Category: Uncategorized

Obama’s Nobel Speech and the Lesson for Progressives

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

I was struck by the unexpected tone of President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech — instead of spending the entire address laying out a vision to achieve world peace, he spent the first half addressing the odd position in which he finds himself: receiving the prize while serving as commander-in-chief of a nation involved in two wars.

In the process, he laid out the most compelling ideological foundation for a progressive view on national security I have ever heard him give:

We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth that we will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations — acting individually or in concert — will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.

I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King said in this same ceremony years ago — “Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones.” As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life’s work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there is nothing weak — nothing passive — nothing naïve — in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.

But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

I raise this point because in many countries there is a deep ambivalence about military action today, no matter the cause. At times, this is joined by a reflexive suspicion of America, the world’s sole military superpower.

Yet the world must remember that it was not simply international institutions — not just treaties and declarations — that brought stability to a post-World War II world. Whatever mistakes we have made, the plain fact is this: the United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans. We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest — because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if other peoples’ children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity.

This is where progressives should stand on national security: we must acknowledge that there is evil in the world and show a resolve to make tough choices when America’s vital national security interests are at stake. Our preference is to not use force, but when all other options have been exhausted and our security remains directly threatened, force may be the last resort.

A Game Plan for Infrastructure

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

A Game Plan for InfrastructureIt’s a sign of the times when “our bridges and roads are falling apart” gets cited as an issue more pressing than college football’s annoying Bowl Championship Series (BCS) on ESPN.

And, while the president hasn’t fulfilled his promise to set up an eight-team playoff yet, he’s taken the issue of infrastructure head-on. The administration’s focus on infrastructure investment is good for both long-term growth and generating jobs through the quick start-up of “shovel ready” projects.

However, one-time disbursements like those outlined in the Recovery Act or the president’s announcement earlier this week fall short of fixing more fundamental issues.

On the heels of Obama’s speech at Brookings on Tuesday, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) is at the same venue today pushing a much more sustainable approach.

Ellison is a co-sponsor on Rep. Rosa DeLauro’s (D-CT) National Infrastructure Development Bank Act, a good start on developing sustainable infrastructure funding the country so desperately needs.

DeLauro and and Ellison’s bill builds on the work of a bipartisan commission chaired by former Sen. Warren Rudman (R-NH) and titan of finance Felix Rohatyn. The bill envisions $5 billion a year from the federal government to capitalize the bank and a government debt guarantee of up to $50 billion.

But even Ellison and DeLauro’s idea can be improved upon. As outlined in Jessica Milano’s PPI policy memo, “Building our 21st Century Infrastructure,” an American Infrastructure Bank (AIB) seeded with a one-time investment at the federal level — a potential use for the TARP funds the president announced this week — and stakeholder buy-ins from the states would be a more effective way to fund a bank dedicated to financing infrastructure programs.

An infrastructure bank would offer a way to leverage much larger private sector investments from a strapped public budget. The bank would raise inexpensive funding for infrastructure projects by issuing debt on the capital markets backed by the U.S. government’s credit rating. By backing these bonds with the revenue or assets of the projects they are financing, taxpayers would not be left to pick up the bill. These projects would be determined according to strict criteria that promote economic development while being fiscally and environmentally sound.

After the President’s remarks on Tuesday, Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania — an infrastructure bank supporter — said the president had “essentially” endorsed the idea of an AIB. But while the president sounded open to the idea this week, he hasn’t gotten behind the legislation needed to get it done. President Obama endorsed an infrastructure bank back when he was candidate Obama. But, much like his promise of reforming the BCS, this threatens to become another campaign promise that falls by the wayside. Now’s the moment for the president to come off the sidelines and lead a sustained drive down the field.

Taking Measure of D.C.’s IMPACT Program

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As states craft their Race to the Top applications, they will likely focus on how to improve teacher and principal quality, as 28 percent of the points that they can earn fall under the “Great Teachers and Leaders” category. The criterion covers, among other things, the development of evaluation systems for teachers and principals, and the use of those evaluations to inform key decisions.

The press release announcing Race to the Top stressed a key point about the teacher-evaluation component:

…states should use multiple measures to evaluate teachers and principals, including a strong emphasis on the growth in achievement of their students. But it also reinforces that successful applicants will need to have rigorous teacher and principal evaluation programs and use the results of teacher evaluations to inform what happens in the schools.

That emphasis on “multiple measures” informs D.C. Public Schools’ new teacher evaluation system: IMPACT. The evaluation program offers a combination of approaches. Teachers of grades 4-8 mathematics and reading, for whom value-added data can be collected, will have 50 percent of their evaluation based on DC-CAS student achievement data. But another 40 percent will come from something called the Teaching and Learning Framework. For teachers in non-tested grades and subjects, the Teaching and Learning Framework comprises an even greater proportion – 80 percent – of their evaluation.

