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A Look at the Senate Races

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

It’s now just four months until Election Day, and for those who really like to think ahead, not much more than a year-and-a-half away from the next Iowa caucuses. (Speaking of the 2012 presidential nominating process, I’ve got an item posted at FiveThirtyEight about the maneuvering over the rules and calendar for that contest.)

My political memo on Tuesday focused mainly on an overview of House races, so today let’s take a closer look at the U.S. Senate. As noted on Tuesday, Nate Silver has slightly upgraded Democratic Senate prospects after the recent batch of primaries, and now thinks the probabilities come in at about 55 for what Democrats might have in the way of a Senate majority after November. Over at the (subscription-only) “Cook Political Report,” Jennifer Duffy, relying somewhat less than Silver on polling data, reaches similar conclusions about the overall landscape but with different takes on specific races. Duffy, for example, still has Arkansas in the toss-up category, while Silver says: “Our model now shows Blanche Lincoln’s chances to be close to zero (technically, about 0.3 percent, which rounds down to zero).” Conversely, the Cook Report shows the Connecticut race as “lean Dem” (having briefly rated it as a toss-up after the military record controversy hit Democrat Richard Blumenthal), while FiveThirtyEight rates it as “safe Dem.” It will be interesting to see if these and other forecasts begin to converge as we get closer to November.

It’s also worth remembering that the nominees haven’t been sorted out yet in several competitive or potentially competitive Senate races, notably Colorado, Arizona, Florida and Wisconsin.  And most interesting of all will be to see if some sort of intensified national wave begins to help Republican Senate candidates towards the home stretch, which could solidify the GOP’s shaky hold on seats in Ohio and Missouri (and perhaps Florida, where Marco Rubio consistently trails now-indie Charlie Crist), while making Democratic incumbents in Washington, California and Wisconsin a lot more vulnerable. To use historical analogies, we’ll find out if this Senate cycle is more like 1980 and 2008, when one party (Rs in 1980, Ds in 2008) got every break and won every close race, or like 1982, a recession-ridden year when the incumbent Republicans dodged a lot of bullets.

The polling world this week was roiled by a conflict between Daily Kos and the Research 2000 public opinion research firm, which has done regular polling for DKos for the last two years.  DKos proprietor Markos Moulitsas dismissed the firm recently, apparently unhappy with its accuracy as rated by FiveThirtyEight. But then an investigation of anomalies in R2K numbers convinced Markos that there might be fraud or at least book-cooking involved, and now the charges and counter-charges are flying and lawsuits are being filed. As the facts get sorted out, all sorts of political observers (including yours truly) are looking back at what they might have said or concluded based on R2K data. It is clear that if R2K gets out or is forced out of the state polling biz, the dominance of Rasmussen data, with its apparent pro-GOP “house effect,” could grow, though PPP seems to be expanding its state polling significantly.

Poll Watch

In polls this week that aren’t part of any overriding dispute, PPP takes a look at GOP statewide primaries in Wisconsin, and finds self-funder Ron Johnson with a big lead over hard-core ideologue David Westlake in the Senate race, and Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker with an equally comfortable lead over former Rep. Mark Neumann in the gubernatorial race.  Meanwhile the increasingly visible Republican polling firm Magellan has Democratic former Gov. John Kitzhaber and Republican candidate Chris Dudley even in the Oregon gubernatorial race, and shows Republican former Gov. Bobby Ehrlich inching ahead of incumbent Democrat Martin O’Malley in Maryland.

Recommendations on Curbing the National Deficit

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The following is the is an excerpt from Will Marshall’s June 30 testimony before the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform during the commission’s first public listening session:

Chairman Bowles, Chairman Simpson, and Members of the Commission, I appreciate the opportunity to appear before you to discuss ways to put America on a fiscally sustainable course.

Once unemployment rates start to fall, U.S. policy makers must be prepared to pivot sharply from fiscal stimulus to fiscal restraint. Otherwise, a large and growing federal debt will deplete our capital stock and thereby limit future economic growth. It will divert resources from productive investment to interest payments on the debt, half of which is already held by foreign lenders. And it will shake investor confidence, here and abroad, in the fundamental soundness of the U.S. economy, eventually driving interest rates up and the dollar down.

Despite these dire and entirely foreseeable consequences, too many federal policy makers remain in denial about the need for fiscal discipline. You have taken on what many consider a Mission Impossible: forging a bipartisan consensus on how to defuse the nation’s debt crisis. That’s put you in the crosshairs of extreme partisans of the left and right, who imagine this problem can be solved strictly at the other side’s expense. By refusing either to cut spending or raise taxes, the two have joined in a tacit conspiracy to bankrupt the country.

Common to both is the assumption that you can have fiscal responsibility, or you can have progressive government, but you can’t have both. We at the Progressive Policy Institute have always rejected this false choice. We believe that a progressive government can and must live within its means, and that if it instead chases the illusion of borrowed prosperity, it’s not really progressive.

To paraphrase Franklin Roosevelt, Americans know instinctively that borrowing routinely to consume more than you produce is both bad economics and bad morals. I don’t think it’s an accident that, as public worries about deficits have been mounting, public trust in government has been plummeting.

So there’s a lot riding on your ability to forge consensus behind a bold and balanced plan to restore fiscal responsibility. Let me offer some thoughts on what that plan should include from the perspective of a “progressive fiscal hawk.”

Read the entire testimony.

Obligatory World Cup Interlude

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

I’m not that much of a soccer fan. I don’t follow a club team, though by proxy, I suppose my obsessed Liverpool-loving Swedish best-bud Eric Sundstrom would claim me for his side.

But I love the World Cup.

