Category: Uncategorized

Homeownership Vouchers: A Plan to Reinvigorate the Economy While Helping Low-Income Families

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

 

While easy monetary policy and a large fiscal stimulus have limited the economic downturn and helped generate modest growth, few believe the economy can grow fast enough to reduce unemployment without the recovery of the housing sector. Yet, no such recovery is in sight. As of late December 2010, the headline story was “Housing Recovery Stalls: Fresh Fall in Home Prices is Headwind for Economy.”1 Construction output remains 30 percent below pre-recession levels and is no higher today than it was a year ago (about 30 percent of all lost jobs were in the construction industry). The unemployment rate among construction workers is about 19 percent, double the national average. There are still 7 million homes in foreclosure or with mortgages that are 90 days delinquent. House prices continue to stagnate.

So far, federal initiatives aimed at shoring up the housing sector have cost tens of billions of dollars but have been ineffective and poorly targeted. The tax credit for homebuyers may have sped up some home purchases, but it did so at a high cost and with benefits flowing to many high-income families. It subsidized purchases that would have taken place without the credit, resulting in a cost to the taxpayer of $43,000 per new home purchased and a total budget cost of $15-20 billion, which was twice as much as Congress expected. President Obama’s Homeowner Affordability and Stability plan has reached only a small percentage of eligible homeowners.

The potential benefits of increasing the demand for owner-occupied housing are enormous. A rise in home prices would reduce the number of homeowners who find their homes worth far less than their mortgages. It would discourage these “underwater” homeowners from walking away from their mortgages; allow more families to refinance at low interest rates, thereby reducing the rate of foreclosures; and, ultimately, it would generate new construction jobs and spur associated job growth. Increased home values also can play an indirect role in job creation, since more small business owners would again be able to use their home as collateral for loans to maintain and expand their business.

Read the Policy Memo

Maryland Morning: High-Speed Rail’s Leaving the Station…Slowly

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

On February 23, Mark Reutter spoke with Sheilah Kast of WYPR Maryland Morning about obstacles facing the administration’s high-speed rail projects:

[audio:https://www.progressivefix.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/02-23-2011-Reutter-on-MdNPR.mp3|titles=02-23-2011 Reutter on MdNPR]

If you want to read more from Mark Reutter on high-speed rail:

Will Congress Regret Banning Earmarks?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Over in the New York Times, Carl Hulse writes notes that one of the many unique aspects of this year’s unfolding budget clash is that this will be first budget battle without earmarks.

Generally, the disappearance of earmarks been seen as positive development, since everybody loves to hate earmarks. But say all you want about earmarks being wasteful or corrupt (even though that’s a debatable claim), they helped broker compromise. By giving enough members a stake in an omnibus appropriation bill, earmarks were mechanism whereby leaders could assemble a winning coalition to pass a budget bill, a powerful tool to avoid a government shutdown.

Here’s Diana Evans, a professor of political science at Trinity College, from a book about earmarks called Greasing the Wheels:

Pork barrel benefits, the most reviled of Congress’s legislative products, are used by policy coalition leaders to produce the type of policy that is most admired: general interest legislation. This book makes the case that buying votes with pork is an important way in which Congress solves its well-known collective action problem.

And here’s Scott A. Frisch and Sean Q. Kelly, writing in the National Journal last November:

The reality, as we see it, is that without earmarks it will be much more difficult to get moderate and liberal members to go along with spending cuts that may be necessary to reduce the deficit – one of the major goals of the tea party movement.  By eliminating earmarks, tea party supporters may have lost one of their most effective tools for building coalitions to make painful cuts in spending. Earmarks can be viewed as the spoonful of sugar that makes the bitter medicine of deficit reduction go down; without earmarked projects, enacting tough legislation will be even more difficult.

(Frisch and Kelly are the authors of a book called Cheese Factories on the Moon: Why Earmarks are Good for Democracy.)

Remember, even at their height, earmarks accounted for roughly two percent of all appropriations expenditures. And that two percent hasn’t necessarily been cut out of the budget – it’s just been transferred the executive branch for allocation instead of being Congressionally-directed.

Now, I understand that there were some lobbying abuses in the world of earmarks, but my sense is that most offices were actually remarkably transparent about their earmarks (and indeed happy to brag about their projects). I never saw any reason for banning them and thought it was all silly red-herring type politics that distracted us from more difficult but far more consequential fights over entitlements.

Maybe the folks in Congress will figure out how to come to some sort of eventual budget agreement without a bunch of earmarks to grease the wheels, and we’ll all be better off because of it. But I’m beginning to wonder if, when budget negotiations grind to a standstill, the good folks running Congress might wish that they hadn’t prevented themselves from sweetening the pot with a few special district spending programs.

Obama Gets His Comeuppance For Failing the Lobbying Purity Test

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

If you search through the White House visitor logs, you can find me. In fact, I’ve been to the Obama White House twice (though I seem to have two records for the same visit). Let me explain: A good friend of mine worked at CEQ for a while. Once, she took some friends on a tour of the White House. Once, we went to see the Christmastime decorations at the East Wing. However, if I had visited this friend at her office, which was not the White House but instead at Jackson Place, there’d be no trace of me in the White House visitor logs.

Yesterday, Politico ran a story noting this fact and insinuating that lobbying meetings were intentionally being moved to Jackson Place, or to the nearby Caribou Coffee on 17th Street, just so that they wouldn’t show up in the visitor logs. Many bloggers, especially those on the right have jumped all over Obama for this supposed hypocrisy. The ever-clever Michelle Malkin triumphantly rhymed: “Obama lied, transparency died.” Common Cause asked Obama to disclose every meeting regardless of where it occurs.

Now, I really don’t know if the Administration moved meetings off-campus so that they didn’t show up in the visitor logs. It seems to me like a silly thing to do. I’m trying to imagine what visitor would be so terrible that his or her presence in the visitor logs would be an instant scandal. I can’t. Based on what I know about the scarcity of space in the White House, I’m willing to buy the rationale that meetings were held elsewhere just because that’s where space could be found.

