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What We Talk About When We Talk About Health Care

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Regardless of the outcome of the Democratic health reform push, one point is obvious: at every turn, they lost the messaging battle to Republicans and the Tea Party. The latest reminder came this morning, as the umpteenth story on budget reconciliation came on the radio. These days, to talk about health care reform is to talk about process — exactly where the GOP wants the conversation to be.

Over the last few weeks, a new narrative has taken hold in health care news: that of a partisan Democratic Party determined to “ram” a bill through Congress. It’s a frame that the GOP has been relentless and disciplined in perpetuating. Some have even taken to calling it the “nuclear option,” which in its previous political incarnation was the name Trent Lott gave the Republican effort in 2005 to change filibuster rules for judicial nominations.

The “nuclear option” as shorthand for budget reconciliation is not only a misnomer, it’s flat-out misleading. Hardly unprecedented, budget reconciliation has been used 22 times since the process was established in 1974. As Jackie Calmes wrote in the New York Times last week, 16 of those times, it was the Republican Party that used it to “ram legislation through on a one-party vote” (at least that’s how House GOP Leader John Boehner describes its use today).

Moreover, reconciliation has been used several times to pass health care legislation. NPR’s Julie Rovner, who has done superb work on the health care story, pointed out that health care provisions ranging from COBRA (it even says so in the name — COBRA stands for Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act) to the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) to changes in Medicare and Medicaid have come via reconciliation.

But efforts by reporters like Rovner notwithstanding, the Democrats have already lost this battle as the media have taken the GOP’s cue and fixated on process. The unwarranted magnification of reconciliation is not unlike the media frenzy over Sen. Ben Nelson’s “Cornhusker Kickback,” a bit of horse-trading that was hardly unusual in writing bills, but somehow became the equivalent of a legislative high crime by the time the GOP and the media were done with it.

More than any other piece of legislation in recent memory, health care reform has been debated, negotiated, and written under the unforgiving attention of the 24-hour cycle. This is as close a view as the American public has had to the sausage-making in Washington. They don’t like what they see. Republicans are well aware of this, and continue to point the spotlight on the frequently ugly process.

And so we are now at the current pass. One party has made unprecedented use of the filibuster to prevent anything from being done. The other party is now thinking of using a procedural tactic used nearly two dozen times since 1980, including to pass health care legislation, to break the impasse. While there certainly has been more attention on the abuse of the filibuster of late, that the use of reconciliation is even a story is a problem for Democrats. That Democrats are playing defense on a matter of process speaks volumes about their PR ineptitude, the Republicans’ messaging cohesion, and the media’s ongoing failure to go beyond stenography.

Two More Scooped Up in Zazi Case. Where Are Progressives?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Two men who were already in custody, Adis Medunjanin and Zarein Ahmedzay, were charged (along with Najibullah Zazi) in a plot to attack New York’s subway system. The plot was derailed by federal agents back in September, just days before it was set to be executed.

Details of the plot continued to emerge at the previously scheduled hearing for the two men Thursday when Jeffrey Knox, the assistant U.S. attorney, strongly implied that Medunjanin and Ahmedzay were two of the operatives in the “three coordinated suicide-bombing attacks on Manhattan subways during rush hour.” Knox added that the plot was undertaken at the direct command of al Qaeda’s central leadership. That’s a heavy charge, and I’m normally skeptical of prosecutors making grandiose assertions to attract press attention. But — bin Laden’s direction or no — the fact remains that this was a very real plot with very real consequences.

After three significant arrests, I’ll restate the question I asked the other day: Where are progressives on this one? Yet again, we have a large-scale terrorist plot against a major American target that was successfully thwarted due to the good work and cooperation of our law enforcement and intelligence communities. The civilian court system has already gotten one guilty plea out of the ringleader (Zazi), and he’s continuing to provide intelligence. Progressives should be pounding their chests about a strong victory against a ruthless enemy.

But instead, as Greg Sargent at The Plum Line quotes one Democratic strategist saying, “We’re behaving like the President has a 30% approval rating. On these [national security] issues, Democrats inherently believe no one will believe our arguments” (a quote that admittedly was made before the Zazi guilty plea, though the sentiment still applies).

 

It’s time to snap out of it. I argued before that progressives have to respond to conservative attacks (if they’re brazen enough to criticize the Zazi case…wait a minute, I forgot who we’re dealing with here — of course they’re brazen enough), not on policy grounds, but with forceful rhetoric. National security is an emotional issue for Americans, not a policy one. Using the Zazi case to show our strength and smarts to contrast conservatives recklessness is an argument that continues to resonate. We’ve got great ammo — let’s use it.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/99887786@N00/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

All in on Health Reform

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

There’s something poignant about President Obama’s attempts to reason with congressional Republicans. He keeps hoping that facts, evidence, and logic somehow can penetrate the depleted-uranium armor of conservative ideology. As yesterday’s health summit showed, it hasn’t worked, but a public frustrated with Washington’s tribal politics will probably appreciate the effort anyway.

