posit that America routinely acts capriciously and unilaterally.

If the United States were to become involved militarily in the absence of any sort of global consensus, that would take us back to the fragile “coalition of the willing” of the Bush era. This undermines our work to strengthen NATO and the United Nations as organizations that could take on more global security responsibilities. When coalitions are ad hoc, it makes for a less predictable and stable climate for our allies to find common ground on which to solve future problems.

We should strive for global, or at a minimum regional, consensus on how to address the Libyan problem. If the United Nations cannot reach consensus, America should not assume that its actions would be in concert with trans-regional goals. After all, if our allies are not sufficiently included in the “take-off” planning, they are less likely to be with us for the landing.

Congress and the Obama Administration should strive for policies that would make it relatively safe for a pilot climbing into a cockpit in the near future to enforce a no-fly zone over Libya. He should know that his aerial bombing targets were properly vetted to distinguish between civilians and armed forces and that the rules of engagement make sense. He should have the peace of mind to know that America and the global community are behind him 100 percent and that there is recognizable agreement on the preferred diplomatic and military options.

Beware the “Japan Syndrome” Narrative

Posted on March 14, 2011 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Taking Rahm Emanuel’s advice to heart, U.S. anti-nuclear activists are using the emergency in Japan to stoke premature panic in the United States about atomic energy. While the rest of us might want to wait and see what actually happens with the Fukushima Daiichi plant before leaping to conclusions, it’s not too early to draw three conclusions that belie this fearful, “Japan Syndrome” narrative.

First, while Japan is the world’s most seismically active country, vast swaths of the United States aren’t active. We probably won’t be siting new reactors on the San Andreas Fault.

Second, what’s been most striking about the Daiichi plant isn’t its vulnerability, but its resilience. The 40-year-old facility plant has thus far withstood one of the biggest earthquakes in memory, followed by a tsunami and multiple interruptions in power. Scientists say hydrogen explosions have vented minor amounts of radiation into the air.

Third, the health and environmental risks of nuclear energy don’t seem any greater than those associated with other conventional power sources, and in fact are distinctly lower than those of coal-mining and offshore oil drilling.

Continue reading at The Arena on Politico

Where Do NGOs Stand on Intervening in Libya?

Posted on March 13, 2011September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

One of the many tragedies of the Iraq War was that the Bush administration presented it as a humanitarian venture when in fact not a single established humanitarian organization supported the intervention. The International Crisis Group and Human Rights Watch, for instance, both argued that the War could not been as a humanitarian venture.

Again we are seeing calls for some sort of humanitarian intervention, in Libya this time. From my former colleague Job Henning to columnist Charles Krauthammer, the U.S. is being called upon to arm the rebels, establish a no-fly zone, or something in between.

Since the humanitarian argument was used so cynically in Iraq in 2003, it’s worth checking in with what the humanitarian groups are actually saying this time around. The results are not what one might think.

Let’s start with the most aggressive: The Genocide Intervention Network has been the lead group calling for the “[e]stablishment of a no-fly zone by willing countries, with the express aim of preventing continued operation of Libyan military aircraft if attacks against civilians continue.” GIN’s position might seem counterintuitive given that nobody claims genocide is taking place in Libya, but the organization’s goal is to stop genocides before they begin. Once the genocide begins, time is already lost.

Only slightly less interventionist is the International Crisis Group. Notably, it says that “forceful measures” – sanctioned by the UN Security Council and the Arab League and African Union—might become necessary to stop the “full-blown civil war.” The ICG’s position is very different from its position on Iraq, when the organization’s president said in March 2003 that the situation in Iraq did not merit an invasion. Still, the ICG thinks “nothing should be allowed to preempt or preclude the urgent search for a political solution” in Libya. At this time, “Western calls for military intervention of one kind or another are perilous and potentially counter-productive.”