To put this in perspective, my World Cup love pales in comparison to my Notre Dame football obsession, an illness that transforms the otherwise mild-mannered, level-headed gentleman I consider myself into a stark-raving lunatic on 12 Saturdays in the fall. (It’s bad. I drop F-bombs in front of eight-year-olds; I now know myself well-enough to warn their parents.) My Notre Dame addiction allows me to speak the same language as my soccer-loving brethren. Read Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch (a great memoir about his love of English club Arsenal that was translated into “American” in a horrible film with Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon about the Red Sox), and you see where I’m coming from.

The soccer affair started in France, like all wonderfully cliched romances. I did an internship outside of Paris in 1998, the summer between my junior and senior year of college. When I arrived that May, I was only vaguely aware that the planet’s greatest competition/festival was about to kick off underneath my nose. A naively conceived, cellphone-less attempt to meet with Kate Sullivan, the only other American I knew in Paris that summer, on the Champs Elysees in the wake France’s 3-0 victory over South Africa turned out to be as fun as it was initially frustrating. The spontaneous gathering of 400,000 French football nutters made our rendezvous, er, challenging.

Suffice it to say that the combination of good sport, a month-long French national fete, and what I would discover to be World Cup’s intriguing ties to politics, demographics and diplomacy had me hooked.

Frank Foer’s How Soccer Explains the World and Soccernomics by Simon Kuper and Stefan Syzmanski can explain. This year’s tournament hasn’t disappointed, and the star has been North Korea. Seriously, who else would have paid 1,000 Chinese fans to travel to South Africa and cheer for Pyongyang? This was after Kim Jong-Il made the disasterous decision to air his country’s match against Portgual. We joked that the 7-0 public drubbing that must have landed the team in a concentration camp for “re-education.” I fear that may be closer to reality than we’re comfortable with.

Dictators struggle with such a broad, uncontrollably open international stage. Pyongyang was playing with fire — what if self-exiled protestors exploited the opportunity to beam their grievances back home? Iran routinely blocks soccer broadcasts out of such fears. And it was shocking to me that last year’s qualifier between Egypt and Algeria had to be moved to neutral Sudan due to violence against the Algerians in Egypt. Can’t Hosni Mubarak extend his police-state’s writ to football crowd-control? Or is he letting Egyptian hooligans blow off steam that would be otherwise targeted at him?

Then there was the “most politically charged game in the world,” that occurred during that amazing French summer of 1998: USA vs. Iran. Here’s a taste:

Iranian-born Mehrdad Masoudi was a FIFA media officer for the match but, given the diplomatic and security issues surrounding the game in Lyon, his responsibilities were far more wide-ranging.

“One of the first problems was that Iran were team B and the USA were team A,” explains Masoudi. “According to FIFA regulations team B should walk towards team A for the pre-match handshakes, but Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamenei gave express orders that the Iranian team must not walk towards the Americans.”

Masoudi eventually negotiated a compromise which saw the Americans walk towards the Iranians…

Iran won, 2-1, but the game wasn’t all lost from the American side: “We did more in 90 minutes than the politicians did in 20 years,” said U.S. defender Jeff Agoos at the time.

That’s it. I revel in the split-second excitement of a well-struck goal, and appreciate the enduring frustration of so, so many near-misses. But the World Cup’s true allure is how it means so much more, to so many billions of people, beyond just the final score. That just happens to be why Notre Dame means so much too.

Good Ol’ Days

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

When House Republican leader (and would-be Speaker) John Boehner claimed the other day that Democrats were “snuffing out the America I grew up in,” it didn’t cause much reaction (or at least far less than his remarks on Social Security and on financial regulation), since it’s the kind of thing conservatives say all the time. But as Mike Tomasky quickly noted, it was a very strange statement if you actually think the problem with Democrats is their addiction to big government and their subservience to unions:

Boehner was born in November 1949. Let’s take a look at the America he grew up in.In the America John Boehner grew up in, the top marginal tax rate on wealthy earners was 90%. It had gone up there during the war, and five, 10, 15 years after armistice, no sizable group, Democrat or Republican, felt any strong urge to lower it.

In the America John Boehner grew up in, private-sector union membership was around or above 30%. Today’s figure is 7%. The right to form a union was broadly accepted. Outside of a few small turbulent pockets, there was no such thing as today’s union-busting law firms hired by management to go into workplaces and intimidate workers.

That’s all very true. But as Matt Yglesias observes, the country was in fact a lot more conservative back then on the cultural front:

[In] many other respects the America of John Boehner’s youth was a much more right-wing country. Gays and lesbians were stuffed deep into the closet, and there was no suggestion that they should be allowed to serve openly in the military or in any other role. African-Americans were subjected to pervasive discrimination in housing and employment, and in the southern states they couldn’t vote or exercise any basic rights–all this backed by the state, and also by collusion between state authorities and ad hoc terrorist groups. It was a whiter country with dramatically fewer residents of Asian or Latin American descent. It was a more religiously observant country, and it was a country in which Jews were far from fully accepted into American life.I’m not nostalgic for that era at all. There are a few areas of policy in which I think we’ve moved backwards since the mid-sixties, but I wouldn’t want to return to an America with almost no immigrants or to an America with a single monopoly provider of telecom services. I’m glad airlines can set their own ticket prices and I’m glad black people can sit in the front of the bus. What is it that Boehner misses?

What indeed? Let’s all remember Boehner’s regret for the passing of the good ol’ days of high taxes, strong unions, Jim Crow and homophobia next time we are told that the GOP wants to declare a truce in the culture wars, or only cares about economic or fiscal issues.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

A Red Card for Airbus

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Referees often make costly mistakes, as we’ve seen in the World Cup. But the World Trade Organization (WTO), which umpires international commerce, got a big decision right yesterday. It handed the United States a thumping victory in a long-standing, high-stakes dispute with Europe over aircraft subsidies.