But I can see why people in the White House might be unnecessarily sensitive about who they are meeting with. The problem is that from Day One, when the Administration placed a ban on registered lobbyists serving in the White House, it tried to place itself somehow above and beyond the influence of lobbyists.

But as anybody who has spent any time in Washington knows, lobbyists are part of the policymaking fabric in this town, like it or not. To try to govern without at least getting their input and occasional buy-in is simply impossible. There are reasons to be concerned about their influence and power, but simply demonizing them as to-be-avoided-at-all-costs is not helpful, and almost certainly counter-productive.

In many ways, Obama has held himself to a standard that was far beyond reach. Of course he wasn’t going to rid Washington of special interests. But that’s politics. Everybody comes to Washington to change the way business is done. Nobody is ever powerful/foolhardy enough to do so.

One of the reasons that Obama was able to make White House visitor logs public is because the Secret Service keeps close track of everyone going in and out of the White House. When I’ve visited, somebody had to see my ID and check me in. What I can glean from yesterday’s press conference transcript is that this puts me into something called the “the WAVES system.” And when you’ve got an electronic database, it’s easy to make it public. And there’s no reason not to do so.

Maybe meeting disclosure should extend to Jackson Place. Maybe it should extend to Caribou Coffee. Should it extend to every phone call? Every kid’s soccer game an administration staffer attends where lobbyists might have kids playing as well? Where do you draw the line?  Washington is in many respects one big social network. And lobbyists, the majority of whom once worked in government, are part of that network.

I suppose what Obama should have said from the beginning was that he was doing the best he can. He was going to make White House visitor logs public because the White House belongs to everyone, and everyone should know who is visiting. But that he also recognized that the White House is not a compound on a hill, and that disclosing visitor logs is not going to capture all the conversations he or anyone on his staff ever has with an interested party. Moreover, he could have also said that he valued the inputs of everyone, be they lobbyists or not. And that he and his staff had enough integrity, thank you very much, to cut through the self-serving BS of lobbyists.

But instead, Obama succumbed to the familiar politics of purity and moralizing when it came to lobbyists. This moment of gotcha journalism, I suppose is his comeuppance. When you hold yourself to unrealistic standards, it’s bound to come sooner or later.

Is the Center Still Vital?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Over at Third Way, Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck have published a new analysis about the role of moderates in American politics, “The Still-Vital Center: Moderates, Democrats, and the Renewal of American Politics.” It’s a keen paper, and I generally suspect they are right in their basic thesis: American government would work a whole lot better if there were more moderates running the place and that self-identified moderates have a more coherent worldview than many critics think.

Galston and Kamarck have pulled together some solid survey data on moderates, enough to conclude that, “moderates have mixed opinions about the overall stances of the two parties.” They’re more like Democrats on social issues, a little more like Republicans on foreign policy, and about split on economic policy.

But in general, moderates are more likely to support Democrats. Since 1980, the U.S. electorate has hovered around 20 percent liberal, 33 percent conservative, and 47 percent moderate. This means that Democrats need moderates more, since liberals make up only one-fifth of voters. Conservatives outnumber liberals by a substantial amount, so Republicans need fewer moderates to establish a winning coalition. This is the kind of simple math that liberals keep forgetting. Obama, like every Democrat before him, couldn’t have won without strong support among moderates.

But there’s also a puzzle here, and one that continues to frustrate centrists: If moderates consistently represent almost half of the electorate, why are there so few moderate representatives, and why is our politics so polarized?

Galston and Kamarck put a lot of emphasis on primary elections as a culprit, since they are generally low-turnout affairs, in which extremist candidates who are able to mobilize a small but loyal following can win. (Witness Christine O’Donnell winning Delaware’s Republican primary with 30,561 votes in a state of 900,000 people).

They advocate for open primaries so that voters from both parties can participate, which might, as they write, “open up the possibility that moderate and compromise might be rewarded rather than punished.” By all means! But already half of the states do this, and I’ve yet to see any systemic evidence that states with closed primaries turnout candidates any more extremist. Moreover, Alan Abramowitz has made the case that primary voters are actually not that different from general election across a number of ideological indicators.

But the ability of ideologues to triumph in primaries points to a larger problem: that moderate voters tend to be the least engaged and least educated part of the electorate. This extends as well to general campaign work, contributions, and even just talking to other people about politics.

In Abramowitz’s recent book The Disappearing Center (reviewed here by me), he shows that 56 percent of strong liberal or conservatives reported being politically engaged in 2004, as compared to 36 percent of those who “lean” liberal or conservative, and just 20 percent of those who say they are moderate, or of no ideology.  And according to National Election Studies data, 43 percent of self-identified conservatives had a college degree, 32 percent of self-identified liberals had a college degree, but only 18 percent of moderates had a college degree. This is something centrists are going to have to grapple with.

In Abramowitz’s story, the plight of the moderates is mostly a story about less-educated, less-engaged citizens who don’t know or care enough about politics to pick a side. Were they to get wealthy and educated, like the partisans, they would presumably then know enough to pick one of the two distinct teams in American politics. But lacking the means or the will to pick a side, they call themselves moderate, feel disengaged and disenchanted by politics, and try to get on with the business of making a living.

However, I’m not sure about this. Have political moderates instead become less engaged out of frustration with extremism? Feeling that they have nobody in politics who speaks for them, have they simply stopped bothering? Galston and Kamarck come down on the side that moderates are becoming more frustrated as parties have become more ideological. My hunch is that they’re right, though it would be hard to prove this.

For my money, I think probably the best thing we could do to empower moderates would be to reduce obstacles to voting by supporting reforms such as vote-by-mail, Internet voting, same-day-registration, and moving Election Day to the weekend (the vast majority of countries hold elections on Sundays). In many respects, our current voting system effectively privileges the most engaged partisans and those with the most time on their hands, while disenfranchising more moderate voters for whom politics is, unfortunately, often less of a priority. Getting more moderates voting would force candidates to pay more attention to them and result in more moderate candidates. Additionally, instant runoff voting could enable centrist and independent candidates to run for office without worrying about being dismissed as spoilers.