The summit nonetheless achieved its real purpose, which was not composing differences but illuminating the two parties’ starkly contrasting visions for health care reform so that the voters can make a real comparison. For the past year, Republicans have had the advantage of attacking (often dishonestly) Democrats’ plans without anyone paying much attention to what they have to offer.

The summit put them on the spot, and the clear answer was: not much. Here’s what we learned about what Republicans mean by reform:

First, they don’t much care about health care’s “have nots” – 45 million Americans without coverage. Sure, they favor a modest expansion of coverage to about three million people, but that only begs the question of why the lucky few and not everyone? The answer is that Republicans don’t really believe it’s government’s responsibility to make sure everyone can get access to affordable coverage.

Second, Republicans do care about restraining rising health care costs for those with coverage. But their preferred solutions — medical savings accounts, and allowing people to buy cheaper insurance policies out-of-state — are tilted toward the healthy. The former takes healthy people out of insurance pools, raising premiums for those who remain. The latter allows people to end-run state mandates on the medical services insurance companies must offer. That’s fine for healthy people who can get by with bare-bones coverage, but it doesn’t help the sick. In fact, Republicans generally oppose the insurance market reforms that would prevent companies from cherry-picking healthy customers or dropping people when they get sick.

Third, the GOP has no intention of helping Obama and the Democrats improve their plans, let alone pass them. They feel little pressure to do so, because they think they have the public on their side.

It’s true that polls show majorities are leery of the Democrats’ reform proposals, even if Americans still want Obama to “do something” about health care costs and coverage. Rather than crumble in the face of public skepticism, Obama adroitly used the summit to reframe the health care debate as a choice between action or inaction on one of the nation’s most vexing problems.

The spotlight now shifts to his party. Will liberals torpedo health reform because it doesn’t include the public option? Will moderates play it safe or take a risk for the larger good of their party and their country? Will health care reform be a casualty of that hardy perennial of the culture wars, abortion?

Can congressional Democrats, in short, summon the will and discipline to rise above their own centripetal forces and govern? It should be obvious that failure would reinforce the Republican narrative: the bill was misbegotten in the first place, an overly ambitious, big-government monster that couldn’t even pass muster with Democrats.

Obama has gone all in; now his party needs to follow.

Grumpy Old Party

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

If you are unemployed, or if you are one of the millions of people hanging on to cancelled employer-sponsored health insurance via COBRA, your life will take a turn for the more insecure on Sunday, thanks to Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY), who wants to make a symbolic gesture about federal spending. Bunning is refusing to let the Senate vote on totally noncontroversial extenders for these provisions, which will probably force a cloture vote and at least a week’s delay in restoring unemployment insurance and COBRA.

What makes this weird is that Bunning is taking this action not to secure any concessions on present or future legislation, but to express his grumpiness about something that’s already happened: Senate passage of the first chunk of jobs legislation by a 70-28 vote.

Now you have to appreciate that Bunning is a very angry old man. Never a very genial soul, he was pushed into retirement by his own party because it looked like he would be defeated even in a good Republican year, in part because he’s exhibited some signs of being a few bricks shy of a load. So he’s mad at his colleagues, and maybe even mad at his constituents, for their failure to let him serve in the Senate into his ninth decade of walking the earth.

The most appropriate response to Bunning’s grievances is probably the words the senator himself contemptuously uttered yesterday to Sens. Dick Durbin and Jeff Merkley when they cited the plight of the unemployed and soon-to-be-uninsured in asking him to let the extenders come to a vote: “Tough s__t!” The people he’s affecting with his little fit of pique have a lot more to complain about than Bunning, who’s largely wasted twelve years in the Senate being a grumpy old man. But he is a fitting symbol of the obstructionism of his party in Congress, which knows no bounds and feels no shame.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Does KIPP Get Results?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In education circles, the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), the nation’s largest charter management organization, is considered one of the great success stories in the charter school movement. But as Quick and the Ed’s Chad Aldeman points out, even though an observer of a KIPP classroom can immediately tell the difference, quantitative analyses of KIPP’s real-world effects have been sparse and low-level — which is why the National Bureau of Economic Research’s new study (PDF) of a KIPP charter school in Lynn, Massachusetts, the sole KIPP school in New England, is noteworthy.

As with other KIPP schools across the country, the Lynn school has a long school year that starts in August and includes some Saturdays, and a long school day running from 7:30 am to 5:00 pm. The school has a code of behavior that calls for orderly movement between classes and students to speak only when called upon. The curriculum puts a strong emphasis on basic reading and math skills.

The study was a quasi-experimental evaluation that compared students who attended KIPP with those who wanted to attend but couldn’t get in because of space restrictions. In Massachusetts, charter schools are required to hold a lottery for admission if a school is oversubscribed. Because KIPP Lynn’s enrollees are determined by a randomized lottery, the study was able estimate the causal effect of the program on achievement without the problem of selection bias — the idea that a charter school gets results by “skimming from the top” of a given demographic — tainting the results.