At issue were some $20 billion and below-market lending rates — known as “launch aid” – that several European governments had provided to aircraft manufacturer Airbus. The WTO deemed launch aid to be an illegal subsidy, upholding a September 2009 interim ruling.

The largess of European taxpayers was critical to Airbus’ development of several of the companies’ main commercial jets. Without such favorable financial assistance, the WTO’s ruling said, it “would not have been possible for Airbus to have launched all of these models, as originally designed and at the times it did.” In other words, without government subsidies, Airbus would have never have become the world’s number 2 player in the lucrative market for commercial airframes. U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk has said that the subsidies have done “great harm” to competing U.S. manufacturing firms, especially number 1 Boeing.

The ruling is welcome, not just for Boeing and American manufacturers but because it boosts the credibility of the rules-based global trading system, which lately has shown signs of fraying at the edges. If the rules aren’t enforced, trade will become a zero-sum game as countries resort to mercantilist and protectionist strategies to protect their economic interests. That in turn could bring global prosperity crashing down. The WTO’s decision is important too because it serves as a warning to other countries — China, Brazil, and Russia — who might or want to subsidize their own aircraft producers.

In an ironic twist, even the unions were on board in support of freer trade in the Airbus case. As Will Marshall and I wrote back in September (when the interim ruling was announced), “Although organized labor often has taken a skeptical if not hostile stance toward international trade, Boeing’s unions strongly backed the U.S. government’s decision to file the case in 2004. The unions realized that Boeing competitiveness was suffering and that only fair and enforceable trade rules would ensure it.”

The WTO has no mechanism for enforcing its rulings,  but rather provides the legal justification for the United States  to even the playing field. It would be best, of course, if Airbus and its European patrons bowed to the WTO’s judgment and end the illegal subsidies. It would be a tragic irony if Europe were to embrace an economic unilateralism even as President Obama has put the United States back on a course of multilateral cooperation. But if Europe won’t play by the rules, the United States has three options.

First, our government could levy tariffs on Airbus imports to the United States. Second, it could spread the pain by taxing other European imports. And third, Washington could subsidize aircraft production by U.S. firms.

The first is far and away the best choice — taxing Airbus limits the trade dispute to an isolated sector of the market, and avoids a broader trade war over other products. Government subsidies for U.S. firms are the least attractive option, because other companies in other sectors may lobby for money based on that precedent, further distorting trade.

I don’t expect Europe to just roll over and play dead. Though the EU hasn’t officially decided whether or not to appeal the ruling, and there is the possibility that some governments will just ignore the ruling and continue to subsidize production. That’s a big gamble of course, because it would just provoke more stringent U.S. tariffs on imports.

But for now, the good news is that the worlds’ trade ump is on the job, sending off those who break the rules.

Photo credit: Caribb’s Photostream

“Top Two” Illusions

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

One of the more interesting developments on the June 8 “Super Tuesday Primary” day was the approval of a ballot initiative (Prop 14) by California voters creating a “top two” voting system. Similar to the process already used in Washington State, it essentially abolishes party primaries and provides that the top two finishers in a nonpartisan primary will proceed to the general election.

Over at Sabato’s Crystal Ball, TDS contributor and advisory board member Alan Abramowitz of Emory University has examined the claims of Prop 14 backers like Arnold Schwarzenegger that the new system will reduce ideological and partisan polarization in California, and concludes it’s pretty much a nothing-burger. He takes on two particular illusions associated with Prop 14: the idea that party primaries and gerrymandering are responsible for political polarization in California, and the idea that abolishing party primaries will prevent ideologues from winning elections.

On the first topic, his reseach shows:

The most important source of polarization in California politics is the ideological divide between supporters of the two major parties….In both California and the nation, ideological polarization increased considerably over this time period, but it has always been greater in California. That’s because while California Republicans are as conservative as Republicans in the rest of the country, California Democrats are considerably more liberal than Democrats in the rest of the country.

And on the second topic:

In Washington, which began using the new system in 2008, the electoral consequences were minimal. In all 9 of the state’s congressional districts the open primary produced a general election runoff between the Democratic or Republican incumbent and a challenger from the opposing party and in all 9 general election contests the incumbent was victorious. And based on the winners’ voting records in the 111th Congress, the new primary system has had no effect on partisan polarization–the gap between the state’s Democratic and Republican representatives was just as large in the current Congress as it was in the previous one. Expect the same results in California.

So can we just forget about Prop 14? That’s not quite clear just yet. The new system could produce some strange and unintended consequences.

For one thing, making the primary non-partisan could be a major boon to self-funders, who may simply need high name ID to win a general election spot, particularly in California statewide races where the cost of television advertising will be prohibitive for many candidates. For another, the system could theoretically increase partisan polarization. The “top two” system does not provide any particular incentive for winning an actual majority of votes in a primary; the top finisher still must face the runner-up in the general election, where turnout is very likely to be much higher. So the safe thing to do is to nail down a general election spot by appealing to partisans (Prop 14 does not repeal party registration, which means that candidates will know exactly whom to contact with partisan messages), while beginning the general election campaign by going after the other party’s preferred candidate.

Consider this year’s governor’s race. If Meg Whitman were running with her vast fortune in a “top two” system, perhaps she would not have spent quite so much time attacking Steve Poizner for alleged ideological heresy. But on the other hand, she would have had every incentive to go after Democrat Jerry Brown (whom she largely ignored) hammer and tongs to drive up his negatives in preparation for November.

In effect, Prop 14 makes the general election cycle a lot longer. That does not seem to be a particularly smart way to reduce partisan polarization.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Photo credit: Nancyf’s Photostream


School Reform or Edujobs?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

There’s a move afoot in Congress to cut one of President Obama’s most creative and cost-effective reforms – the Education Department’s $4.3 billion Race to the Top fund. Which GOP troglodyte is behind it? Actually, it’s a prominent liberal: Rep. David Obey (D-WI).