The Teaching and Learning Framework calls for five observations of teachers by administrators and master teachers in a given school year. Evaluation is broken down into three major categories: planning, teaching, and increasing effectiveness. Planning has to do with preparation of the content as well as the creation of a safe and productive learning environment; teaching gets into engagement, instructional techniques, and interaction with the students (among other factors); and increasing effectiveness deals with student assessment and the use of data to inform decision-making.

The use of more frequent observation of teachers and a clear rubric fills an important gap in teacher accountability. Since value-added student achievement data is currently available for only a small cohort of the teaching force, reliable tools for evaluating the rest of the teachers are crucial. We need rigorous ways to identify great and struggling teachers, but also to help the ones in the middle range improve. It’s easy to identify poor teachers; the tougher part is knowing how to help them improve or when to cut the cord. The Teaching and Learning Framework helps to define and show teachers paths to improvement through post-observation conferences.

George Parker, president of the Washington Teachers’ Union, has been critical of IMPACT, saying, “It’s very punitive. It takes the art of teaching and turns it into bean counting.” A union-administered focus group and survey found that the primary concerns revolve around inadequate training under the system prior to implementation and fears of its use for punitive measures rather than as a tool for improving teacher quality. Early reports on completed observations indicate some bumps in execution. Whether feeling satisfied, overrated, or underrated, teachers have expressed disappointment in the quality of suggestions offered by administrators and master teachers during post-observation conferences. Given the culture of mistrust and fear that permeates many schools, teachers are understandably skeptical and justified in noting that they cannot possibly hit all points of the rubric during a 30-minute observation. However, teachers must also recognize that their openness to the evaluation process is integral to its success and to building a better culture in schools.

The IMPACT program sets a process for clear expectations, clear feedback, and clear growth plans. While value-added testing is a useful measure for student achievement, IMPACT is a worthwhile experiment in pursuing a more expansive evaluation of teacher quality. Offering not just a goal but a pathway for improvement, it’s an innovation worth keeping an eye on.

The Problem of Food Deserts

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The following is an excerpt from Joel Berg’s “Good Food, Good Jobs: Turning Food Deserts into Jobs Oases,” a new policy report from PPI.

Our hunger, malnutrition, obesity, and poverty problems are closely linked. Low-income areas across America that lack access to nutritious foods at affordable prices — the so-called “food deserts” — tend to be the same communities and neighborhoods that, even in better economic times, are also “job deserts” that lack sufficient living-wage employment….A Good Food, Good Jobs program can address these intertwined economic and social problems.

[…]

In Los Angeles County in 2002, an average supermarket served 18,649 people, while the average supermarket in a low-income neighborhood served 27,986 people. The higher the concentration of poverty within a neighborhood, the fewer supermarkets there were. In ZIP codes where fewer than 10 percent of households lived below the federal poverty line, there were approximately 2.26 times as many supermarkets per household as there were in ZIP codes where the number of households living below the federal poverty line exceeded 40 percent. In addition, the higher the concentration of white people in a neighborhood, the greater the number of supermarkets.

In neighborhoods without supermarkets, corner stores, bodegas, and convenience stores fill in the gaps. In a study of rural Orangeburg County, South Carolina, researchers identified 77 stores in the county, of which only 16 percent were supermarkets and 10 percent were grocery stores. The remaining 74 percent were convenience stores. Low-fat and nonfat milk, apples, high-fiber bread, eggs, and smoked turkey were available in 75 to 100 percent of supermarkets and grocery stores versus four to 29 percent of convenience stores. Just 28 percent of all stores sold any of the fruits or vegetables included in the survey. Convenience stores also tended to charge more for items than did supermarkets.

A study conducted by the City of New York found, “The city is vastly underserved by local grocery stores.” That dearth has an economic impact. “NYC has the potential to capture approximately $1 billion in grocery spending lost to suburbs,” according to the city.

The lack of supermarkets makes a real difference. Areas without a full range of markets are “obesogenic” (obesity producing). Four different studies have demonstrated a positive association between access to food stores and improved dietary choices. A study in four states found that areas with high numbers of supermarkets had lower rates of obesity, while areas with higher numbers of convenience stores had higher levels of obesity. Nationwide, for every additional supermarket in a census tract, fruit and vegetable consumption increases by as much as 32 percent.

To add insult to injury, low-income Americans often pay more for food, even though they often purchase food of lower quality than that purchased by higher-income Americans.

To read the executive summary, click here. To download the report, click here.

Europe, We Love You, But Please Shut Up

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Over the course of the past week, the Swedish government, which currently holds the EU’s soon-to-be-extinguished rotating presidency, suggested that the European Union’s foreign ministries declare Jerusalem a divided city and the future capital of a Palestinian state. The draft statement also implied that the EU would recognize a unilateral Palestinian declaration of statehood.