What did the researchers find? KIPP Lynn attendees registered Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) gains of about .12 standard deviations for each year that a student stayed in KIPP. For math, the gains were even larger at .35 standard deviations for each year. The results for limited English proficiency (KIPP Lynn has a high proportion of Hispanic students) and special education students were even more positive.

While it’s just one study for one school, the NBER analysis is a well-designed quasi-experiment that offers robust quantitative evidence for KIPP’s effectiveness. (Aldeman calls it “by far the most rigorous of all the evaluations thus far that specifically focus on KIPP.”) As the researchers point out, KIPP has a replicable model and runs similar schools across the country, and it’s not hard to imagine that KIPP has had similar effects at other sites. Of course, more studies like this are needed to measure KIPP’s results. But in the meantime, the NBER study should embolden charter proponents, who seek to bring demonstrably successful models to areas badly in need of alternatives for students willin and eager to learn.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/mlleleela/ / CC BY-ND 2.0

Financial Regulation Is Good — But Consumer Financial Protection Is Better

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Paul Volcker, vanquisher of inflation in the early ’80s as chairman of the Federal Reserve System and now the chairman of President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, said, “[T]he most important financial innovation that I have seen the past 20 years is the automatic teller machine.” While he qualified the comment as a “wiseacre remark,” he stood by it, going on to say, “Indeed, it was quite good in the 1980s without credit-default swaps and without securitization and without CDOs.”

Our friend Bob Litan has a new report out from the Brookings Institution on the benefits from financial innovation over the past thirty years. The report is worth reading in full, but a quick summary of his findings is found in a chart at the beginning of the paper (condensed into one image by Kevin Drum):

Given attitudes like Volcker’s, it might be surprising to see so many “+”s, connoting relative benefits, relative to “-“s, connoting developments that did not improve that part of the economy. (“0” indicates the innovation was a wash.) But that is the reality of innovative financial instruments — they are, by and large, designed to be beneficial, but unmonitored can cause more harm than good. Innovations like credit scoring, collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), and inflation-protected Treasury bonds (TIPS) — all were developed since Volcker was Fed chair. But the benefits from these innovations (increased access to credit, which allows for consumption smoothing) can also lead to abuses of the system (crushing credit card debt, NINA mortgages, balloon payment mortgages) and asset bubbles. These abuses can be swept under the rug if the underlying assets in a CDO are not transparent, and that CDO is sold to an unsuspecting client by an investment bank trading desk.

The status quo is unsustainable, but attempts to ban some of these activities are problematic as well. Proclamations like the Volcker rule — limiting the scope of bank activity — are either too tightly defined to be effective or are so broad they throw out the above benefits with the bathwater. What would be better is to provide transparency in these activities — through clearing credit default swaps (CDS) and other derivatives on exchanges, providing credit terms in an easily understood manner upfront, and eliminating hidden fees — so that all involved know what they are getting into.

Litan also points out one key fact at the end of his paper: we’re not done with financial innovation. He argues that despite the headlines, not all innovation is bad, and there is more to come. He cites the work of Robert Schiller, the Yale professor who has pioneered work in housing price markets — designed to give homeowners protection they currently don’t have against a fall in the value of their home — and counter-cyclical tax policy, as an obvious source of financial innovation that is for the good.

But Litan concludes by noting that the market — not government — will continue to drive innovation, but “policymakers must be better prepared in the future than they were before the financial crisis to step in — first with disclosure standards and possibly later with more prescriptive rules” to prevent crises like the most recent one from happening again. The one area where he sees a more active government role is in consumer finance, an area in which a robust Consumer Financial Protection Agency will be key.

Walking Dead Incumbents

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

To distract myself from the intense desire to scream while listening to Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) speak at the health care summit, I read a fine post by Nate Silver that explodes the myth that incumbents who don’t hold a majority in early polls are already toasty if not toast. This myth is being used by Republicans to declare a lot of Democrats as walking dead long before campaigns actually develop. Turns out, though, the available evidence doesn’t support that proposition. Here’s Nate’s conclusion:

1) It is extremely common for an incumbent come back to win re-election while having less than 50 percent of the vote in early polls.2) In comparison to early polls, there is no demonstrable tendency for challengers to pick up a larger share of the undecided vote than incumbents.

3) Incumbents almost always get a larger share of the actual vote than they do in early polls (as do challengers). They do not “get what they get in the tracking”; they almost always get more.

4) However, the incumbent’s vote share in early polls may in fact be a better predictor of the final margin in the race than the opponent’s vote share. That is, it may be proper to focus more on the incumbent’s number than the opponent’s when evaluating such a poll — even though it is extremely improper to assume that the incumbent will not pick up any additional percentage of the vote.