Obey, chairman of the mighty House Appropriations Committee, introduced a bill this week to cut $500 million from the fund. He also wants to skim $200 million from the Teacher Incentive Fund, which helps districts set up pay-for-performance systems to reward excellent teachers, and to take $100 million from a pot of money set up to help finance charter schools.

These raids on signature Obama school improvement initiatives are intended to raise $10 billion to help fund the Keep Our Educators Working Act, otherwise known as the “edujobs” bill. It would send federal dollars to the states to prevent teacher layoffs. Pitting jobs against efforts to improve America’s lowest-performing schools is a profoundly bad idea.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan has used the Race to the Top Fund brilliantly to leverage overdue changes in state laws that inhibit innovation in underperforming school districts. To compete for federal grants, states must remove arbitrary caps on charter schools, track students’ educational growth year by year, and include that information in teacher evaluation. The other funds operate on the same principle that the federal government should play a strategic role in education, using small investments to stimulate state and local innovations in teacher compensation and public school choice.

No one wants to see teachers lose their jobs in today’s dicey economy. But no one wants to see firefighters or police or, for that matter, construction workers, sales reps or bank tellers lose their jobs either. With unemployment stuck near 10 percent, Congress has a clear moral responsibility to extend unemployment and transitional health care benefits. But what’s the rationale for singling out teachers for a special measure of job protection?

What’s more, Obey and his liberal allies have not tied the extra money to changes in the way school districts conduct reductions in force. Most districts use the last-in-first-out (LIFO) method, in which teachers with the least seniority and lowest salaries are dismissed first. LIFO thus reinforces a tenure system that ties compensation to years on the job irrespective of job performance, and that deters more talented people from becoming teachers. It also means that the cost of overall spending on teacher salaries will rise faster than if reductions in force had been made across the experience spectrum.

If edujobs is bad policy, it’s worse politics. It practically begs conservatives to charge that Democrats put the interests of the adults in public education over the interests of the kids.

It happens, however, that that’s not true. Obey’s proposal has sparked strenuous objections both from the Education Department and from progressive school reformers in Congress. “If we are to meet the President’s goal of becoming global leaders in college graduates by 2020, we must rethink and reinvent our approach to education by moving forward with bold reforms,” Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO) wrote in a letter to his colleagues. “Unfortunately, the proposed cuts represent a major step backward.”

Obey is a liberal lion who is retiring after a long career in Congress at the end of this term. Polis is only a freshman, but he’s right, and progressives ought to rally behind the president’s efforts to fix America’s broken schools.

Photo credit: House Committee on Education and Labor’s Photostream

Give Innovation Economics a Chance

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Budget deficits are emerging as one of Washington’s chief economic obsessions, with both liberal and conservative economic camps opining about the deficit’s effect on the economy. Robert Samuelson’s recent column in the Washington Post describes how the major economic doctrines—particularly Keynesian and monetarists (or supply-siders)—interpret the fiscal impact of budget deficits.

Keynesians believe budget deficits (either from increased spending or reduced taxes) can stimulate the economy, leading to more demand and therefore more jobs. As Paul Krugman’s recent arguments have demonstrated, they believe that when unemployment rates are high job creation should not be sacrificed on the altar of deficit reduction. In contrast, many neoclassical economists, especially conservative supply-siders, argue that big government deficits reduce national savings and increase interest rates while also contributing to financial uncertainty and reducing private sector investments.

While Samuelson rightly points out the differing perspectives of the Keynesian and supply-siders, he misses what they have in common. Neither of them considers the role of innovation in their growth models or distinguishes between spending and investment. And with this omission they fail to see what particular types of deficit spending can be harmful to the economy and conversely what kinds can be beneficial.

Innovation economists argue that the long-term benefits of investments, particularly in innovation, outweigh the costs of temporary budget deficits. For example, as the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation recently demonstrated, expanding the R&D tax credit, while costing the government money in the short run, would actually lead to more revenue for the Treasury in the medium term. Innovation economists support direct investments, such as government research, and indirect public investments, such as an expansion of the R&D tax credit. Robust investment in innovation and technology are essential to long-term growth. This is because innovation increases productivity, and productivity gains have accounted for the lion’s share of economic prosperity over the last several decades.

Once economists recognize innovation as the most important part of economic policy, the impact of budget deficits becomes clearer. For example, neoclassical economists worry that deficit spending will increase interest rates and reduce the amount of capital available for private sector investment. Innovation economists believe that investments in technology and knowledge spur economic growth and will generate more capital. The problem is that the market doesn’t always allocate as much capital to these endeavors as it should. Indeed, the extremely low interest rates in the early 2000s did little to boost these kinds of investments. Instead, people used low interest rates to increase capitalized spending, specifically in housing, which created the housing bubble. Instead of emphasizing access to capital, innovation economics argues that if investment in technology (including new capital equipment used by business) is the goal, then policy makers would do better to focus on policies that incentivize such investments, such as allowing first-year capital expensing—even if doing so temporarily increases the budget deficit.

Samuelson frets that the differing opinions on how to handle the budget deficit indicate that “[w]e may be reaching the limits of economics.” Indeed, if in the knowledge-based economy we are limited by theories that still define the production process as only land, labor or capital, as Adam Smith did, these legacy economic doctrines will likely offer little advice on the budget. On the other hand, the new-growth theory of innovation economics that puts knowledge and innovation at the center of the contemporary production process is more able to intellectually navigate the modern, global economy and dictate appropriate policy decisions.