The Israelis reacted harshly, and lobbied the Europeans to change the statement, which now reads, “If there is to be a genuine peace, a way must be found (through negotiations) to resolve the status of Jerusalem as the future capital of two states.”

Even the milder declaration hasn’t exactly received much enthusiasm from the Israelis, while garnering divided support between the Arab League and Palestinian Authority.

Skeptics say that Sweden’s stab at forging European unity was a cynical attempt to leave a legacy from its last crack at the EU presidency (with the advent of Herman Von Rompuy’s more permanent ascent to that post) to either show symbolic solidarity with Palestine or to forge a joint European position on an important issue.

And though the Palestinians are, of course, content to receive international backing, let’s be honest: This effort at joint European diplomacy looks like amateur hour and risks further destabilizing an already fragile process.

A few months ago, I had lunch with a friend involved in European social-democratic circles. He said (and I’m paraphrasing), “Europe can’t do anything on the diplomatic front with Israel/Palestine, but if America can broker a deal, we are ready and anxious to pay for the whole thing: security, development, trade… you name it.”

My friend was right — Europe hasn’t invested much diplomatic capital in the Middle East peace process. Issuing public and controversial statements of questionable utility could only upset – and, in the worst case, undo — the hard, delicate, behind-the-scenes work of the American administration.

We’d love for Europe to pay; but for now, we’d also love for it to shut up.

Some Unanswered Questions on Financial Reform

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA)-authored Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act passed the House Financial Services Committee last Wednesday, and could come to a floor vote in the House as soon as this week. Through legislative jujitsu on Frank’s part, the bill will have a lead on Sen. Chris Dodd’s (D-CT) efforts in the Senate.

The day after the committee passed the legislation, I saw Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-CO) talk about it at an event hosted by the National Journal and got to exchange a few words with him on the subject. He was positive about the bill and its chances in the House (it will likely pass easily), and gave positive marks to the administration’s handling of the crisis in its first year in office.

But while Perlmutter said he felt the House has done its part to address regulatory reforms, I thought some of the accomplishments he touted leave unanswered fundamental questions raised by the financial crisis.

He spoke about the legislation’s planned Financial Stability Council, that would provide a forum for regulators like the Fed to address systemic risk. But the Financial Stability Council, instead of facilitating coordination among regulators, won’t live up to expectations — much like what happened with the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) that was supposed to facilitate information-sharing in the intelligence sector, but has had limited effectiveness in getting different agencies to talk to each other. The weak mandate of a Financial Stability Council would lead to regulator shopping by financial institutions, a temptation that can lead to problems similar to those seen in the case of under-regulated AIG. Moreover, the resolution authority that the council would have is useful only after the fact — it would not preemptively deal with the Too Big To Fail problem we still face.

Fixing Mark-to-Market Requirements

More generally, however, Perlmutter mentioned two ideas the House is considering that could actually contain the seeds of our next crisis.

One idea is extending the Financial Accounting Standards Board’s (FASB) loosening of mark-to-market requirements for financial institutions to value their securities. Perlmutter wants to suspend mark-to-market and make permanent the FASB’s contentious April decision to ease mark-to-market rules.

The rule would let the Financial Stability Council order FASB to suspend mark-to-market in cases where there is no market in a security or securities are being sold in a “fire sale” or distressed environment. More worrisome, however, is that banks get to declare whether the market in the securities they are holding is distressed or not. Banks can drive a truckload of bad investment decisions through this loophole without having to disclose them on their bottom line or affecting capital requirements. Under this new rule, banks will have no incentive to conduct diligent analysis of the securities they hold — anything that turns out to be worthless (like bonds backed by subprime loans) can just be called “distressed.” This would decrease transparency and not restore confidence to the system.

But mark-to-market does have the bad consequence of increasing volatility in bank balance sheets. During crises like last year’s, banks can even perversely see mark-to-market improve their bottom line the closer they get to bankruptcy.

A better idea than the one Perlmutter mentioned has been put forward by PPI contributor Robert Pozen in his new book, Too Big To Save. Pozen suggests delinking banking capital regulations from accounting mark-to-market rules by effectively recognizing all securities as being “held for sale” (an accounting distinction) for regulatory purposes. This would allow us to continue to keep the transparency in assets that mark-to-market allows, while avoiding the bottom line volatility that banks would like to avoid.

What to Do About Sarbanes-Oxley

The second idea is exempting firms from some Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) reporting requirements. Passed in the wake of Enron, SOX was designed to hold companies and their executives accountable for their auditing, and eliminate some glaring conflicts of interest in financial auditing.