And yet, it is significant that ICG’s former president Gareth Evans—who was president in 2003—wrote in the Financial Times that with regards to Libya “it is the responsibility of the international community to provide [basic security], if necessary–should peaceful means be inadequate–by taking timely and decisive collective action through the United Nations Security Council.” ICG’s relative hawkishness on the issue is important, both because it is highly respected and rarely insistent on military solutions. The left-wing Nation magazine has been surprised and troubled by the International Crisis Group’s positions, for instance.

Now to the firmly anti-US-intervention organizations: Amnesty International welcomed news reports in late February of the African Union’s plans to send a mission to Libya. No mention has been made of NATO, UN, or US no-fly zones, however. For its part, Human Rights Watch has called for the regime in Libya to allow relief aid in and refugees out (good luck with that!), but has conspicuously avoided advocating outside military intervention. Unlike other NGOs, HRW does take positions on wars, and so its silence essentially means it is stalwartly against military action.

The latest news is that aid groups are having trouble delivering supplies inside Libya, unsurprisingly. Perhaps if that keeps up, more humanitarian NGOs will call for intervention inside that country. Until then, the scorecard shows mixed enthusiasm for military action among the actual humanitarians.

A Comparative Look at Income Inequality

Posted on March 11, 2011September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

What would it mean for theories of U.S. income inequality growth if the U.S experience has been similar to that everywhere else?

Yet again and again [economists and other researchers not named Hacker or Pierson] have found themselves at dead ends or have missed crucial evidence. After countless arrests and interrogations, the demise of broad-based prosperity remains a frustratingly open case, unresolved even as the list of victims grows longer.

All this, we are convinced, is because a crucial suspect has largely escaped careful scrutiny: American politics.

– Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner Take All Politics

Here’s a chart showing trends in the share of income received by the top one percent for all the modern industrialized nations for which data is available going back to the early twentieth century:

The data is from a new website created by several of the leading scholars studying inequality with tax data. The American trend, the thick black line, is from the much cited work of Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, which is part of this new database.

From 1910 to 1970, American inequality trends follow the broad international pattern, and inequality levels are in the middle of the pack. That’s basically still true from 1970 to 1986:

It’s rising a bit over the period, but only by a percentage point. Note I’m keeping the scale of the charts the same for each one. Here’s the chart for 1988 to 2006:

Uh-oh. Now we look like our inequality levels are higher than everywhere else. What happened? 1986 to 1988 happened, as is evident from the 1970-2006 trend:

Wow, that’s a four percentage point increase in two years—three times the increase over the 16 years from 1970 to 1986, and bigger than the 12-year increase from 1988 to 2000. Huh. There are two possibilities here. One is that the data is right. You can see where I’m going here.

It helps to know that the 1986 tax reform created big incentives for people who had previously reported income on corporate returns (where it is invisible to the datasets above) to report on individual income tax returns (where it appears as an out-of-the-blue increase). And if this may be considered a permanent change in the tax regime, then the effect is for more income to show up on individual returns after 1986 than before, artificially lifting the top income share in every subsequent year.

Hmmm…which possibility is more likely? Let’s look at another chart showing the trends just for the northern hemisphere Anglophone countries, to which I’ll add a new line:

OK, from about 1940 to 1986, these trends line up strikingly, then the U.S. trend goes AWOL. However, let’s instead assume the post-1986 U.S. trend is an artifact of the 1986 tax reform. First, let’s increase the top one percent share from 1986 to 1988 by the same rate that it increased in the U.K. Then let’s let the top share in the U.S. increase by the same rate that it actually did from 1988 to 2006, but from the new, lower 1988 level. The result is the revised line above. This makes the U.S. trend and level consistent with not just the U.K., but Canada.
Of course, if the 1988 to 2006 top share levels are more accurate in the U.S. after 1988 than before 1986, then rather than lowering the post-1986 trend, we should raise the pre-1988 trend. That would make U.S. levels uniformly higher than in the U.K. and Canada. But of course, the measured U.K. and Canadian top share levels may also be artificially low due to tax avoidance. And of course, the common trend over the three countries would remain.