Photo credit: TheTruthAbout…’s Photostream

The Ever-Shifting RINO Line

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

One of the more interesting byproducts of the Tea Party Movement and the ideological battles going on within the Republican Party is that the tolerance of “movement conservatives” for dissent is really reaching a low level. This was made most painfully evident during the recent Utah Senate primary, when Tim Bridgewater, whose issue positions would have placed him on the far right fringe of the GOP as recently as a couple of years ago, was regularly denounced by supporters of Mike Lee as a RINO, mainly for supporting in the past Republican initiatives that a majority of Republican officeholders also supported.

Now the litmus-testers seem to be training their sights on the GOP’s leadership in the House. Check out the language of this post today from right-wing opinion leader Erick Erickson of RedState:

Eric Cantor and John Boehner — particularly Eric Cantor — have decided they don’t need or want conservatives and, more troubling, do not have any intention of trying to win at the polls by forcing Democrat hands on Obamacare….Last week and on Monday I mentioned Rep. Steve King’s effort to repeal Obamacare and start over. He’s filed a discharge petition. If he gets 218 signatures, Nancy Pelosi must hold a vote.

At the time, I was hearing that Eric Cantor was desperate to undermine Steve King’s efforts and, sure enough, he’s trying. Worse, he has John Boehner helping him….

Today, Eric Cantor and John Boehner are announcing that they’ll sign King’s discharge petition, but they’re also going to go with one by Congressman Wally Herger that would repeal Obamacare and replace it with a Republican alternative….

Tea Party activists and others should pay attention here: Eric Cantor and John Boehner are implementing a strategy that makes it look like they are on your side, but are in fact stabbing you in the back.

Cantor and Boehner are spinning this as a good thing. But it is not. It muddies the water and gives Democrats an escape from being forced to take action.

Any Republican who signs on to the Herger discharge petition should be driven from office for betraying the “repeal” cause. This does nothing but provide cover to people who don’t really want to repeal Obamacare, just nibble at the edges.

And should the GOP take back Congress in November, we should remember this betrayal and the lies that go with it.

So a strategic difference of opinion in which Boehner and Cantor, who are slavishly deferential to the conservative movement, chose not to go along with the routinely demented Steve King becomes a “betrayal” rationalized by “lies” that reveal the two top House GOP leaders as secret allies of the satanic socialists.

Granted, Erickson likes to play the bully-boy and go rhetorically over the top as an intimidation tactic, but this is still pretty amazing stuff. Looks like by November the RINO line will have shifted so far that even Steve King will need to watch his back.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Photo credit: asterix661

Time To End Supplemental Budgeting

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The House has taken up a $30 billion supplemental appropriations bill to fund Afghanistan. However, the bill has ballooned to over $70 billon as the Democratic leadership has had to slather on non-defense appropriations to attract the votes of more progressive caucus members frustrated with nine years of slow progress in Afghanistan. There’s a $10 billion education jobs fund, $18 billion in Department of Energy loan guarantees, and $500 million for border patrol. This bill has turned the old guns vs. butter argument into a fight about guns and butter.

The bottom line is Democrats’ left flank is fed up with tough but “must have” votes on issues they view as too centrist (a health care bill minus the public option, multiple war appropriations). But this bill’s incentives are wholly inappropriate: Spending $10 billion on education-related jobs may be a worthy expenditure when considered separately, but it has no business in a defense bill. The Republicans, of course, are having a field day — they’ve exposed the Democratic split by threatening to pull potentially vital support of war-funding unless the bill is stripped “clean” of non-defense expenditures.

The good news is that there is a magic bullet, and it would solve a lot more than political bickering: End the practice of supplemental budgeting. Beyond politics, having just a single, unified defense budget would force trade-offs in a defense spending culture that has run wild in the last 10 years.

Here how supplementals work. Every year since 9/11, we’ve had essentially two or three defense budgets. This year, we’ve had three: a baseline defense budget appropriation of approximately $549 billion, a $159 billion “overseas contingency operations” (i.e., mostly Afghanistan and Iraq) budget and the current supplemental request of $30 billion (which includes several tens of billions for non-defense items discussed above).

The dirty secret is that even many of Pentagon’s “emergency war appropriations” have nothing to do with our current wars. Take the F-22, for example. Before Secretary Gates won last year’s fight to cap production of the F-22, lawmakers inserted $600 million to buy additional planes in the 2009 “emergency supplemental” after the money was shut out of the baseline 2009 budget. This happened even though not one of the 183 F-22s already owned by the U.S. military had flown a single mission over Iraq or Afghanistan. That doesn’t sound like an emergency spending necessity, does it?

Having three budgets is like having three strikes in a baseball at-bat — you have the luxury to swing and miss twice. Projects that don’t make the baseline DoD budget (strike one!) can be considered in either of the additional supplementals (strike two! strike three!) before they’re “out.”

Ending the supplementals would be like giving the batter just one strike. By combining all defense spending into one (larger) appropriation each year, the batter has just one swing — miss the first time, that’s it. The practice would force Congress to make hard choices that prioritize the war-fighter. Who wants to be the representative that adds defense pork to a bill at the expense of our fighting soldiers’ needs? And with no hope of getting additional money later in the year, it would begin to create a culture of efficiency and discipline in spending priorities.

Ultimately, Afghanistan will be funded. Having a single defense budget minimizes divisive political bickering and prioritizes the war-fighter. That’s a real win-win.

Marshall to Testify Before National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

NEWS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 30, 2010

PRESS CONTACT:
Steven Chlapecka—schlapecka@ppionline.org, T: 202.525.3931

PPI President to Offer Recommendations on Curbing National Deficit

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, will testify today at 2 p.m. before the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform during the commission’s first public listening session. Marshall will urge the commission to carefully examine national spending and create an ambitious but attainable fiscal target to address the United States’ mid- and long-term deficit challenges. The commission’s listening session live webcast can be viewed at https://www.whitehouse.gov/live.