SOX does two good things. It makes a publicly held company have legitimate auditors, and ensures that those same auditors aren’t also advising the company on how to prepare the books for auditing (thereby basically handing over the answer key before a test). SOX also made sure that companies had proper controls that minimized the risk of errors in financial statements and of people either using company money inappropriately (as Enron did in off-balance-sheet shell companies) and of people embezzling money. Exempting firms from this would eventually lead to the same bad behavior happening again.

That said, SOX isn’t without flaws. Many in the auditing industry perceive it as very manpower intensive and, as a result, a significant burden to publicly listed companies, especially smaller ones (with income under $100 million). The SEC has responded by annually exempting small companies from some reporting requirements, but the exemption is not going to be extended past next year.

The solution to this problem is to streamline SOX to make it less burdensome to companies, not gutting it and letting new Enrons bubble up. Instead of providing an internal control report with each annual filing to the SEC — which can require up to three percent of a small company’s income — the SEC and Congress should encourage accounting oversight boards to spell out further guidelines and best practices to adopt. This streamlined SOX could even be extended to non-public financial institutions, as a key part of what allowed Bernie Madoff to steal people’s money for so long was having a small one-man upstate auditor keep tabs on his multi-billion dollar Ponzi scheme.

PPI Releases Policy Report on Food Jobs and Hunger

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

NEWS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 8, 2009

PRESS CONTACTS:
Steven Chlapecka—schlapecka@ppionline.org, T: 202.525.3931
or Lori Azim—lori.azim@gmail.com, T: 718.362.0473

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Americans facing and living with hunger is on the rise. In 2008, 49 million Americans struggled to find adequate and affordable food in the United States. Good Food, Good Jobs: Turning Food Deserts into Jobs Oases, a new policy report authored by Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger and former U.S. Department of Agriculture coordinator for community food security, proposes the creation of a food and jobs program to fight hunger, foster economic growth, and bolster employment.

Download the full policy report here.

“Our hunger, malnutrition, obesity and poverty problems are closely linked,” writes Berg. “A Good Food, Good Jobs program can address these intertwined economic and social problems, and help the Obama administration meet two of its top goals: job creation and improving nutrition.”

By creating a Good Food, Good Jobs program, the author argues the government could solve a number of very tangible problems, while fusing the growing public interest in food issues with ongoing efforts to fight poverty at the grassroots level.  Berg’s paper builds upon the brief discussion of community food security work in his book, published last year, titled All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America?

Download the full policy report here.

 

For more information or to speak with the author, contact Steven Chlapecka, schlapecka@ppionline.org, 202.525.3931or Lori Azim, lori.azim@gmail.com, 718.362.0473.

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Tea Party Party?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Republicans’ favorite polling outfit, Rasmussen, sure gave the GOP a toxic little gift this week, in the form of a “generic ballot” for Congress listing the Tea Party Movement (hypothetically organized as a political party) as an option. The Tea Party brand outperformed the GOP 23 percent to 18 percent (Democrats lead the pack with 36 percent).

The Tea Party movement has been around for roughly 10 months, compared to 156 years for the Republican Party.

Unsurprisingly, another political parvenu is being closely linked to this third-party talk. On Friday, Sarah Palin was pressed by a conservative talk radio host to rule a third-party presidential run in 2012 out or in. She responded: “If the Republican party gets back to that [conservative] base, I think our party is going to be stronger and there’s not going to be a need for a third party, but I’ll play that by ear in these coming months, coming years.”

Palin nicely sums up the real meaning of the Tea Party threat. It is exceptionally unusual, not to mention counter-intuitive, for a major party to move away from what is generally perceived to be the political “center” and become self-obsessed with ideological purity immediately after two crushing general election defeats. But the Republican Party has been doing just that; it is a far more conservative party, in terms of its overall message, than it was going into the 2008 election cycle. But it’s not conservative enough just yet for a lot of activists, and for those Tea Party participants who really do think “looters” and “loafers” elected Barack Obama and are busily constructing a totalitarian society. Palin’s telling the world the rightward trend needs to continue, or she’ll be pleased to act out the GOP’s worst nightmare in 2012.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Industry Bashes the EPA Endangerment Finding

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As expected, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finally issued its “endangerment finding” on carbon dioxide. Everyone has known for months that the EPA would be issuing the ruling.

It was prompted by a 2007 Supreme Court decision that found that greenhouse gases are air pollutants covered by the Clean Air Act. Since the Obama administration took power, it was only a matter of time when the EPA would act to comply with the Supreme Court ruling. Certainly doing it before Copenhagen, as my colleague Mike Signer pointed out, hands President Obama a big stick as he prepares to attend the summit next week.