So, to review, when the post-1986 U.S. trend is corrected, the U.S. experience with inequality over the past 100 years is broadly consistent with the rest of the modern world. Here’s the summary chart for 1910-2006, with the revised U.S. trend.

Comparing levels is more difficult, but many recent cross-national comparisons related to inequality are about why trends differ. What these five charts clarify is that explanations for the recent rise in American inequality that focus on uniquely American causes—such as greater political muscle-flexing among corporations and the mega-rich—are insufficient (and unnecessary).

Update: I’ve received several responses offline that it’s going to far to say the experience of the U.S. is like that “everywhere else” and that it is really only like the other Anglophone countries. To some extent, that’s a fair criticism. But of 15 countries shown here, only Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland haven’t experienced an increase in inequality since 1980. And the increases in Norway and Finland are as big or bigger than in the U.S., U.K., and Canada. Sweden’s increase is also nearly as great in relative terms (starting from a much lower level of course). But even if this is a story about the U.S., U.K., and Canada or the Anglophone countries versus the rest of the world, that’s still a problem for Hacker’s and Pierson’s U.S.-centric theory.

This piece is cross-posted at Scott Winship’s blog

Dems’ Hard Times in the Anxiety Belt

Posted on March 10, 2011September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Yesterday, I began exploring the idea of an “Anxiety Belt” – an upper Midwest group of six swing states from Pennsylvania west to Iowa. I showed how these states were whiter, older, less well-educated, and slightly poorer than the nation at large, and argued that, with 81 electoral votes between them, Obama needs to pay attention to them. Today, I want to look at what’s happened to the partisan dynamics in those states in the last two years.

Across almost the entire country, the number of individuals identifying as Democrats or at least leaning Democrats (according to Gallup) has declined since 2008. But in the Anxiety Belt, that decline has been more pronounced. In all six states, the state-level decline than the national (average of 7.6 percentage points, compared to 6.1 percentage points nationwide). Overall, the Anxiety Belt went from slightly more Democratic than the rest of the nation to slightly less Democratic. Not an encouraging trend for Dems.

As might be expected, the Republicans have made greater gains in these states. Again, the Republican gain in each of these states is higher than the national average Republican gain, and overall, the average state-level gain among Anxiety Belt states in Republican identification (4.2 percent) is 50 percent more than the national average (2.7 percent).

Republicans won all five governor’s races in these six states last November, with the sixth being Indiana, where Republican Mitch Daniels was elected to a second term in 2008. Republicans also won all four Senate seats up for re-election in these six states.

Of course, it’s worth pointing out that Democrats still enjoy an overall partisan identification advantage in five out of the six states.

Certainly, Obama should still be competitive in all of these states, though Indiana might be a stretch. But the direction of this region is unmistakably away from Democrats, and even moreso than the nation as a whole. Democrats are going to have to continue to think hard about why they are having a particularly time here, and what they can do to speak to these voters.

Under the Radar: Arab Support for No-Fly Zone

Posted on March 8, 2011September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Ouch. Sorry about the pun in the title.

But it happens to be true. Little noticed was a potentially significant piece of news, as a representative of the Arab League told French Foreign Minister Alan Juppe that the League would, in fact, support a no-fly zone over Libya. On the surface, it seems a big deal: autocrats across the Middle East and North Africa are standing on the side of oppressed peoples in the face of their murderous leader.

In the search for international legitimacy, securing the Arab League’s endorsement, not to mention ones from the Organization of Islamic Conference and Gulf Cooperation Council, should go some distance, even if those organizations essentially draw on membership from the same states.

Then you ask yourself: Whoa. So WHY are Middle East leaders now standing with the masses? Strongmen throughout the region continue to resist protesters’ wishes, so why side with them on this?

Certainly, one reason is that Qaddafi definitively crossed a line into war. Strongmen the region over may be interested in maintaining a tight grip on power, but the protests in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, and Libya may have concretized the lengths to which the region’s unelected leaders are willing to go. The Mubaraks of the region will muffle press, stifle political organizations, restrict Western-sponsored NGOs, and arrest and beat their opponents, but as we’ve clearly seen from Tunis to Cairo, they are not willing to descend their countries into war to hold on to power.