“There is a common assumption in Washington that you can either have a fiscally responsible government or a progressive government, but you can’t have both,” said PPI President Will Marshall. “But, I’ve always rejected this assumption as a false choice. A progressive government can and must live within its means. It’s not really progressive if it chases the illusion of borrowed prosperity.”

The bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, created by President Obama to address our nation’s fiscal challenges, is charged with creating a plan after the midterm election to start unwinding America’s massive debt.

“We are looking for ideas,” said Commission Co-Chairman Erskine Bowles opening the commission’s third meeting on June 30, 2010.

Marshall is a member of the Brookings–Heritage Fiscal Seminar, a nonpartisan group of 16 federal budget and policy experts and frequently writes on the need to control the large and growing federal debt.

For further questions, please contact Steven Chlapecka at schlapecka@ppionline.org, 202.525.3931 (office), or 202.556.1752 (cell).

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Marshall’s testimony as prepared for delivery.

The State of U.S. Infrastructure: A Snapshot

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

We all want the infrastructure market to pick up dramatically and generate jobs, build productivity, and create competitiveness. But there is a yawning gap between public expressions of optimism and what infrastructure executives have been telling me about the state of their business. We continue to hear good news about the infrastructure industry in the media and from the administration, yet head counts at infrastructure firms are still down by as much as 25 percent, and executives say that the U.S. market is still essentially flat.

To get a granular picture of the state of infrastructure, my firm, CG/LA Infrastructure, last week sent out a survey of about 11,000 infrastructure executives and professionals throughout the U.S. and in all sectors of the industry. While only a fraction of the responses have come in so far, I’d like to share some preliminary results, which affirm the pessimistic mood that I’ve picked up in conversations. Here’s a snapshot of the state of U.S. infrastructure through the eyes of the men and women running our top firms:

1.) What is your current perception of the U.S. infrastructure market? Fifty-one percent of executives who have responded so far say that the market is “getting worse,” while 33 percent said that it is essentially flat and 15 percent said that it is improving.

The grim results may seem surprising, but it makes sense when you think about it. Most states have not recovered from last year’s cataclysm and continue to cut their budgets across the board. Considering that 70 percent of infrastructure spending is the responsibility of states and municipalities, it would be a surprise if infrastructure spending didn’t go down.

2. In your day-to-day infrastructure work, what are the most problematic issues in terms of improving project development speed? The U.S. needs to dramatically increase investments in infrastructure. Our survey question tried to get at the barriers to that kind of increased investment, and the current problems for restarting the market.

In our menu of options — respondents were allowed to choose as many as they wished from a list of factors — fifty-four percent of infrastructure executives mentioned “financing” as a problem. Meanwhile, 30 percent highlighted weak public sector capacity. This is significant. If we are going to invest in infrastructure, then we need a highly capable public sector.

Additionally 30 percent of executives also highlighted permitting issues as a barrier. Surprisingly, environmental issues, normally the biggest ‘problem’ on any industry survey, ranked fourth, highlighted by only 24 percent of executives.

Clearly the overriding issue is financing. How is that going to be addressed, and who will benefit? These are questions for another survey, and deserve a lot more attention than they are getting – particularly given the preponderant role of state and municipal budgets, and the dramatic weakness in those budgets. And lurking behind these concerns is a question few people are asking: What has become of the Obama administration’s initial National Infrastructure Bank proposal?

3. High-speed rail (HSR) is a signature initiative of the Obama administration. How do you rate this proposal in terms of current progress, and future potential, on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being excellent and 1 being poor? Another striking result: 53 percent of respondents clustered their answers in the 1-3 range (97 percent scored the high-speed rail program “7” or below). The results reflect my experience with industry, where the initial excitement about the program has rapidly given way to doubt and incredulity.

This question allowed for comments, and those comments clustered into two groups: justifications for their scores, and constructive comments on what is wrong with the program. Under the first category, one commenter noted that there were “serious issues…of whether the funding provided will be sufficient to implement a meaningful program and whether the funding will be concentrated on the most promising HSR opportunities.” Another, more critical respondent wrote, “I have not seen any significant developments since the topic was broached.”

On the constructive side: “Existing rail corridors that host HSR should be exempt from most of the overly burdensome environmental laws. This is unnecessary and needless bureaucracy and is slowing everybody waaaaaay down.” Another comment noted that the program “needs a long term funding source; it will not survive as a jobs program.” Perhaps the most critical comment, in terms of strategy, was the following: “There are a few corridors where high speed rail makes a lot of sense; the Northeast corridor in particular. However, there is no national consensus on its utility in other parts of the country.” Without consensus, at a time of tremendous austerity, it is indeed difficult to see this “man on the moon” initiative moving forward. Note that nothing has been spent from the original authorization of $8 billion.

4. In infrastructure, where are the greatest [geographic] opportunities for your firm over the next 12 months? The answers to this question were surprising and underscore that the U.S. infrastructure industry is focused on the home market – and at the same time, does not see much future for itself in that market. Overall, 42 percent of executives surveyed see their greatest opportunities in the U.S., a market that they qualify as depressed. After the U.S. market, 32 percent of respondents see the greatest opportunities in Latin America (a region with four percent of global GDP), followed by North America (the U.S., Canada and Mexico), with 29 percent. Europe and the Middle East were each ranked at 20 percent, while non-China Asia was ranked below 10 percent. None of the infrastructure executives surveyed see opportunities in the closed Chinese market.