Just as expected was the reaction of certain industry actors to the EPA’s move. The EPA finding “could result in a top-down command-and-control regime that will choke off growth by adding new mandates to virtually every major construction and renovation project,” said U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Thomas Donohue.

Donohue’s right that the EPA ruling could lead to command-and-control regulation of carbon emissions. Which leads one to ask – why has the Chamber of Commerce been stonewalling against cap-and-trade legislation? Knowing that the EPA would have to act on emissions, why did the Chamber and other industry players sit out the cap-and-trade process?

Cap-and-trade is a far more flexible process by which the economy can curb carbon emissions. Moreover, it’s a process that’s been open to industry stakeholders – note the gnashing of teeth over the giveaways in the Waxman-Markey bill. Even EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson yesterday said that legislation is still the best way to confront the challenge of climate change.

Yet despite all that and the looming threat of the EPA ruling, the Chamber of Commerce and other industry rejectionists have refused to come and sit at the table to discuss cap-and-trade. And something tells me that even with the EPA finding, the Chamber is still not going to be joining the discussion on cap-and-trade. Instead, they’ll resort to the one thing we know for certain we’ll see in this process: lawsuits.

Vets for Energy Security

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As the Copenhagen summit on climate change gets under way, we’re going to hear a lot from naysayers like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck about the alleged hoax that is climate change. But Operation: Free, a group I’ve written about before, is cutting across ideological lines by using veterans to frame the issue of energy independence as one of national security. It’s a solid idea, and one that’s gaining momentum.

They just wrapped up a bus tour promoting their mission, and even got a shout-out from President Obama on live TV. Check out the video:

Good Food, Good Jobs: Turning Food Deserts into Jobs Oases

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

 

Tens of millions of Americans need more nutritious, more affordable food. Tens of millions need better jobs. Just as the Obama administration and Congress have supported a “green jobs” initiative to simultaneously fight unemployment and protect the environment, they should launch a “Good Food, Good Jobs” initiative. Given that large numbers of food jobs could be created rapidly and with relatively limited capital investments, their creation should become a consideration in any jobs bill that Congress and the president enact.

Our hunger, malnutrition, obesity, and poverty problems are closely linked. Low-income areas across America that lack access to nutritious foods at affordable prices — the so-called “food deserts” — tend to be the same communities and neighborhoods that, even in better economic times, are also “job deserts” that lack sufficient living-wage employment. A concurrent problem has been the growing concentration of our food supply in a handful of food companies that are now “too big to fail.” A Good Food, Good Jobs program can address these intertwined economic and social problems.

In partnership with state, local, and tribal governments, nonprofit organizations, and the private sector, the federal initiative would bolster employment, foster economic growth, fight hunger, cut obesity, improve nutrition, and reduce spending on diet-related health problems. By doing so, not only could government help solve a number of very tangible problems, but it could fuse the growing public interest in food issues with the ongoing efforts, usually underfunded and underreported, to fight poverty at the grassroots level.

A Good Food, Good Jobs program could provide the first serious national test of the effectiveness of such efforts in boosting the economy and improving public health. The new initiative should:

  • Provide more and better-targeted seed money to food jobs projects. The federal government should expand and more carefully target its existing grants and loans to start new and expand existing community food projects: city and rooftop gardens; urban farms; food co-ops; farm stands; community-supported agriculture (CSA) projects; farmers’ markets; community kitchens; and projects that hire unemployed youth to grow, market, sell, and deliver nutritious foods while teaching them entrepreneurial skills.
  • Bolster food processing. Since there is far more profit in processing food than in simply growing it (and since farming is only a seasonal occupation), the initiative should focus on supporting food businesses that add value year-round, such as neighborhood food processing/freezing/canning plants; businesses that turn raw produce into ready-to-eat salads, salad dressings, sandwiches, and other products; healthy vending-machine companies; and affordable and nutritious restaurants and catering businesses.
  • Expand community-based technical assistance. Federal, state, and local governments should dramatically expand technical assistance to such efforts and support them by buying their products for school meals and other government nutrition assistance programs, as well as for jails, military facilities, hospitals, and concession stands in public parks, among other venues. Additionally, the AmeriCorps program — significantly increased recently by the bipartisan passage of the Edward Kennedy Serve America Act — should provide large numbers of national-service participants to implement nonprofit food jobs efforts.
  • Develop a better way of measuring success. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) should develop a “food access index,” a new measure that would take into account both the physical availability and economic affordability of nutritious foods, and use this measure as another tool to judge the success of food projects. All such efforts should be subject to strict performance-based outcome measures, and programs should not be expanded or re-funded unless they can prove their worth.
  • Invest in urban fish farming. Given that fish is the category of food most likely to be imported, and given growing environmental concerns over both wild and farm-raised fish, the initiative should provide significant investment into the research and development of environmentally sustainable, urban, fish-production facilities.
  • Implement a focused research agenda. The government should enact a focused research agenda to answer the following questions: Can community food enterprises that pay their workers sufficient wages also make products that are affordable? Can these projects become economically self-sufficient over the long run, particularly if they are ramped up to benefit from economies of scale? Could increased government revenues due to economic growth and decreased spending on health care and social services offset long-term subsidies? How would the cost and benefits of government spending on community food security compare to the cost and benefits of the up to $20 billion that the U.S. government now spends on traditional farm programs, much of which goes to large agribusinesses?