Nate goes on to say that a much narrower version of the “50% incumbent rule,” which focuses on polls taken late in an election cycle, has more merit, but isn’t really a “rule” either. On the other hand, incumbents who register at above 50% in early polls do typically win. This ought to be kept in mind by Republicans who are fantasizing about a late “wave” that will sweep popular Democratic incumbents (and there are some) out of office.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Summit Spectacle

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Like many of you, I’ve been watching the health care summit, and can’t decide just yet if it’s a spectacle of complex drama, or just one of the longest congressional hearings to be broadcast in a long time. For those unfamiliar with congressional events, the preliminary throat-clearing and personal preening must be excrutiating.

The Republican strategy for this event is pretty clear already: act like the administration is doing something really outrageous by using reconciliation to finalize the health care legislation already passed by both Houses. As I mentioned yesterday, this is factually ludicrous, but repeating talking points does sometimes work.

It’s pretty interesting that tea partiers are protesting the very existence of the event outside Blair House. Appointing themselves representatives of the people, and making unconditional demands on their behalf, has been a hallmark of their movement all along.

Editor’s note: The summit is being webcast live on C-SPAN.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Public Transit: Good for Your Wallet

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, a Canadian research organization, came out with an interesting new study (PDF) that makes a strong pocketbook case for high-quality public transit.

The study looked at seven major U.S. cities with high-quality public transit systems: Washington, D.C., New York, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.

The study’s findings shouldn’t surprise public transit aficionados. According to Litman, residents of cities with good public transit tend to own 10-30 percent fewer vehicles and drive 10-30 percent less than they would in more automobile-oriented communities.

But the study also calculated what exactly good public transit meant for residents’ wallets:

[P]roviding high quality public transit service typically requires about $268 in annual subsidies and $108 in additional fares per capita, but reduces vehicle, parking and road costs an average of $1,040 per capita. For an average household this works out to $775 annually in additional public transit expenses and $2,350 in vehicle, parking and roadway savings, or $1,575 in overall net savings…[emphasis added]

Those results don’t even take into account the other benefits a city can derive from a high-functioning transit system: a decrease in pollution, less congestion, fewer traffic accidents, and improved public fitness and health.

What’s striking about Litman’s study is that its conclusions are something that transit-using city-dwellers tend to grasp intuitively. Commuters know firsthand the benefits of not having to rely on a car to get around the city — not having to deal with parking, congestion, gas, upkeep and insurance costs, etc.

But as Litman points out, most American cities offer only basic public transit services that are used mainly by people who have no other alternatives. In cities with good public transit, even affluent residents use the system, as they recognize its benefits. It all points to a fairly obvious upshot: cities should place public transit higher on its list of funding priorities.

Studies like Litman’s also bring up another important dimension in all this: political will. Americans love their cars but — especially in tough economic times — would they love them as much if they were informed that a strong alternative would save them an average of $1,500 a year? Something tells me a citizenry informed of the considerable savings from a good Metro or bus system could be nudged toward supporting more robust funding for a well-developed transit infrastructure.

Brainwashed

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

“Flip-flopping” on major issues can be hazardous to your political health. “Flip-flopping” when you’ve branded yourself as a brave principled “maverick” can be especially dangerous. And “flip-flopping” on grounds that you were confused about the issue in question is really, really bad, particularly when you are on the far side of 70.

That’s why John McCain may have ended his long political career the other day when he responded to attacks by primary challenger J.D. Hayworth on his support for TARP (popularly known from the beginning as the “Wall Street Bailout”) by claiming he was misled by the Fed Chairman and the Treasury Secretary into thinking the bill was about the housing industry, not Wall Street:

In response to criticism from opponents seeking to defeat him in the Aug. 24 Republican primary, the four-term senator says he was misled by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. McCain said the pair assured him that the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program would focus on what was seen as the cause of the financial crisis, the housing meltdown.”Obviously, that didn’t happen,” McCain said in a meeting Thursday with The Republic’s Editorial Board, recounting his decision-making during the critical initial days of the fiscal crisis. “They decided to stabilize the Wall Street institutions, bail out (insurance giant) AIG, bail out Chrysler, bail out General Motors. . . . What they figured was that if they stabilized Wall Street – I guess it was trickle-down economics – that therefore Main Street would be fine.”

What makes this claim especially astonishing is that McCain was rather famously focused on TARP at the time. He suspended his presidential campaign to come crashing back into Washington to attend final negotiations designed to get enough Republican support for TARP to get it passed. He was, by all accounts, a very passive participant in these talks, but it’s not as though he wasn’t there. And you’d think his memories of the event would be reasonably clear, since it probably sealed his electoral defeat.

It’s not obvious how McCain can walk this statement back. And in terms of the political damage he inflicted on himself, it’s hard to think of a suitable analogy without going all the way back to 1967, when Gov. George Romney (father of The Mittster) destroyed his front-running presidential campaign by claiming he had been “brainwashed” by military and diplomatic officials into erroneously supporting the Vietnam War. He never recovered from that one interview line. (Sen. Gene McCarthy, who did run for presidential in 1968, was asked about the Romney “brainwashing” by David Frost, and quipped: “I would have thought a light rinse would have been sufficient.”).