5. You expect your firm’s gross revenue in 2010 to _____. Only seven percent believe that their firm’s revenue will grow “significantly” in 2010, with 48 percent projecting moderate growth, and 32 percent stating that economic performance will remain flat. Two facts stand out: It is a cause for concern that 13 percent of executives see their firm’s performances actually declining and 80 percent see moderate or no revenue growth for their firms in 2010. Considering their point of comparison is 2009, the worst year for infrastructure in 80 years, this is dismal news.

All in all, the survey results speak for themselves. U.S. infrastructure executives don’t see much hope for revival this year – in fact, they see things getting worse. President Obama’s signature program, high-speed rail, does not receive anything like passing grades and it is increasingly not being taken seriously. The financing issue — not a surprise for anyone in the infrastructure business — is the number one problem facing the industry.

When I was starting in the infrastructure industry a friend would tell me, over and over, that “nothing is as stubborn as a fact.” Well, these are the facts. We should all take them seriously if we are going to create jobs, generate competitiveness and build opportunities. And it seems like the executives in this most public of industries have a pretty clear grasp of reality, and some good ideas about what should be done.

Photo credit: SP8254

In Plain Sight: A Look at the Russian Spy Ring

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

I peered nervously into my colleagues’ offices after reading this morning’s wrap-up of the Russian spy case:

The operation, referred to by U.S. investigators as “the Illegals program,” was aimed at placing spies in nongovernmental jobs, such as at think tanks, where they could glean information from policymakers and Washington-connected insiders without attracting attention.

I realize Steven had studied in Russia, and this afternoon I’m going to fire up the old Blackadder tapes and figure out just how to catch him in the act.

Kidding aside, the story goes that 10 Russian spies were arrested (one remains at-large) as part of the largest espionage takedown I can remember.

Dan Drezner over at Foreign Policy thinks the whole thing is “low-rent” and “bizarre” because the ring is charged only with being “unregistered agents of a foreign government.” Drezner’s opinion is just odd — by definition, the nature of espionage is difficult to detect and harder to prove. To put this in perspective, it’s a huge deal when one intelligence operative gets caught — think Aldrich Ames, Robert Hansen, or most recently, my former professor Kendall Myers. Now we have 10, who worked in a loosely coordinated manner. The fact that we know as much as we do is testament to some pretty solid counterintelligence work.

Perhaps Drezner is unimpressed because of the nature of the suspects’ work: The press has categorized them more as talent-spotters who would recruit Americans in influential positions to provide information, not the actual spies themselves who’d bring documents out of sensitive government buildings. But I think categorization is likely an underestimation of what they actually did. These individuals may have recruited talent, but they also would have probably played a role in transmitting information back to Moscow.

The group was likely composed of Russia’s best. Remember the first (and best) Mission:Impossible with the “NOC” list? NOC stands for Non-Official Cover, and that’s what we’re talking about here — deep cover spies whose true identities are hidden from all but a handful of people. When Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov claims to have no idea what this is all about, that’s because he really doesn’t. Anonymity and deniability is by design.

Click over to Jeff Stein’s SpyTalk blog to get a flavor of how seamlessly the ring blended in with their American communities. I always find it hysterical that the neighbors are so shocked when spies in their midst are exposed — if the neighbors aren’t shocked that the normal-looking Canadian next door was leading a massive international Russian spy ring, then that would be news.

The investigation went on for nearly 10 years. Seem excessive? Why, after all, would we let these guys continue to spy on the U.S. if we knew what they were up to? Since this group served as talent spotters and intelligence mules, their operations had to be drawn out and subtle as they slowly became comfortable with, and then pitched, their recruits.

To firm up their cover, they’d spend months and months working their “real jobs” and only dip into the shadowy underworld on occasion and when they felt safe. Furthermore, the FBI needed to catch them absolutely red-handed, which is no easy task. Nothing like starting a potentially massive international scandal without iron-clad proof, huh? The FBI finally got what they needed on Sunday, with a fake dead drop of $5,000. And the decade-long investigation probably means that any intelligence damage has been limited. By keeping tabs on them for so long, we should know their extended network fairly well.

Should we be surprised that Russia is still spying on us? Hell no. We do it to them. And other countries, including our close allies, do it to us (albeit for varying motives). Everyone’s looking for an informational advantage, and that’s what spying can get you.

Finally, there’s been a lot made of the timing of this incident, right on the heels of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s visit to DC. Accordingly, we should expect Russian retaliation just to save face — they’ll probably PNG a handful of low-level diplomats whom they suspect of doubling as spies.

This could become a major international incident akin to Britain’s deteriorating relations with Moscow after the 2006 murder in London of Alexander Litvinenko, likely by Russian intelligence agents. However, I doubt it will. The timing of the arrests was bad, but they send a message of subtle strength to the Kremlin — despite wanting good relations with Moscow, Washington won’t be pushed around.

Photo credit: worldeconomicforum

Can Republicans Run the Table in November?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

A lot of the buzz about Republican prospects for retaking control of the U.S. House is based on fairly abstract factors, such as historical averages and national generic ballot polls. But in reality, of course, elections are individual contests, no matter how “nationalized” the cycle. And four months and change out from the November elections, it’s worth taking a somewhat more concrete look at the House landscape and where Democrats are vulnerable.

For purposes of this analysis, I’ll use the authoritative (if somewhat conservative, in the sense of caution about predicting incumbent losses) Cook Political Report ratings as of June 24 (no link, because it’s subscription-only). According to Cook’s highly astute David Wasserman, there are 66 seats currently held by Democrats that are involved in competitive races. Of those, nearly half (32) are actually rated as “lean D” at the moment. To win control of the House, Republicans need a net gain of 40 seats, and seven of their own seats are in competitive races, including three (DE-AL, HI-1 and LA-2) that most observers consider very likely to flip. So from the get-go, retaking the House will require a very high win rate for Republicans in competitive races, and/or continued improvement in their overall national standing—i.e., races now deemed “Likely D” slipping into the competitive range.