Galston and Kamarck also propose “real redistricting reform” (hard to argue with the wisdom of non-partisan commissions drawing lines, though the fact that polarization extends to the Senate suggests there’s more than gerrymandering at work here), and a highly intriguing proposal that becoming Speaker of the House or Majority Leader of the Senate should require 60 percent support from the entire body (That’s 261 votes in the House, for those of you keeping score at home). This would be quite a change from the current approach, in which the leader is selected by only the majority party, and thus is only responsive to the majority party. But with a 60 percent super-majority, any leader would have to be able to draw at least some support from the opposing party.

I suspect this would have a minimal effect in the Senate, which is already pulled towards moderation by the 60-vote threshold to get anything done.

But could it change the way the House works? Galston and Kamarck argue that “super-majorities guarantee ownership by both political parties.” I guess it depends how the public perceives it. My hunch is that the majority party will still mostly get the blame or the credit, since the public doesn’t really get the concept of super-majorities (think how confusing the filibuster is to your average voter).

Moreover, given how hard it is for even a single party leader to keep the troops who are supposedly on the same team all marching in the same direction, wouldn’t it be even harder to have to steer a larger and more internally divisive army without mutiny? But who knows? Maybe it could work. It deserves more thought.

The bigger problem is that in some respects, the problems of polarization are built into politics: there is a tendency for those who have the most extreme views to care the most deeply, simply because they perceive the most at stake in the outcomes. And particularly in the current political environment, there is a tendency for those most interested in politics to be pulled to the extremes, in part because political discourse offers little guidance for those seeking a middle course – there is a lot more intellectual sustenance and solidarity on both poles.

But obviously, there have been periods in American politics (most recently the 1950s and 1960s) in which there was a Vital Center.  So what happened?

The short version is that several demographic changes led to political sorting, which reduced moderating pressures on candidates. African-Americans migrated to the North and as a result became a more important political constituency. Civil Rights reforms alienated Southern Democrats, freeing the Democrats of their conservative wing and making their caucus more liberal. New Southern Republicans, plus the rise of the conservative Sunbelt, shifted the Republican center of gravity, as did the political awakening of evangelicals.

The decline of machine politics played a role. Without party machines to turn out votes and with new sprawling suburban districts to cover, candidates turned instead to special interests and ideological believers who were willing to volunteer and give money because they felt so strongly. A new political class that cared more about being right than actually winning took over the party mechanisms, creating the perfect breeding ground for ideological candidates.

Meanwhile, as politics became more partisan, it also became nastier. Because the activists who increasingly control the party now feel more is at stake, they became more aggressive – a feedback loop that has left much wreckage in its wake.

What Galston and Kamarck provide is a starting point back from the wreckage: evidence for a fundamentally moderate public, and a distinct “moderate” worldview. (For even more on this, it’s also worth reading Disconnect by Morris Fiorina. Fiorina’s basic thesis is that “the orientation [of the public] is more pragmatic. Far more people position themselves on the issues on a case-by-case basis rather than deduce their specific positions from some abstract principle ….Those who ostensibly represent the American public take positions that collectively do not provide an accurate representation of the public.”)

The big question is how to give moderates a more active role in politics. I suspect there is a bit more work to be done here in giving moderates more intellectual sustenance than they have traditionally received, and providing leadership and discourse that supports moderation as vital centrism rather than mushy compromise, and that fundamentally engages moderates. This analysis is a great place to start.

Six Months Is Too Short For Egypt’s Elections

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Arab revolutions have overthrown one dictator after another in strikingly orderly fashion. There’s an almost biblical quality to it: Tunisia begat Egypt, and Egypt begat Libya and Bahrain. One of the problems of such a linear evolution of revolutions is that we tend to focus on only one at a time. Remember Egypt? Barely – it’s yesterday’s news. And Tunisia feels like it happened in the Bush administration (note: it didn’t).

As our gaze floats from one country to the next, it’s worth remembering that now—when the hard work of democracy begins—is just as crucial a time across the Arab world. Political parties, civil society organizations and democratic institutions are just beginning to form. As in any power vacuum, Egypt’s infant governing class is scrambling first to organize the pillars of democracy, and then to contest power.

In the United States, we have become conditioned to expect things immediately – I’ve taken time to respond to no less than three emails as I’ve written the paragraphs above – rather than applying a good dose of patience as I crank this piece out. To us, the six months set between a revolution and Egyptian elections seems like more than enough time to hold a democratic vote. But when you’re starting from nothing, six months just isn’t enough time.

From WSJ:

As hopes rise for Egypt’s first elections, political parties are sprouting like weeds. Activists, businessmen and community leaders are all forming new parties they hope will widen Egypt’s limited menu of political options.

The nascent parties are both secular and Islamist, but for the most part they agree on one thing: more time than the target for elections—in less than six months—may be needed for these groups to have a real impact. Some also worry that elections too soon would greatly favor the Muslim Brotherhood, which already has a large-scale social organization in place.

And the Washington Post:

Al-Wasat waited 15 years, one month and nine days for official permission to operate, which a court granted Saturday. The party, started by a group that split away from the Muslim Brotherhood to promote a more tolerant form of Islam, has little more behind it than a Web site, the bonds formed during years of suppression and a shared desire for democracy.

An organization so recently banned has no sign announcing its presence, and reporters traveled around the block a few times searching for the office… “We could never meet people here in Egypt,” said Tareq El Malt, an architect and member of the executive committee whose own neighbors don’t know the party exists. Elections are expected in six months, but El Malt said that before the party thinks about winning seats in parliament, it has to figure out how to organize and operate.

Six months is too short for a truly organized, healthy political class to mature into a set of diverse but not scattered parties that can form a stable governing coalition. Is a year? Most probably not, but it would be better.

If the time comes when Egypt’s temporary ruling council delays the vote beyond August, it’s not necessarily because the council is attempting to thwart democracy. It may be just the opposite – a delay, even a relatively short one, would likely significantly benefit the long-term prospects for a stable Egyptian governing coalition.