The B-side could be more calculated. Are regional leaders looking to use their “solidarity” with the masses as a mechanism to defuse their own domestic opposition? Did they really have a choice? And what’s the benefit of opposing one anyway?

The next questions become increasingly uncomfortable: Now that there is a sense of Arab legitimacy behind a no-fly zone, what’s next?

First up is the question of whether it is the proper remedy for the cure. My colleague Will Marshall argued last week that a no-fly zone “would entail high political costs while yielding uncertain military returns.” And while Michael O’Hanlon of Brookings believed a no-fly zone was “eminently doable”, it “might not accomplish its goals of fending off Qadhafi’s brutes and foreign mercenaries, since their major weapons do not appear to be airplanes.”

Since those writings, there are mixed reports on the extent of pro-Qadhafi air raids. Report after report detail that he’s using them more extensively near the oil terminal at Ras Lanouf. Though Ivo Daalder, the American ambassador to NATO said there’s been a fall in air activity in recentdays, reiterating questions about a zone’s usefulness. Watch this space.

Britain and France are working to prepare a UN Security Council Resolution, and NATO will begin considering one on Thursday. Both entities say that they are considering the no-fly zone as a contingency should the situation warrant it, and British Foreign Minister William Hague has insisted that there be a “clear, legal basis”, implying the value of an explicit UN resolution. That continues to be a difficult proposition given resistance from the likes of China and Russia, but there is a glimmer of hope — China has left open the possibility of undefined “action beyond sanctions.”

Where does that leave us? More evaluation, essentially. If a no-fly zone proves to be an effective tool that advances the rebels’ cause, it remains critical that the United Nations grant it a mandate. It would most likely be conducted by NATO, but it would be helpful if at least one Arab nation participated to avoid giving it too much of a Western imprimatur.

Gang of Six Steps Up

Posted on March 8, 2011September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

If there’s any hope for making headway this year against America’s debt crisis, it lies with the bipartisan “Gang of Six” in the U.S. Senate. This group is filling the political vacuum created by House Republicans’ lemming-like rush to the ideological cliffs, and President Obama’s reluctance to commit himself on tough fiscal choices.

Led by Virginia Democrat Mark Warner and Georgia Republican Saxby Chambliss, the Gang of Six has picked up where the President’s Fiscal Commission left off. They’ve embraced the commission’s main political breakthrough – a hard-won bargain in which some key conservatives like Sen. Tom Coburn agreed to cut tax expenditures, while liberals such as Sen. Dick Durbin agreed to constrain Social Security costs.

This is the only bipartisan game in town, and it makes the Senate the main arena in Washington’s three-ring budget circus. What’s happening in the GOP House is essentially a sideshow, though it could turn into a very destructive bit of political theater.

Despite the jobless recovery, the House proposes to cut $61 billion in domestic spending this year – the largest immediate spending cut in U.S. history. Everyone knows there’s no way such a draconian measure gets through the Democratic Senate or past a presidential veto. Senate Democrats have countered with $6 billion in domestic program cuts, but that’s not likely to clear the filibuster-proof 60-vote threshold either.

So we’re in for a game of budgetary chicken in which both sides maneuver to blame the other if the federal government runs out of money in two weeks. Even if there is a federal shut-down, however, it’s unlikely to go on for very long, given how fed up U.S. voters already are with the antics of Washington politicians of all stripes.

But what’s really dumb, if not tragic, is to expend all this political blood and energy in a battle over domestic programs, which account for only 12 percent of the federal budget. Yes, their growth needs to be constrained too, but there just isn’t enough money there to make a sizeable dent in our fast-growing national debt, now $12 trillion and inexorably rising toward 90 percent of GDP if we don’t act soon. In the real world, stabilizing the debt at a sustainable level and eventually whittling it down means putting everything on the table – defense spending, taxes and entitlements.