Looking at the 66 vulnerable Democratic seats, 15 are open. That’s a reasonably large number, but only half of the 30 open seats Democrats had in the last Republican “wave” election of 1994 (Republicans had 26 open seats in 2008, greatly helping the Democrats achieve a second straight big winning cycle). Twenty-five seats, however, are represented by freshmen, traditionally the most vulnerable incumbents. Most significantly, 51 of the 66 seats have a pro-Republican Partisan Voter Index (PVI), based on an average of party performance in the last two presidential elections. This indicates that most Republican gains in November will be a “correction” of recent overperformance by Democrats in House races rather than a true GOP “wave.” And it’s a reminder of the simple but often overlooked fact that because all members of the House face re-election every two years, a “landslide” is not defined by gains, but rather by overall performance. A GOP “landslide” in November would involve gains of closer to 100 seats than to the 40 necessary to eke out a small margin of control.

There are not any large regional disparities among the vulnerable Democratic seats: 18 are in the South, 18 in the Northeast, 18 in the Midwest and 12 in the West. Nor is it easy to typecast vulnerable Democrats by ideology: an analysis of the ideology of Democratic incumbents in competitive races published just yesterday by Swing State Project shows they span the intra-party ideological spectrum quite broadly.

Meanwhile, Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight has just released an update of his Senate race forecast, which now shows a slight improvement in Democratic prospects compared to his last forecast a couple of months ago.  His model now predicts as a matter of probabilities that Democrats should get through November with 55 senators, with the Republicans holding 44 and, perhaps, one true independent (Charlie Crist). Silver gives Republicans a six percent chance of running the table and taking control of the Senate, a figure that improves to 12 percent if they can convince both Joe Lieberman and Charlie Crist (if he wins) to caucus with them.

Poll Watch

In polling news, two new surveys of the Massachusetts gubernatorial race by the University of New Hampshire and Rasmussen both show vulnerable incumbent Democrat Deval Patrick maintaining a seven-point lead over Republican Charlie Baker, with independent Tim Cahill losing steam. A rare poll of the Wyoming governor’s race (again by Rasmussen) shows the importance of term limits: four different Republicans have sizable leads over three different Democrats, while lame duck Democratic Gov. David Freudenthal enjoys an approval/disapproval ratio of 72/25 (a bit better than President Obama’s 30/70).

Yet another Rasmussen poll is the first post-primary survey of the South Carolina governor’s race, and given the positive hype surrounding Nikki Haley after her runoff win, Democrat Vincent Sheheen should be pleased to be trailing only 52-40 (his approval/disapproval ratio is 50/35, while Haley’s is predictably and perhaps temporarily in the stratosphere at 70/26).  And while it’s hardly that significant at this early stage, it’s interesting that a PPP survey of Texas Republicans shows Newt Gingrich leading the 2012 presidential field, with or without Rick Perry listed as an option. Presumed front-runner Mitt Romney is in the middle of the pack.

Ed Kilgore’s PPI Political Memo runs every Tuesday and Friday.

National Journal: Labor’s Uphill Climb This Year

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

PPI President Will Marshall tells the National Journal‘s Eliza Newlin Carney that labor’s aggressive fight to unseat incumbent Democrats has been destructive and a losing strategy for Democrats to maintain a congressional majority:

The unions’ Arkansas challenge angered Democrats, from the White House on down. Some argue that the tens of millions of dollars that labor threw into the race was a waste, especially given that Arkansas is not union-friendly. Demanding loyalty to base voters, as tea party activists have set out to do in several GOP primaries, is a losing strategy for Democrats, said Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute.

“Trying to enforce litmus tests and punish Democrats for ideological heresy [is] divisive and does not reflect the reality that Democrats are inevitably a coalition party,” Marshall said. He called the labor movement’s anti-Lincoln campaign “extraordinarily destructive.”

“The sad truth is that labor has not found a way to arrest its decline in the private economy,” Marshall added. “And this year, for the first time, we see more labor union members in the public sector than in the private sector.”

Read the entire article.

RIP Robert Byrd

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

It’s been a tough year for the Democratic tradition in the U.S. Senate, with the loss of Edward Kennedy and the solidification of the Almighty Filibuster as the real power in the institution. But the death of Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia really does turn a lot of pages, while denying the Senate its unrivalled historian and parliamentarian.

Byrd’s tenure alone makes him one of the titans of Senate history: more than a half-century, spanning the administrations of eleven presidents. He was, however, the junior senator from West Virginia until he was 68, and in another reflection of the Senate’s slow pace of change, his career overlapped with only five Democratic leaders — not counting Byrd himself.

When Byrd was first elected to the Senate in 1958, Democrats from his corner of the world were typically hard-core segregationists and equally hard-core New Deal economic progressives. He abandoned and apologized for the former habit, but never the latter. The persistent poverty of West Virginia — for much of career it included some of the very poorest areas of the country — made it one place where politicians never shrank from the full exercise of power on behalf of the home folks, or from celebration of the seniority system that gave Byrd and so many others the clout to serve as equalizers. Byrd became the embodiment of Senate traditions for good reason: they served his constituents well.

He survived wave after wave of efforts in both parties to change the Senate and make it more responsive to national political trends, and might well have survived one or two more had he been born 10 years later. He also survived wave after wave of efforts to bend Congress to the will of presidents of both parties, and in that respect was more consistent than most of his colleagues in both parties.

In this era of political turbulence and simmering resentment of professional politicians, it’s unlikely America will ever see another senator like him. And so in a very real sense a big part of national history will go to the grave with him. His distinctive and authoritative voice will be missed, and may he rest in peace.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Photo credit: cliff1066™’s Photostream