McCain has a more sizable bank of political capital than George Romney ever did, but in a primary contest where he was already in some trouble, the suggestion that he was brainwashed by a Republican administration into fundamentally misunderstanding the central national and global issue of the moment–not to mention the central current grievance of voters with Washington–could be fatal. It doesn’t help that it will vastly reinforce Hayworth’s not-so-subtle claims that McCain is a fine statesman whose time has come and gone, and is now losing it.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Leaving Iraq

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Take a minute to soak in Tom Ricks’ column in NYT today. Here are a two key excerpts:

IRAQ’S March 7 national election, and the formation of a new government that will follow, carry huge implications for both Iraqis and American policy. It appears now that the results are unlikely to resolve key political struggles that could return the country to sectarianism and violence.  If so, President Obama may find himself later this year considering whether once again to break his campaign promises about ending the war, and to offer to keep tens of thousands of troops in Iraq for several more years. Surprisingly, that probably is the best course for him, and for Iraqi leaders, to pursue.

[…]

The political situation is far less certain, and I think less stable, than most Americans believe. … All the existential questions that plagued Iraq before the surge remain unanswered. How will oil revenue be shared among the country’s major groups? What is to be the fundamental relationship between Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds? Will Iraq have a strong central government or be a loose confederation? And what will be the role of Iran (for my money, the biggest winner in the Iraq war thus far)?

Ricks goes on to advocate slowing down the U.S. withdrawal, which can really only occur if the Iraqis offer to re-open negotiations on the status of forces agreement (SOFA). It was signed in the waning days of the Bush administration and establishes December 31, 2011, as the date when “all United States forces shall withdraw from Iraq.”

While the future in Iraq certainly continues to look murky and Ricks’ suggestion should be kept in mind, I don’t think we’re quite at the point of seriously debating a change to the SOFA just yet. Let’s wait until the March 7th elections have passed and the mood of the country and new government shake out until we think about it. After all, it’s not our call anyway — as the SOFA clearly states, “The United States recognizes the sovereign right of the Government of Iraq to request the departure of the United States Forces from Iraq at any time,” and that’s a politically weighty sentence to revisit if you’re a brand new Iraqi government.

That’s why I don’t think the announcement of General Odierno’s contingency plan to delay withdrawal is much of a definite harbinger at this point. That’s what the military does — it plans for things. They’re the best Boy Scouts (motto: Be Prepared) in the world. And just because it plans, doesn’t mean the commander-in-chief is about to put those plans in motion. After all, we have a plan on the books to attack Iran. And I’ve got $20 that says we have a plan to attack Canada.

But then again, invading Canada would make winning the hockey gold medal a lot less fun.

Obama’s Multiple Audiences

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Looking forward to tomorrow’s health care “summit,” Ben Smith of Politico has a pretty good summary of the five distinct audiences the president must think about in handling this event: House Democrats, Senate Democrats, the Public, the Fans of Bipartisanship, and Republicans. But there are obviously priorities in his messaging:

He’ll be making the sale, for the umpteenth time, to an American public that supports aspects of health care legislation but opposes the bill. He’ll be pitching Beltway graybeards obsessed, as always, with bipartisanship. He’ll be appealing to moderate Senate Democrats to back reconciliation.But most important will be his pitch to a handful of conservative Democrats in the House who will have to switch their votes and vote for the Senate health care bill for it to pass into law.

Smith’s right that the most important immediate audience is House Democrats. In the longer run, however, this summit is a very important landmark in his overall positioning of himself and his party for the midterm elections in November. The reality in Washington is that a Republican Party that is becoming more ideologically extreme each day is using every procedural tool and political trick you can imagine to avoid any real action on any significant issue. If that reality becomes more generally known because of the summit, then it will be a success for Obama and Democrats, regardless of how it plays with the Republicans, the pundit class, or Democrats who are wavering on health reform.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Charting a Course for a National Infrastructure Revival

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As the United States struggles to rouse itself from its economic slumber, the country is beginning to keenly feel the need to lay down a foundation for a new and vibrant economy. A concerted effort to modernize our infrastructure must top any checklist for recovery. The backbone of our economic system has suffered from years of neglect – budgetary, conceptual, institutional. With his recent request for $4 billion to create a National Infrastructure Innovation and Finance Fund, it’s encouraging that President Obama seems to understand how essential an infrastructure revival is to our prosperity.

But such a fund is not nearly enough to bring our infrastructure into the 21st century. And simply devoting money to projects will not lead to results unless we have a clear strategy for revitalizing and reinventing our roads, bridges, railroads, mass transit, and other structures and systems essential to sustaining productivity.

To put it plainly, our current infrastructure model is exhausted. We currently invest 1.3 percent of GDP in infrastructure; in 1980, we invested over three percent. Worse, we are investing in the wrong kind of infrastructure. Right now, we are barely covering replacement costs for a system designed 50 years ago — and which now badly needs updating just to keep up with the rest of the world.