For a community to have good nutrition, three conditions are necessary: food must be affordable; food must be available; and individuals and families must have enough education to know how to eat better. This comprehensive proposal accomplishes those objectives. Moreover, in the best-case scenario, it could create large numbers of living-wage jobs in self-sustaining businesses even as it addresses our food, health, and nutrition problems. But even in a worst-case scenario, the plan would create short-term subsidized jobs that would provide an economic stimulus, and at least give low-income consumers the choice to obtain more nutritious foods — a choice so often denied to them.

Download the full report.

Popular Dissent “From the Left” On Health Reform

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Nate Silver has a post up at 538.com that is sure to get a lot of attention. Looking closely at an IPSOS/McClatchey poll that asks supporters and opponents of health care reform their underlying concerns, Nate notices that about one-fourth of those opposing current proposals think they “don’t go far enough to reform health care,” and suggests there’s a little-discussed segment of the electorate that might either grow if reform is further compromised, and/or might eventually come around if and when legislation is on the president’s desk.

This is an argument that Jonathan Chait made a couple of weeks ago at TNR, based on earlier polling.

Both articles are important refutations of the common assumption of conservatives that there is monolithic majority opposition to health care reform, and also a monolithic majority of Americans happy with the status quo in health care.

Beyond that, of course, this argument will be catnip to those progressives who are searching for ways to convince the White House and the congressional Democratic leadership to abandon or greatly toughen its endless negotiations with Senate “centrists” and the odd Republican, particularly over the public option. A majority of Americans, they will argue, either likes the current bill or wants something with more and more generous coverage, and a stronger public option. This is, of course, a subset of the ancient debate among Democrats between the strategy of seeking a majority coalition by peeling off “centrist” independents, or by solidifying and energizing the presumably liberal party “base” (along with “populist” independents).

There are, however, two problems with excessive reliance on the “progressive majority” analysis on health care reform. The first is that the polling numbers are based on some pretty vague ideas about what would constitute “doing more” on the health care front; it’s not entirely clear “more” means “more” of what progressive opinion-leaders want. And the second problem, more to the immediate point, is that in a Senate with a sixty-vote threshold for enactment of major legislation, a handful of Democratic and Republican senators, who represent not the nation as a whole but their own states, have the whip hand on the details of health care reform. I don’t think many progressives would want to abandon health care reform if a durable majority did, in fact, favor the status quo; this is a complex issue that’s not exactly good material for a plebiscite.

The more useful observation about the existence of a “dissent from the left” on health reform involves the wrath that Republicans (and obstructionist Democrats) may well inherit if nothing happens this year, and health care premiums, along with insurance industry abuses, continue to get steadily worse. We will then be talking not about a constantly shifting and poorly understood thing called “Obamacare,” but about one party that sees a major national challenge and wants to do something about it, and another that’s fine with an increasingly untenable status quo.

The diversity of opinion among those unhappy with the present legislation is, to be clear, an excellent argument for increasing the frequency and volume of claims that said legislation really will accomplish a great deal, if not everything it should or could achieve. All the news that’s been made about compromises on health reform over the last few months, along with reform advocates’ efforts to reassure seniors and others that they won’t lose anything worth caring about, have undoubtedly “undersold” the extent of change that even a “weakened” bill would make happen. A reform effort that’s marketed as a tepid bowl of porridge won’t satisfy much of anybody.

The Incredible Hulk in Copenhagen

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Among some members of the chattering class, it’s become something of a meme to assert that the Obama administration is too deferential to its opponents — whether Tea Partiers arguing about health care or Senate Republicans attacking on Afghanistan. The charge has especially been taken up by his critics, who seem to delight in attacking the president they’re beating up as a president whom, well, they can beat up. In September, for instance, Fred Barnes wrote in the Weekly Standard, “There’s the Obama who defers, the one who dithers, and the one who’s out of touch. The Obama presidencies have one thing in common. They’re all weak.”

These critics should be silenced, at least for a while, by the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) announcement today formally declaring that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant, paving the way for its regulation under the Clean Air Act.