That’s why the deal struck within the Fiscal Commission is so significant. It targets over $1 trillion in tax expenditures, like the tax exclusion for employer-paid health and scads of smaller business subsidies. To Senate conservatives like Chambliss, Coburn and Gang of Six member Mike Crapo of Idaho, these are essentially back-door spending programs administered through the tax code. And unlike many House Republicans and self-appointed tax commissar Grover Norquist, the GOP Senators don’t regard closing loopholes as tantamount to raising taxes. That brave departure from anti-tax fundamentalism is crucial to any bipartisan budget deal, because no self-respecting Democrat is going to negotiate deficit reductions on the spending side of the budget alone.

In a reciprocal show of political courage and country-first patriotism, commissioners Durbin and Kent Conrad of North Dakota signaled their willingness to entertain reforms in Social Security, notwithstanding all the overheated blather in the lefty blogosphere and cable TV land about the “cat food commission.”

According to today’s Washington Post, the Gang of Six is trying to recruit other Senators to join their center-out coalition. Let’s hope they succeed – and that President Obama enters the lists soon. Obama did the Fiscal Commission he created no favors by declining to endorse any of its recommendations. Worse, top White House aides lately have dropped hints that the administration may try to separate Social Security reform from negotiations over deficit reduction. If true, it would represent backsliding from Obama’s forthright pledges on taking office to confront Social Security’s problems.

In a recent op-ed, OMB Director Jack Lew argued that “Social Security does not cause our deficits,” and added: “Strengthening Social Security is an important, but parallel, issue that needs to be addressed as quickly as possible. But let’s not confuse it as either the cause of or a solution to our short-term fiscal problems.”

It’s true that health care costs are a far bigger problem, but Social Security also faces a long-term spending gap that will contribute to our mounting national debt as the baby boomers retire. The fact that it’s more easily fixed than Medicare or Medicaid is no reason to put that chore off. On the contrary, Democrats’ willingness to get serious about entitlement reform is an indispensible element of any plausible bipartisan deal for getting our fiscal house in order. It’s also the best way to take the heat off domestic programs, including progressive investments in education, infrastructure and social mobility that Democrats rightly defend.

If Durbin, the Democrats’ Senate whip, understands this, then surely President Obama does as well. His reticence on the specifics of a bipartisan budget deal may be purely a matter of tactics, but Durbin, and the Gang of Six, deserve his unequivocal support.

On Energy, Long-Term Targets Needed

Posted on March 8, 2011 by The Progressive Policy Institute

This piece was originally posted at National Journal’s Energy and Environment Expert Blog

Asking what our energy mix will be three decades from now is exactly the right question to reframe the debate about our national energy policies—or lack thereof. Most of our discussions would be a lot more productive if advocates for different approaches laid out a clear vision of what our future mix of fuel sources would look like in 30 years, so voters and policy wonks alike will be able to better understand and compare competing proposals. We should start with simple but achievable targets, such as the “Balanced Energy Portfolio” that sets a 2040 goal of using one-third renewables, one-third nuclear, and one-third fossil fuels to generate the country’s electricity and avoiding increases in greenhouse gas emissions.

Too often our recent battles over energy legislation have focused on specific mechanisms for shaping our energy future, without making a clear case for what that future should actually look like. Trying to sell cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, or renewable energy standards isn’t going to work unless we can judge these abstract ideas against easily understood energy targets. That’s why President Obama was right to reduce his new energy agenda to a simple goal: producing 80 percent of our electricity from clean energy sources by 2035.

The elegance of the President’s clean energy messaging is made possible by his nearly total avoidance of mechanistic details about how he wants the country to reach this goal. Secretary Chu has offered an overview of a very broad Clean Energy Standard (also a fact sheet) that would include a system of mandates satisfied with tradable credits for renewables, nuclear, natural gas, and clean coal technologies. But the administration has not laid out a full proposal for how those credits would be allocated or traded, because there is no sense in making a case for implementation until President Obama can convince a critical mass of the public that his goal is worth pursuing.