For our country to be globally competitive, we will need to nearly triple our level of infrastructure investment each year over the next 10 years, from the current $150 billion level to at least $400 billion per year. And we will need to think differently about infrastructure, designing projects and promoting firms that are carbon neutral, highly innovative, and transformative.

These goals will require a fundamental shift in orientation, and a new conceptual framework for infrastructure. To see infrastructure through a new prism, we need:

  • bold leadership that inspires Americans to dream big about infrastructure again
  • an uncompromising competitiveness agenda that puts us on track to keep pace with — and lap — nations like China

From that perspective springs three specific ideas on how to get us on a course to an infrastructure revival:

  • a true National Infrastructure Bank
  • a new, NASA-equivalent agency for infrastructure
  • a new focus on the design and aesthetics of infrastructure projects

A Conceptual Framework for Infrastructure

First, the country needs a positive and unified infrastructure vision that ties together immediate job creation and long-term productivity. The last time the country had a grand vision for infrastructure was 60 years ago with the Interstate Highway System.

In a sense, we need to learn how to think about infrastructure again. Without an organizing vision, we are unmoored. In our current mindset, any project will be just as good as another. The discipline of setting priorities, and of creating and following budgets to reach toward an inspiring and ambitious vision, has disappeared. The Greatest Generation conjured up the last coherent vision for U.S. infrastructure. Now we need to create – and execute – a new vision for the next generation.

Second, we need to place the issue of competitiveness at the center of the debate. Like boiling a frog by gradually raising the temperature, the current catastrophe happened slowly, without our noticing until it was too late. For instance, China is investing $300 billion in high-speed rail through 2020, while we congratulate ourselves on a measly $8 billion down payment on a system that lacks vision, institutional support, or a budgetary glide path.

Now that we’ve noticed how far behind we’ve fallen, we have to look at infrastructure through the lens of global competitiveness. We need to be able to make, move, and deliver things much more cheaply. We need to give people better, cheaper, quicker, and cleaner options for moving themselves around the country. And we need to make sure that our water and air quality are measurably world-class. There are many ways to think about competitiveness, but having the right infrastructure, built and operated at a world-beating price, is the place to begin.

From Concept to Execution

But vision and motivation aren’t enough. We also have to execute – to get the mechanics right, and quickly. The third challenge that we need to overcome is that of funding. Specifically, we need a long-term source that will be reliable and impervious to changes in political administrations. Such an agency will also need the authority to select and seed priority infrastructure projects and systems.

A National Infrastructure Bank would fill this void. The bank would be capitalized through the sale of infrastructure bonds to middle-class Americans, who would triply benefit from their investments – contributing to better infrastructure, directly engaging in the creation of a stronger country, and individually benefiting from coupon returns on their investment.

The bank would cover all infrastructure sectors, from transportation to water to energy, and would need to be capitalized at a level of at least $400 billion over 10 years, yielding a minimum of $160 billion a year in strategic infrastructure investments. The National Infrastructure Bank would be a strategic and necessary complement to the Obama administration’s highly successful Build America Bonds program. Overall, this effort would create between two million and 2.5 million new jobs per year for the next 10 years.

We also need a high-functioning public sector – and one viewed as such by the public – if we are to rebuild our infrastructure. More than in most areas of the economy, there is a productive tension in infrastructure policy between the market’s ability to identify opportunities and the long-term wisdom the public sector can provide. Without a strong public sector, this necessary balance – identifying opportunities and creating jobs now, while ensuring benefits for the next generation – will fall out of balance. Private sector energy will never be unleashed on our infrastructure challenges unless there is a strong, high-functioning, and strategic public sector with which it can reliably and aggressively partner.

Today, the public sector – and particularly the infrastructure public sector – is neither seen nor treated as an indispensable arm of a successful state. A fretwork of agencies are involved in different fiefdoms of infrastructure, from the Federal Highway Administration to the Department of Energy to the Environmental Protection Agency. This needs to change. We need an equivalent of NASA for infrastructure, a powerful new federal agency that could drive vision and policy at all levels.

Fifth, we must bridge a design gap.  The U.S. has fallen into a budget trap in infrastructure. We are so pressured by budget issues and the threat of cost overruns that we design our projects without much attention to the inherent grandeur of infrastructure. We seem to be governed by a belief that the aesthetically pleasing is more expensive than the pedestrian, when the reverse is actually true.

Bridges, airports, subway stations, highways, and high-speed rail stations are powerful symbols that define a country and its capacities. Projects and the networks they serve say something about how a nation views itself. Crumbling infrastructure, cut-rate design, and the absence of super projects all suggest not only a lack of confidence – they saddle us with inferior infrastructure well into the future.

Conclusion

We have to establish economic priorities to get ourselves back on our feet. Making strategic decisions on our infrastructure is essential to bring vibrant and equitable growth. The Obama administration needs to fill the voids in our infrastructure policy as soon as possible. Under the right leadership, a recalibration of our infrastructure outlook and priorities can create up to five million jobs in the short run, erasing the losses of the last two years and ensuring an extraordinarily productive future for the next generation.