On the cusp of meetings in Copenhagen to discuss an international climate treaty, the announcement has huge significance. It essentially enables the administration to circumvent climate obstructionists in Congress. Under the rules announced today, the administration can not only directly regulate carbon — it can exceed the limits contemplated by current Senate and House bills that would cap carbon dioxide emissions by 17 to 20 percent by 2020, compared with 2005 levels.

It seems unlikely that the EPA will actually act unilaterally to regulate carbon; the most administrable policy will probably remain market-based solutions such as cap-and-trade and similar proposals, rather than a command-and-control approach. However, the announcement today has political and strategic significance beyond its legal effect — and shows that the administration has just opened a brand new offensive playbook on carbon.

Two things are clear from the announcement today. First, the EPA decision puts the president on an unequivocal and strong footing for his visit to Copenhagen in a little over a week. The president will now be able to assert leadership on the issue on the basis of a clear authority to act.

Second, with today’s announcement, Barack Obama has placed a big stick on his desk in the Oval Office. His opponents in Congress and in industry will be pounding their own desks in outrage. Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-OH) immediately released a statement today, for instance, saying, “The EPA claims its process is dictated by science, however, it’s conveniently timed to push its politics.” Yes, that is a plaintive note you detected in Sensenbrenner’s statement. That’s because the president’s opponents will now have no option but to play on the president’s turf on carbon.

Cap-and-trade passed the U.S. House earlier this year. As it stands, cap and trade — originally a market-based, Republican-friendly program — faces a very uncertain fate next spring in the U.S. Senate. But with his move today, the president has told Senate opposition that he has the upper hand, and that if they do not act to cut carbon, he will. On climate change, where the president will certainly be faced with Tea Party-ish opposition every day of his administration, the Incredible Hulk-like transformation (green meeting muscle) comes just in time.

Weekend Papers Detail White House Afghanistan Review

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In the wake of President Obama’s West Point speech announcing the administration’s new strategy for Afghanistan, the White House must have been concerned that lingering charges of warmongering (on the left) or dithering (on the right) were going to dominate the public debate. Why would there be major weekend stories in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times to set the record straight?

Coming from sources as wide-ranging as National Security Advisor Jim Jones to “more than a dozen senior administration and military officials who took part in the strategy review,” these newspapers’ accounts of the strategy sessions show a president asking careful questions to redefine the mission in a way that protects the country while limiting open-ended commitment.

Last week, I was in the offices of a certain 24-hour cable news channel that’s nice enough to put my ugly mug on the air. I overheard one of its regular pundits exclaim breathlessly, “I just don’t understand why Obama just doesn’t do what his commanders on the ground tell him.” This weekend’s trio of articles paints the best picture I’ve seen of why not.

Here’s the short version of that answer from the NYT:

The decision represents a complicated evolution in Mr. Obama’s thinking. He began the process clearly skeptical of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s request for 40,000 more troops, but the more he learned about the consequences of failure, and the more he narrowed the mission, the more he gravitated toward a robust if temporary buildup, guided in particular by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. …

The group went over the McChrystal assessment and drilled in on what the core goal should be. Some thought that General McChrystal interpreted the March strategy more ambitiously than it was intended to be.

And the longer version from the WaPo:

In June, McChrystal noted, he had arrived in Afghanistan and set about fulfilling his assignment. His lean face, hovering on the screen at the end of the table, was replaced by a mission statement on a slide: “Defeat the Taliban. Secure the Population.”

“Is that really what you think your mission is?” one of those in the Situation Room asked. …

“I wouldn’t say there was quite a ‘whoa’ moment,” a senior defense official said of the reaction around the table. “It was just sort of a recognition that, ‘Duh, that’s what, in effect, the commander understands he’s been told to do.’ Everybody said, ‘He’s right.’ ”

 

“It was clear that Stan took a very literal interpretation of the intent” of the NSC document, said Jones, who had signed the orders himself. “I’m not sure that in his position I wouldn’t have done the same thing, as a military commander.” But what McChrystal created in his assessment “was obviously something much bigger and more longer-lasting…than we had intended.”

Whatever the administration might have said in March, officials explained to McChrystal, it now wanted something less absolute: to reverse the Taliban’s momentum, deter it and try to persuade a significant number of its members to switch sides. “We certainly want them not to be able to overthrow the government,” Jones said.

On Oct. 9, after awaking to the news that he had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Obama listened to McChrystal’s presentation. The “mission” slide included the same words: “Defeat the Taliban.” But a red box had been added beside it saying that the mission was being redefined, Jones said. Another participant recalled that the word “degrade” had been proposed to replace “defeat.”

Already briefed on the previous day’s discussion, the president “looked at it and said: ‘To be fair, this is what we told the commander to do. Now, the question is, have we directed him to do more than what is realistic? Should there be a sharpening . . . a refinement?'” one participant recalled.