Have We Finally Reached the ‘End of History’?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Are the current pro-democracy uprisings in the Middle East a vindication of Francis Fukuyama’s theory about the ‘End of History’? Max Borders ponders the question over at the Daily Caller, arguing that the demonstrations in Libya, Tunisia, Bahrain, Egypt, and elsewhere are at least partial proof of Fukuyama’s ideas.

For those uninitiated in Fukuyamaism, the now-Stanford Hoover Institute political philosopher argued in The National Interest in 1989 that “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” In a matter of time, all countries in the world would inevitably evolve in one way or another towards capitalist liberal democracy, because only it can satisfy mankind’s universal yearnings for freedom and dignity.

Looking at the current upheaval in the Middle East, there is some evidence supporting Fukuyama’s argument. The crowds are overwhelmingly calling for democracy. From the Islamists to the Communists, anti-regime protestors seem genuinely eager to put their ideas to the electoral test. For all the talk about Chinese-style market authoritarianism being a sexy ideological competitor to liberal democracy, few of the millions of individuals braving oppression on the streets are demanding local versions of the Chinese Communist Party. The accountability and equality that democracy ideally provides appears to be the most appealing form of government to most of the world. Score one for Fukuyama.

It is equally true, however, that there seems unanswered questions regarding whether the Middle East would embrace either American-style capitalism or social liberalization. For all Borders’ (and Fukuyama’s) entreaties, there is no indication of popular petitions in these protests for free markets or libertarianism. The majority of those in the streets of Egypt and Libya are practicing Muslims and may prefer some form of Islamic democracy. Polls show that the biggest values gaps between the Islamic world and the West occur over the issues of gay rights, women’s rights, and other matters of social freedom. “Muslim publics overwhelmingly welcome Islamic influence over their countries’ politics,” as a December 2010 survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project found.

Surveys show that what (most) Americans see as freedom in the realms of sexual preference, marriage, and families looks to many of the world’s Muslim-majority countries as moral decay and decadence. The full separation of religion and state is also less appealing to the world outside the West, where secularism (let alone atheism) is much more frowned upon. None of this is to imply that Islam is incompatible with free markets or liberalism—only that there is no inevitability that they will all necessarily combine.

Rather than The End of History, I would suggest a variation of Fareed Zakaria’s notion of ‘Illiberal Democracy’ is a more accurate indicator of where the world seems to be heading. Writing in Foreign Affairs in 1997, Zakaria presciently saw that while many countries were embracing the ballot box in the post-Cold War world, the rule of law and human rights norms were far less popular. “Since the fall of communism, countries around the world are being governed by regimes…that mix elections and authoritarianism—illiberal democracy,” Zakaria wrote in the book he based on his Foreign Affairs essay. A different form of illiberal democracy might be erupting in the Middle East, one where the full trappings of democracy are united with a deep social conservatism that cannot be considered ‘liberal’ in any sense of the word. These regimes might be more democratic than the ones Zakaria described, but they could be equally illiberal, albeit in a different manner.

Fukuyamians would likely respond, like good Hegelians, that illiberal democracy is just a bump on the inevitable path to liberal democracy. It is a phase that will be experienced but eventually jettisoned as it is realized that the universal yearning for individuals’ self-determination is stronger than any other desires. Perhaps. But history is known to thwart all predictions. But what seems clear for now is that the crowds in the Middle East like the ‘democracy’ part of Fukuyama’s cherished ideology. The liberal part? Remains to be seen.

Wingnut Watch: The Ideological Crusade Behind the Budget Battles

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In Washington and around the country, conservatives are going on the anti-spending warpath, delighting the Tea Party base with tough talk and confrontational tactics.  The amazing scenes from Madison, engineered by new Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, are emboldening GOPers elsewhere (notably in Ohio and Indiana) to go to the barricades in demanding pay and benefit concessions, if not actual suicide, from public employees and their unions.  And in Congress, a government shutdown is beginning to look like a virtual certainty, quite possibly accompanied by the drama of a debt limit collision.

The internal conservative debate on these subjects is being heavily dominated by those counseling “no retreat,” and laboring mightily to explain why a hard-core approach that threatens the daily functioning of government won’t turn out as it did for the short-lived Republican Revolution of the mid-1990s.

But amidst all the dramatics over spending, it’s increasingly obvious that conservatives have a lot of other fish to fry, and are using their demands for big cutbacks in public-sector spending to impose policies and priorities that have little or nothing to do with money.

This is most obvious in Wisconsin, where Walker’s demands go beyond pay and benefit concessions from public employees and aim at severely restricting collective bargaining rights.  Walker and his defenders, of course, claim that no path of budget austerity is compatible with the existence of strong public employee unions.  That’s another way of saying it’s possible to relate all sorts of ideological objectives as having an impact on spending. Interestingly, two Republican governors close to this particular fire, Indiana’s Mitch Daniels and Florida’s Rick Scott (the latter state is not close geographically to Wisconsin, but is similar in the scope of its gubernatorially-induced budget crisis) have conspicuously parted ways with Walker on demanding non-financial concessions from public employee unions.

An even more obvious ideological aspect of state budget “crises” is the determination of nearly all GOP governors to cut taxes and/or create new corporate subsidies even as they claim there’s just no money for spending they don’t particularly favor in the first place.  Walker, in particular, is insisting on both tax cuts and new “economic development incentives” (e.g., public concessions for companies moving into the state) that have significantly worsened the fiscal situation.  So, too, has Florida’s Scott, who is also demanding a major new private school voucher initiative.

The overlap of ideological and fiscal priorities is even more obvious in Washington.  The FY 2011 continuing appropriations resolution passed by the House last weekend is loaded with long-time conservative hobby-horses, including an end to public broadcasting, severe cutbacks in funding for bank regulators and food inspectors, plus an unprecedented assault on federal support for family planning services, including a total ban on use of federal money by Planned Parenthood and an end to the Title X program that funds many clinics dispensing contraceptives.  Echoing the confrontations in Madison, the bill also slashed funding for the National Labor Relations Board by one-third, and 176 House Republicans voted to kill the NLRB altogether.  Meanwhile, Republicans are leaving the Pentagon budget largely alone.