The President’s Clean Energy Standard is important in another respect, because it is a form of energy resource planning, a realm of energy policy that has historically been handled by the states. It’s an anachronistic and unfortunate result of our federal system that the most important decisions about the types of energy resources we will build are made on a purely piecemeal basis by state regulators and local utilities, with no coherent plan or coordination at the federal level. Part of the political appeal of carbon-pricing models is that they offer an indirect method to influence resource planning decisions without totally upending the current patchwork of state and regional decision making. But there is no reason that the federal government should not take a more active role by adopting national goals and working with states and utilities to implement strategies for meeting them.

If we are going to have a national debate about resource planning, we will need to be more specific and forthright in setting goals than the administrations broad 80 percent standard. In a recent paper released by the Progressive Policy Institute, Jim Conca and Judith Wright offer a realistic Balanced Energy Portfolio with a 30-year target energy mix of one-third renewables, one-third nuclear, and one-third fossil-fuel generation. Their target would be an ambitious departure from our current mix of 69 percent fossil fuels, 20 percent nuclear, and 11 percent renewable energy. But it is a realistic, pragmatic first step to restart a national conversation about determining our own energy future, and it provides clear goals to evaluate policy proposals.

The best hope for finding common ground in this debate is to build consensus around long-term targets for how we as a nation produce and consume energy. Once we get some agreement on the big-picture goals, we can then work on reverse-engineering specific policy proposals to achieve those goals and argue over which approach is best.

Romney Agonistes

Posted on March 7, 2011September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

It’s not exactly Sophie’s choice, but you have to admit there’s something a little poignant about Mitt Romney’s dilemma. To win the GOP nomination for president, he’s being forced by Tea Party types to distance himself from his greatest public achievement – making Massachusetts the first state in the union to achieve universal health care.

To mask this abject act of self-repudiation, Romney is attacking Obamacare with unwonted ideological zeal. “Obamacare is bad law constitutionally, bad policy and it is bad for America’s families,” he assured a group of New Hampshire Republicans over the weekend. Ladling on the conservative boilerplate, he added, “The federal government isn’t the answer for running health care any more than it’s the answer for running Amtrak or the Post Office.”

The problem for Romney – as his presidential rivals gleefully keep reminding conservatives — is that Romneycare is the policy template for Obamacare. It has the same basic architecture: a menu of competing private health care options (“exchanges” in the federal law, the “Connector” in Massachusetts), public subsidies for those who need them, and an individual mandate requiring all adults to buy medical coverage. The biggest difference between the two approaches, ironically, is that Obamacare is a lot tougher on containing health care costs than the Massachusetts law.

Nationally, about 15 percent of Americans (roughly 45 million) lack basic health care coverage. Thanks to Romneycare, it’s less than three percent in Massachusetts. Romney says he’s proud of that accomplishment, but Massachusetts may have to file a paternity suit to get him to own up to the individual mandate.

Romney’s disingenuous attempts to disavow the obvious similarities between his approach and the President’s aren’t doing much for his reputation for intellectual honesty. Given conservatives’ fanatical loathing for the President’s bill – “Repealing Obamacare is the driving motivation of my life,” avers Minnesota Republican and Tea Party pin-up Rep. Michele Bachmann – Romney evidently feels the bill he hammered out with Massachusetts Democrats poses an existential threat to his candidacy.

So the GOP front-runner is seeking refuge in federalism: “One thing I would never do is to usurp the constitutional power of states with a one-size-fits-all federal takeover,” he said in New Hampshire. Let me get this straight: it’s OK for states to adopt a “socialist” approach to universal coverage, including the heartily despised individual mandate, as long as it’s not foisted on them by Washington?

Maybe Romney will find a way to persuade conservatives to forgive him for governing effectively in a deep-died blue state. But at what cost? Let’s face it, Romney is basically a pragmatic problem-solver, not a right-wing ideologue. Pretending to be otherwise will cast further doubt on his authenticity as a candidate, even if it’s the only way to run in today’s radicalized Republican Party.