Editor’s note: This article has been updated since its original publication.

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GOP Complaints on Health Care Process Ring Hollow

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Republicans are warning of ominous political consequences if the Democrats use budget reconciliation rules to help pass health care reform. It would be “a huge mistake,” averred Sen. Olympia Snowe, the chief object of Senate Democrats’ unconsummated quest for bipartisan cooperation on health reform.

Evidently, for the Democrats to resort to reconciliation would be an intolerable abuse of congressional rules, whereas the Republican habit of filibustering everything in sight is perfectly within bounds. Passing health measures by a simple majority vote, the GOP maintains, would be the political equivalent of nuclear war: It would pulverize what little remains of comity and good will in Washington.

It’s a little late for the GOP to be worrying about that. Nor are Republicans more convincing when they complain that it’s somehow illegitimate for President Obama to start the bidding in tomorrow’s health care summit with a plan derived from bills that have passed both houses of Congress.

“I don’t think the people like this any more than…the approach that came down the pike earlier,” House Republican Whip Eric Cantor said. “People are incredulous. I just think they are wondering, does the White House not get it?” He was referring, of course, to polls showing majority opposition to the main health care proposals before Congress.

Cantor seems to be arguing that shifting public attitudes matter more than election results, and that Congress shouldn’t pass legislation that doesn’t poll well. Does the House minority whip not get representative democracy? (It was a good thing he wasn’t around when Lincoln pushed Congress to enact a draft to win the Civil War.) And if Republicans really are so sure Democrats will self-destruct politically by passing Obamacare, why not lash them on?

One reason might be that the health care summit will highlight the embarrassing fact that Cantor and company offer no serious alternative to the president’s approach. (House Republicans last year labored mightily to produce a mouse of a bill that would cover just three million of America’s 40-plus million uninsured.) The real choice is between the president’s far-from-perfect health care reform, and none at all.

And in a way that’s too bad, because if we had a serious opposition, it might help the president push back against some of the bad ideas coming from his own party. An example: under pressure from labor and liberals, Obama has drastically scaled down and delayed an excise tax on expensive employer-paid health plans. Not only does that reduce revenue needed to pay for health reform, it also barely grazes an open-ended federal tax subsidy that economists believe contributes greatly to medical cost inflation. Rather than insist on limiting that government subsidy, many Republicans claim it’s a violation of Obama’s pledge not to raise taxes on the middle class.

In a similar vein, the Republicans have lambasted Obama’s proposal to cut hundreds of billions from Medicare to defray the expenses of expanding coverage. And so in its blindly partisan attacks on Obama’s push for health reform, the GOP has managed to 1) shred its credibility as a force for fiscal responsibility; 2) thwart efforts to rein in runaway health care costs; and 3) reinforce their well-deserved reputation as a party that measures compassion by the thimble-full.

On health care, the Republicans have hit the trifecta of demagoguery – which is why their complaints about parliamentary foul play ring hollow.

Conservatives Let Their Freak Flag Fly

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

There are a couple of interesting articles out today offering meditations on the theatrics of the contemporary American Right. At TAP, Paul Waldman mocks the American Revolutionary trappings of the conservative movement in its efforts to get down with the Tea Party folk–most notably the staging of the Mount Vernon Statement, featuring a rogue’s gallery of old-school conservative power brokers:

What [former Attorney General Ed] Meese and his aging colleagues no doubt realized was that if you want to be relevant in the quickly changing conservative movement of 2010, you’d better pretend it’s 1776. Donning revolutionary regalia — sartorially or rhetorically — is becoming to today’s right what slipping on a tie-dye was to Grateful Dead shows back in the day. It tells other participants that you’re all part of the same tribe. It may seem silly to pretend to be a radical agent of change fighting against “tyranny” — the word you hear over and over again from conservatives these days — from a corner office in a corporate-funded D.C. think tank, but they’ll do their best.

Meanwhile, at Salon, Michael Lind characteristically sees something more profound going on, as the Right adopts a self-conscious counter-cultural stance similar to the one that got the Left off course in the 1970s. Lind notes how far conservatives have been backsliding in recent years towards the zaniness that kept them in the political wilderness before the rise of the organized conservative movement:

When [William F.] Buckley came on the scene in the mid-1950s, the American right was dominated by kooks: right-wing isolationists, Pearl Harbor and Yalta conspiracy theorists, anti-Semites and members of the John Birch Society like the palindromically-named Professor Revilo P. Oliver. Buckley and his movement conservatives, and later the early neoconservatives, struggled to purge the right of crackpots and create an intellectually serious movement capable of governing the country.And yet the right of 2010 looks like the fever-swamp right of 1950 instead of the triumphant right of 1980. The John Birch Society, which Buckley and Goldwater expelled from the conservative movement in the early 1960s, was a co-sponsor of this year’s Conservative Political Action Convention (CPAC). Folks who claimed that Eisenhower was a communist now insist that Obama is a socialist.