Since the House CR is primarily symbolic, the real tale of the tape will be in the internal priorities Republicans set in negotiations with Senate Democrats and the White House.  But GOP leaders are under intense pressure from the large majority of its Members from the arch-conservative Republican Study Group, and from Tea Party-oriented freshmen, to use budget cuts to completely change the scope as well as the size of the federal government.

Most interestingly, there is a growing sense that House conservatives and the right-wing chattering classes are increasingly favoring a federal government shutdown (which will happen on March 4 if no agreement is reached on the CR or on a short-term stopgap, which Republicans say they will oppose unless it incorporate major spending cuts) not just as a negotiating tactic, but as an end in itself.  Highly influential anti-tax lobbyist Grover Norquist has been explicit about what he sees as the political advantage Republicans would derive from a shutdown: “Obama will be less popular if — in the service of overspending and wasting people’s money — he closes the government down, as opposed to now, when he’s just wasting people’s money.”

More to the point, Republican leaders would like to get rid of the RINO label as soon as possible and earn the trust of Tea Party types. It’s even possible that they are powerless to act otherwise (particularly given the example set by Walker in Wisconsin) or will be forced to engineer a shutdown in order to head off the more economically-consequential defeat of a debt limit measure.

In any event, conservatives are busy reassuring GOP pols that a shutdown won’t produce the sort of political damage the brief 1995 shutdown incurred.  They are typically blaming the 1995 setback on Newt Gingrich’s clumsiness, Bill Clinton’s diabolical political skills, the post-Oklahoma City backlash against government-hating, the malice of the pre-Fox “liberal media”—all ingredients that are missing from today’s impending confrontation.  All these psychological factors should be kept in mind in assessing what happens before, on, and after March 4.

Getting Real About Energy: A Balanced Portfolio for America’s Future

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The failure by Congress to pass energy and climate legislation has left U.S. energy policy adrift, with no clear direction or guiding concept of how we are going to address the long-term questions about the energy resources we elect to use and their impact on the environment. Rather than pursuing new approaches and policy proposals in the wake of the political defeat of cap-and-trade legislation, energy and environmental advocates have largely splintered into chaotic scrambles for subsidies or resigned their strategies to calling for increased research and development spending for energy, perhaps hoping technology can succeed in finding solutions where politics failed. Meanwhile, foreign nations continue to announce bold plans that set clear strategies for managing their future energy resources, leaving the U.S. farther behind every day in planning for leadership of tomorrow’s economy.

This paper aims to reorganize our discussions about energy and the environment around a very basic idea: the U.S. needs a new framework for identifying the goals of our energy policies and for laying out a vision of what our energy future should look like. Our current debates are too narrowly focused on incentives or regulation of specific fuels, pollutants, and technologies. We are losing sight of the forest in our fights over so many trees, and we need to take a step back and first address the broader question of where we ultimately want to be decades from now as a country and as an energy leader in the global economy. When we have an idea of the where we want to be decades from now, we can have a much more strategic and deliberate process for making policy decisions.

So what should this framework look like? By rejecting both the climate denialism and obstruction of the right and the wishful thinking and anti-nuclear biases of the far left, we outline a realistic plan to finally get the U.S. on track to a new, green economy and lead the world to a cleaner energy future. As an immediate and bold step toward setting real goals for clean and balanced growth, we propose a balanced energy portfolio that moves us toward a 30-year target energy mix for electricity generation of one-third fossil fuels, one-third renewable sources (wind, solar, biomass, hydro), and one-third nuclear generation. Such a target is an ambitious departure from our current mix of 69 percent fossil fuels, 11 percent renewable energy, and 20 percent nuclear energy. But it is doable – and setting the target is essential to serve as the polestar for all energy policy discussions.

Our balanced energy portfolio proposal is not meant to be exhaustive in its specific policy prescriptions. We offer this proposed portfolio as a framework for assessing what our needs are and for setting parameters and mileposts for policy proposals that are responsive to those needs. Such a framework is a starting point, and it will be up to policy makers to take the critical next steps by enacting meaningful policy changes that will get us there.

Read the memo

Small Spending Cuts’ Big Impact on America in the Middle East

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Now is the winter of discontent for Middle East dictators. A great political awakening is roiling the region – which makes this exactly the wrong moment to weaken America’s ability to help people struggling to free themselves.

House Republicans, however, are determined to do just that. Oblivious to the growing democratic ferment in the Muslim world, they voted last week to cut funding for U.S. diplomacy and assistance by some $4.4 billion, along with a haircut for the National Endowment for Democracy (or NED, and full disclosure: Will Marshall is a member of NED’s board). Although it usually flies under policy-makers’ radar, the NED is America’s premier instrument for assisting democratic transitions in long-closed societies.

To be fair, President Obama’s new budget proposes an even deeper cut (12 percent versus the GOP’s six percent) in the NED’s already miniscule $118 million budget, though it wouldn’t take effect until next year.

These changes were tucked deep in the giant, $61 billion package of 2011 spending reductions the House approved last week in a frenzy of misplaced fiscal probity. We hope the Senate doesn’t overlook them as it tries to salvage something sensible from the House package and continue funding the federal government. If you want to establish your bona fides as a resolute budget cutter and enemy of big deficits, domestic spending isn’t the place to look for serious savings. The real money is in the big middle class entitlement programs and in tax expenditures, backdoor spending programs that cost the federal government over $1 trillion a year.

We are fiscal hawks, but these untimely cuts in democracy assistance illustrate the perfect folly of trying to balance the budget on the back of domestic discretionary spending, which accounts for only 13 percent of total federal outlays. They are too small to make an appreciable dent in America’s $1.6 trillion deficit, but they would curtail our ability to support the spread of America’s democratic ideals in the Middle East and elsewhere.

The NED was established in 1983 under the bipartisan auspices of Ronald Reagan and Democratic Rep. Dante Fascell of Florida. They believed the United States needed a non-official way to lend a helping hand to homegrown reformers. Funneling support through a non-government entity like the NED rather than the State Department or USAID makes it hard for autocrats to tar recipients as tools of American policy.

Since its inception, NED has backed virtually every significant struggle for freedom in the world. It helped ease democratic political transitions in Poland, Chile, South Africa, Nigeria and Russia. Crucially, it nurtures political dissidents from Burma to Cuba, including Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo in China, as well as countless lesser-known but equally courageous champions of human rights and democracy.

The NED and its core institutes are active in the Middle East and North Africa, although its nearly $22 million in annual grants to the region now seems wholly inadequate. In Egypt, for example, its micro-grants support youth participation in government, workers’ rights and – presciently, in light of the crucial role Twitter and Facebook played in drawing crowds to Cairo’s Tahrir square – digital media workshops for young people. In Yemen, another flash point, the NED supports young entrepreneurs and helps human rights and women’s empowerment groups build capacity.

Facing a snap vote in just six months, Egypt is ill-prepared for a democratic transition. It has no organized opposition parties and its civic groups, non-governmental organizations, and democratic institutions are—to be generous—underdeveloped. This is no time to be denying U.S. policy-makers the tools they need to help. But seeding the ground for democracy in the Middle East is a long game. Whatever the outcome in Egypt, we need a sustained and strengthened effort to help local reformers throughout the region put in place the building blocks of an independent civil society and functioning democracy.

That is the NED’s mission, and it needs more resources, not fewer. If our political leaders really want to show they are serious about whittling down America’s monstrous debts, they ought to follow Willie Sutton’s advice and go where the money is.

Twilight of Collective Bargaining?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Battle of Madison is in full cry, as labor and its progressive allies rally to block Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s plan to curb union bargaining power. The leftish Nation magazine calls it “Labor’s Last Stand.”

That’s a tad melodramatic; unions probably aren’t headed for extinction. But the traditional model of collective bargaining looks increasingly like an anachronism that may not survive this political donnybrook.

Like most states, Wisconsin is facing serious budget shortfalls. But Walker, a first-term Republican, isn’t just calling for givebacks from state employees. In addition to asking workers to chip in more for their health and pension benefits, he wants the legislature to pass a bill that would restrict their bargaining rights to the subject of wages. And he’s not alone: other GOP Governors, including John Kasich of Ohio, plan to follow suit.

Many Republicans blame states’ budget woes on generous labor contracts, which they see as creating a privileged class of public sector workers sheltered from the vicissitudes of the “real” economy. “Unionized public employees are making more money, receiving more generous benefits, and enjoying greater job security than the working families forced to pay for it with ever-higher taxes, deficits and debt,” Republican presidential aspirant Tim Pawlenty wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal.

This has incensed liberals, who note that it was Wall Street bankers and speculators, not bureaucrats, who plunged the nation into the fiscal crisis and the Great Recession. They say Walker is exploiting the fiscal crisis to aim a dagger at the heart of the only part of labor that has grown in recent decades: public sector unions. (More than 36 percent of public employees belong to unions, compared to just 7 percent of private sector workers.) Democrats view the GOP bid to strip public employees of collective bargaining rights as an attempt to topple a key pillar of the party’s progressive coalition.

In this view, what’s happening in Wisconsin and elsewhere is a political power play, pure and simple. Says Paul Krugman:

You don’t have to love unions, you don’t have to believe that their policy positions are always right, to recognize that they’re among the few influential players in our political system representing the interests of middle- and working-class Americans, as opposed to the wealthy. Indeed, if America has become more oligarchic and less democratic over the last 30 years — which it has — that’s to an important extent due to the decline of private-sector unions. Given this reality, it’s important to have institutions that can act as counterweights to the power of big money. And unions are among the most important of these institutions.

But things aren’t quite this simple, for three reasons.

First, Krugman conflates public and private unionism. Where public sector unions are concerned, the “boss” isn’t some private oligarch, it’s the government — ultimately the public. Unlike private unions, they get to pick the people on the other side of the bargaining table by funneling union dues into their political campaigns. Even if union leaders and lawmakers were saints, such an arrangement inevitably would put the public interest and the interests of government workers in tension. That is why no less a liberal paladin than Franklin D. Roosevelt opposed public sector unions, saying “The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted in the public service.”

Second, progressives should acknowledge that many states have gone overboard in negotiating generous compensation packages for public employees. For example, the states are carrying about $1 trillion in unfunded pension liabilities on their books. Many pay a higher percentage of their workers’ health care premiums than private employers typically do. It rankles private sector workers to see states go into debt to provide public employees with pay and benefits (not to mention job stability) that are beyond their reach.

Third, progressives need to improve the quality of public services even as they reduce the cost of government. Collective bargaining agreements often impede the quest for flexibility, innovation, and higher productivity in the public sector. A classic example is teacher tenure, which makes it difficult for public school systems to get rid of ineffective teachers or to pay good ones on the basis of superior performance.

There’s no doubt that progressives must defend workers’ right to organize to protect their mutual interests. But organized labor also needs to evolve alternatives to the traditional collective bargaining model, which no longer fits the modes and organization of work in a post-industrial, globalized economy, and arguably has always been problematic in the public sector for the reasons that gave FDR pause.

Unlike private firms, high labor costs can’t drive government out of business or overseas. But running deficits to give workers what looks like special treatment can drive down public confidence in government. That’s why public employees need to develop new strategies that reconcile basic job protections with the need for a more effective, accessible, and fiscally responsible government.

Defusing Tensions on the Korean Peninsula: What America-and China-Should Do

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Defusing Tensions on the Korean Peninsula:
What America—and China—Should Do.

Keynote Address:
The Honorable Kurt Campbell
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs

Featured Panelists:
Scott Snyder, Director, Center for U.S.-Korea Policy at the Asia Foundation
Karin Lee, Executive Director, The National Committee on North Korea
Gordon Flake, Executive Director, The Mansfield Foundation

Date:
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
2 p.m.

 

Location:
University of California Washington Center
First Floor Auditorium
1608 Rhode Island Ave. NW
Washington, DC

Register for this event.

If you have any questions, please contact 202-525-3926.

Space is limited. RSVP required.

MEDIA COVERAGE:
The event is open to the press. Media in attendance are required to register in advance of the event to Steven Chlapecka at 202.525.3931 or schlapecka@ppionline.org.