Calling tea partiers the “hippies of our time,” Lind goes on to compare today’s conservative counter-culture with its leftist forebears, noting a common anti-system radicalism, a Luddite tendency to disparage science and technology, a flair for street theater, and an underlying desire to secede from the broader society. This last observation is interesting; I suppose “going Galt” really is the contemporary equivalent to “getting back to the land,” and could portend a retreat from political activism by tea partiers if they become frustrated by the failure of Americans to embrace their cause.

In any event, Lind concludes, the counter-cultural tendencies of the Right may represent good news for progressives:

The rise of the conservative counterculture may provide the beleaguered Democrats with a stay of execution. A serious Republican counter-establishment, putting forth credible plans for addressing the nation’s problems and determined to collaborate with the other party to govern the country in this crisis, would be a greater threat to the new, shaky Democratic establishment than the theatrics of the right’s Summer of Love.Or should it be called the Winter of Hate?

I tend to agree with Lind on this point, and also think Waldman may not be taking the implications of the conservative movement’s flirtation with revolutionary rhetoric quite seriously enough. The tea partiers have seized on 1776 rhetoric and imagery not just because of the anti-tax nature of the original Tea Party, but because they argue with considerable consistency that the cure for America’s ills is a rollback of much of the country’s political and constitutional developments over not just years or decades, but centuries. It’s no accident that there’s been a remarkable revival of talk on the Right, even among elected officials, of such discredited nineteenth century theories as the “right” of states to nullify federal laws or even express their “sovereignty” by secession. And the prevailing school of constitutional “thinking” among conservatives is a sort of crude fundamentalist originalism that dismisses health care reform as unconstitutional on grounds that the Constitution itself does not mention health care (an argument Glenn Beck, among others, often makes).

This is powerfully radical stuff, and it will not be easy for Republican pols to whip up crowds by embracing it and then going back to the twenty-first century where the machinery of modern government depends on hundreds of Supreme Court decisions (not to mention a Civil War) that have modified the strict letter of the Constitution.

It’s not clear how long and far today’s counter-cultural trends on the Right will last; maybe Mark Schmitt is correct in predicting this is just another populist wave that will soon recede.

But in the mean time, these are some fine days for conservative-watching, whether it’s Ed Meese posing as a revolutionary or conservatives raptly listening to the deep jurisprudence of Glenn Beck.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/19705810@N00/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

“Race to the Top” for Child Nutrition

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

One of the least heralded but potentially consequential initiatives by the Obama administration has been its steady campaign against child hunger and obesity. The administration has set an ambitious goal of eliminating child hunger by 2015. Meanwhile, Michelle Obama has spearheaded the Let’s Move! program, aimed at combating childhood obesity.

At an event at the National Press Club today, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack spoke in greater detail about the administration’s priorities as the Child Nutrition Act comes up for reauthorization. The centerpiece of the administration’s child nutrition push is an additional $10 billion over 10 years to improve school breakfast and lunch programs, increase child participation, and equip schools with the resources they need for student health.

One aspect of Vilsack’s presentation seemed familiar:

We cannot rest while so many of our children struggle with access to food, but the federal government will never solve this challenge alone. In the last year, educators have seen the difference that a national “race to the top” in education has made. I am pleased to announce my support for a new competition to eliminate hunger by 2015. We’ll provide competitive grants to Governors, working with stakeholders statewide, so that states can act as laboratories for successful strategies. We’ll let them be creative in experimenting with models that match program delivery with evaluation, so that we can learn what works and what doesn’t. Possible steps will include policy modifications to existing nutrition programs, enhanced outreach efforts, improved coordination between nutrition assistance programs and family supportive services, and work with community and non-profit organizations. Grants would be provided to States with prior accomplishments and commitments to reducing hunger, applications that target communities with higher prevalence of child hunger, and projects that reflect collaboration with a wide range of partners. It is only with these sorts of coordinated efforts that we will achieve our ambitious and important goals.

“Race to the Top” is, of course, the hugely successful program that the Obama administration has used to incentivize education reform across the country. By dangling the promise of federal funds, the White House has been able to push reforms in states and districts that for years had resisted change.

Vilsack’s proposal is especially familiar to us here at PPI. Our own Joel Berg and Tom Freedman, in a “Memo to the New President” last year, called for something like it:

State governments are often the testing ground for the nation’s most important policy experiments. Your administration could reward states for successful innovations in feeding the hungry and improving nutrition. For example, every three years, the USDA could finance bonuses to the five states that show the greatest reduction in the agency’s measures of food insecurity and hunger. These states could then use their winnings to expand and improve their anti-hunger programs. This would act as an incentive for other states to create truly effective hunger policies.

Vilsack’s proposal is another demonstration of the creativity with which the administration is tackling some of our pressing domestic problems. Initiatives like the one Vilsack announced today or Race to the Top may not get as much publicity on a day-to-day basis, but they may yet end up the most enduring of this administration’s accomplishments.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/chidorian/ / CC BY-SA 2.0