Hosted in collaboration with the University of California Washington Center.

The Strange Republican Cuts to National Security

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As a progressive who strongly believes in a “whole of government” approach to ensuring the nation’s security, I cheered when the Obama administration’s 2010 National Security Strategy included this paragraph:

To succeed, we must update, balance, and integrate all of the tools of American power and work with our allies and partners to do the same. Our military must maintain its conventional superiority … We must invest in diplomacy and development capabilities and institutions in a way that complements and reinforces our global partners. Our intelligence capabilities must continuously evolve to identify and characterize conventional and asymmetric threats and provide timely insight. And we must integrate our approach to homeland security with our broader national security approach.

That attitude goes a long way to rectifying the wrongs of the Bush administration’s philosophy, one that saw too many problems as nails, and too many solutions as a hammer. The results were obvious: squandered resources, an exhausted military, lost international credibility, and, ultimately, less security.

It’s clear that Republicans still haven’t gotten this message. In this year’s continuing resolution, they’ve voted to cut some of those whole-of-government resources that are vital to strengthening our security. Here’s a list of cuts, taken from the just-passed continuing resolution, and compiled by my friends at the Truman National Security Project that fundamentally weakens our crucial non-military national security tools:

House Republican Cuts to National Security Priorities

in 2/19 Continuing Resolution for FY2011

Compiled from: Program cuts in the FY2011 Continuing Resolution, 2/14/2011, House Appropriations Committee. Analysis of HR1. 2/15/2011, Senate Appropriations Committee. Checked against Statement by Congressman Rogers on HR1, 2/19/2011, House Appropriations Committee for amendments which passed. Cuts are to FY2010 Enacted.

Contact: David Solimini, Communications Director. dave@trumanproject.org or 757-876-0295.

National Security & Ongoing Wars

·         National Security Council. Cut the President’s principle advisors on national security issues by $600,000. [Program cuts in the FY2011 Continuing Resolution]

·         Counterinsurgency funding. Cut USAID by $121m (9% cut), which will halt new civilian programs in Afghanistan and Pakistan that are necessary for the counterinsurgency strategy to work. These programs were called for by US military commanders. [Analysis of HR1].

·         Iraq transition, Afghanistan/Pakistan operations. Cut State Department operations by $1.2b (12%), meaning the transition from military to civilian responsibility in Iraq, and State operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, will be put in jeopardy. [Analysis of HR1].

·         Border Security. Cut funding for border fencing and border protection technology, as well as its related infrastructure, by $350m. [Program cuts in the FY2011 Continuing Resolution]

·         Democracy promotion. Cut the Millennium Challenge Corporation, which provides assistance to countries which meet government improvement goals, by $315m. Cut Development Assistance by $746m. [Program cuts in the FY2011 Continuing Resolution]

·         International First Responders. Cut, by $103m, the Civilian Stabilization Initiative, which trains civilians to reconstruct and stabilize war torn, disaster ridden, and unstable countries, to prevent future conflict. Cut International Disaster Assistance by $415m, and the Complex Crisis Fund by $50. [Program cuts in the FY2011 Continuing Resolution]

·         Starvation Prevention/Weak State Stabilization. Cut Food For Peace, which delivers bags of food stamped “USA” to the people of weak and failing states, by $687. Program details. [Program cuts in the FY2011 Continuing Resolution].

Terrorism Prevention

·         Transportation security. Cut transit security grants by more than 66 percent. In the last 7 years, there were over 1,300 terrorist attacks on trains, subways, and busses, killing or injuring over 18,000 people. [Analysis of HR1.] Also cut: Transportation Security Administration Threat Assessment funding by $9m. [Program cuts in the FY2011 Continuing Resolution]

·         Port security & Container Screening. Cut port security grants by 66 percent. [Analysis of HR1.] Also cut $61m in international container inspections. Container shipping is the most likely way a weapon of mass destruction could be brought into the country. [Program cuts in the FY2011 Continuing Resolution]

Nuclear Terrorism

·         Domestic Nuclear Attack Prevention. Cut, by $31m, the office which detects attempts to import, possess, store, develop, or transport nuclear or radiological material for use against the Nation. [Analysis of HR1] [Program cuts in the FY2011 Continuing Resolution] [Program details]

·         Nuclear materials security. Cut nuclear non-proliferation funding by $97m. This will prevent the US from removing hundreds of pounds of highly enriched uranium, which terrorists could use to build nuclear devices, from unsecure facilities in several countries around the world. [Analysis of HR1]

·         Weapons of Mass Destruction Training. Cut, by 51 percent, funding for first responder weapons of mass destruction training, which means that more than 46,000 first responders will not being trained in FY 2011. [Analysis of HR1]

Veterans Benefits

·         Homeless veterans. Terminated the Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing Program, the aim of which is to end veteran homelessness in 5 years. There were more than 130,000 homeless veterans in 2009. The VASH program provided housing vouchers for them. [Analysis of HR1] [Local Story, CT]

·         Veterans long term care. Cut Long Term Care facilities at the Department of Veterans Affairs by $15m. [Program info.] [Program cuts in the FY2011 Continuing Resolution]

Gov. Scott’s Plan for Florida: Let Them Eat Highways

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In rejecting $2.4 billion in federal funds for high-speed rail in Florida yesterday, Gov. Rick Scott came up with a great idea to solve the state’s burgeoning traffic problems – more highways!

At the same time he was denouncing fast trains as wasteful government spending at a hastily arranged press conference, he was imploring U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood to funnel billions of federal dollars into new road projects.

The peculiar letter Scott sent to LaHood yesterday proposed a laundry list of major highway undertakings. Among them, expanding I-395 in Miami-Dade County, widening I-95 down the state’s southern spine, building a new bridge over Choctawhatchee Bay, and adding lanes to I-4 where the high-speed line was supposed to be built between Tampa and Orlando.

The fact that all these projects would cost considerably more than the rail line somehow escaped the governor’s request that he and LaHood “work together” to meet “the broad array of transportation needs in our state.”

There are many reasons why turning aside the chance to become the first state to realize high-speed rail’s promise is foolhardy (such as giving up thousands of construction jobs and boosting Florida’s tourism economy). But the bottom line is that Scott, who won election last November with Tea Party support, feels threatened by projects outside the box of the old car culture.

This same reflexive fear – mixed with bitter hatred of President Obama’s “stimulus spending,” especially if it might economically stimulate – has been consuming many rookie House Republicans, who are seeking to cancel all federal spending for high-speed rail in the 2011 budget.

In other words, high-speed rail has become the latest stage for the battle between progressives seeking to advance America’s competitiveness with strategic public investment and conservatives inveighing against non-defense government spending as “waste.”

Not all Republicans have swallowed the Kool Aid – Florida’s prior governor, Charlie Crist, was a firm backer of the Tampa-Orlando project, and John Mica (R-Fla), chairman of the powerful House Transportation Committee, yesterday denounced Scott’s decision as “a huge setback for the state of Florida.”

What Scott decries others enthusiastically endorse. The governors of California, New York, and Illinois greeted Scott’s announcement with delight, saying they’d gladly accept the money rejected by Florida to build 21st-century rail transportation in their state.

Overcoming the Obstacles to Charter School Growth

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

High-performing charter schools need to grow faster to serve more students, but to do so, they will have to overcome not just organizational obstacles but also significant political ones. That was the takeaway from a panel discussion on charter schools the Progressive Policy Institute held at the National Press Club today to launch a new PPI report: “Going Exponential: Speeding the Growth of High-Quality Charter Schools,” by Emily Ayscue Hassel, Bryan C. Hassel and Joe Ableidinger.

Bryan Hassel led off the panel by discussing his report, which begins from the premise that high-performing charter schools need to grow faster in order to serve more low-income children. “They only serve a tiny fraction of the students, only ten percent,” he said. “And the average number of schools being added annually is 1.3 schools. Only five CMOs [Charter Management Organizations] are planning to have more than 30 schools in their network by 2025. I don’t see a lot of prospects for serving millions of kids who need these schools.”

Hassel’s report focuses on urging leading CMOs to think big, and he distills nine lessons from high-growth organizations in the private sector that could apply to charters. On the panel he focused on four: generating cash flow, tackling talent scarcity, reaching customers where they are, and finding top leaders committed to growth.

To improve cash flow, he proposed a pay-for-performance scheme: “What if the best charters were paid more?” Hassel asked. “What if the top 10 percent received 10 percent more? Then they could invest in growth. And then we’d pay worse charter schools less, which would hasten the closing of the worst charter schools.”

To improve reach, Hassel proposed micro-reach and micro-chartering strategies: “How do you do more without having to find a facility?” Hassel said. “One idea is that policymakers could issue charters not just to whole schools but to individual teachers who want to serve 20-40 kids.”

Eva Moskowitz, CEO of Success Charter Network (who was featured in the documentary “Waiting for Superman”), applauded the goal of rapid growth. Success Charter Network has doubled in size every for the last four years, and will open up two more in the next year. “And I don’t die of exhaustion,” said Moskowitz, “I could keep going.”

And when she says exhaustion, she means exhaustion from the politics. “In our world it’s really hand-to-hand combat,” she said. “It’s the teachers’ union blockading students and preventing them from entering the school. We’re talking about having to ask police to come to usher our kids, five year olds, into the building” These politics, she noted, put real obstacles on growth.

Andrew Rotherham, partner at Bellwether Education Partners and former PPI colleague, echoed Hassel’s call for scaling up. “This field does not understand scale,” he said. “The only thing we consistently know how to scale is problems, bad ideas, and perverse incentives.”

Like Moskowitz, he also put a focus on politics. “We’ve done a poor job of using regulation and incentives,” he said. “Really there’s only one state, Michigan, that in meaningful ways incentivizes a process where good charter schools can replicate effectively.”

Rotherham noted that in many ways, top charter schools have grown beyond expectations. Once upon a time people predicted KIPP would never expand beyond two dozen schools (it is now at 100) and TFA would never expand beyond 500 core members (it now has 20,000 alums). But he also posed a question for future growth: “Do we need more CMOs or bigger CMOs? We talk about more-more-more, but what should it look like.”

R. Brooks Garber, vice president of federal advocacy for National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, added a note of caution to the rapid growth strategy. Quality control is important, he said. “It takes only one failure, and one failure would be the end of the brand. We open schools one grade at a time.” But he agreed that charter schools could be more strategic.

Hassel responded by suggesting that even if rapid expansion resulted in slightly reduced performance for top charter schools, it would still probably be better than the alternative – the continuation of inferior public or other charter schools.

All and all, the discussion highlighted the tensions between the aspirations of rapid growth and the substantial on-the-ground obstacles, both political and organizational. Everyone wants high-performing charters to grow faster. But it ain’t easy.

The Most Important Question About Charter Schools

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Controversy rages over the overall contribution of charter schools to education reform. And while charter schools have produced mixed results, that is for a simple reason: not all charter schools are created equal.

Some charter schools do produce poor results. But other charter schools receive extraordinary results, turning around the lives of low-income children.

Rather than group all charter schools together and debate the wisdom of charter schools generally, here’s a better question to ask: How do we facilitate growth of the charter schools that work? How do we bring the effective teaching strategies from the most successful charter schools to more students?

That’s the question that Emily Ayscue Hassel, Bryan C. Hassel and Joe Ableidinger tackle in a new report for the Progressive Policy Institute, entitled “Going Exponential: Growing the Charter School Sector’s Best.”

The report outlines nine lessons from fast-growing organizations that can be applied to charter schools. You can read it here.

But the big lesson is simple:

Charter leaders who want to pursue exponential growth and funders who want to support them must become much more familiar with the rapid-growth strategies used in other sectors and apply them to education. In addition, policymakers must prioritize removing any barriers to growth by the best – while also creating new incentives and avenues for excellent programs to reach more children.

Bryan Hassel will be on hand tomorrow (Feb. 17) at the National Press Club, to discuss the paper, along with R. Brooks Garber of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, Eva Moskowitz of the Success Charter Network, and Andrew Rotherham of Bellwether Education Partners. For more details, click here.