Said a senior White House adviser who took extensive notes of the meeting: “The big moment when the mission became a narrower one was when we realized we’re not going to kill every last member of the Taliban.” [emphases mine]

Separately, a few other nuggets, like on troop numbers (NYT):

On Oct. 9, Mr. Obama and his team reviewed General McChrystal’s troop proposals for the first time. Some in the White House were surprised by the numbers, assuming there would be a middle ground between 10,000 and 40,000.

“Why wasn’t there a 25 number?” one senior administration official asked in an interview. He then answered his own question: “It would have been too tempting.”

And from the LA Times‘ piece on the date of withdrawal:

Gates was also persuaded by Petraeus and others that announcing the date would help create an incentive for the Afghans to act, he said this week.

The proposed date also would make it such that the withdrawal of troops would begin just as the campaign for the 2012 presidential election was heating up.

Still, it was crucial to Gates and other military officials that Obama not announce a specific drawdown plan. Doing so could embolden militants, Defense officials said. Gates and others wanted to make sure that the pace of the drawdown would be based on the security situation — not a set timetable.

“Ultimately,” said a senior Defense official, Gates “wanted conditionality, and got it.”

All three articles are must-reads to anyone who wants to understand the complexity of the White House’s decision. In sum, it seems that the review sessions narrowed the goal, and resourced it as robustly and quickly as possible.

I understand that the administration needed to fix a date for beginning withdrawal as a political concession to the progressive base, and I still remain uncomfortable with that notion, even as these articles do a good job clarifying that the withdrawal’s pace is subject to the security situation.

It’s About Time: 180 Six-Hour Days No Longer Meet the Needs of Students

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The problems that beset America’s schools are myriad: a seemingly unbridgeable achievement gap; deteriorating international competitive position in educational attainment; data showing that schools are narrowing their curricula at a time when a broader course of study is necessary for success. But these challenges have also forced the country’s education leaders to think creatively about reforming the nation’s schools.

One idea that has begun to catch on is the need to change one of the most intractable features of our country’s education system: a 19th-century school calendar of 180 six-hour school days. Increasingly, schools across the country are switching to an expanded time frame to enhance teaching and learning.

Our organization, the National Center on Time & Learning (NCTL), has sought to focus the education policy agenda on converting standard district public schools across America to expanded learning time (ELT) schools. After successfully promoting the idea of shifting schools to ELT in Massachusetts — the first such state policy in the nation — NCTL has spent the last two years building federal interest in the concept, as well as early-adopter interest in several other states and districts.

Education leaders have recognized the need for more days in our school calendar for some time now, but until recently there has been little movement on the issue. While many charter schools have been quick to innovate, using their autonomy to give students the additional time they need to excel academically, traditional district schools have not followed suit. Costs and deeply entrenched cultural routines and expectations have been key obstacles to change. More important, education leaders and policy makers have lacked the “proof points,” policy levers, and models for the successful expansion of learning time within standard schools.

Steps in the Right Direction

But all of this is changing. Today, we are proud to release a new report that finds that a growing number of U.S. schools have already broken from the traditional school calendar and shifted to expanded learning time to improve educational outcomes. The report draws from our new national database and is the first effort to catalog schools operating with days substantially longer than the six-hour norm and, in many cases, a calendar that exceeds the standard 180-day school year.

The report comes at a time of great momentum for the issue nationally. In March, President Obama called for expanded learning time as part of his education agenda, stating, “We can no longer afford an academic calendar designed for when America was a nation of farmers who needed their children at home plowing the land at the end of each day.” In his Senate confirmation hearing, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said, “I think our school day is too short, our week is too short, our year is too short.” And the guidelines for the highly competitive Race to the Top grant channel unprecedented federal funds to education, including incentivizing adoption of a longer school day and year as part of a strategy for improving schools.

Supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the report and accompanying database comes over 25 years after A Nation at Risk called for a longer school day and year. The report, Tracking an Emerging Movement: A Report on Expanded-Time Schools in America, identifies 655 schools in 36 states serving more than 300,000 students that met the following definition: “An expanded-time school is any public school that has deliberately added more time to the school day and/or days to the school year for all enrolled students (or has been founded with a deliberately longer day and/or year than surrounding public schools) for the express purpose of improving student outcomes.” The study also includes key characteristics and survey data on 245 schools on how the added time is utilized and funded.

Key Findings and Future Research

Significant findings from the analysis of the profiled schools include:

  • On average these schools offer about 25 percent more time than the national norm, which would translate over the course of a school career to over three additional years in school for participating students;
  • While many of the schools included are public charter schools, more than one-quarter of the schools identified are standard district public schools;
  • Compared with national averages, schools with expanded time serve a more heavily minority and poorer student population;
  • 75 percent of schools that convert from a traditional school schedule to an expanded school day pay their teachers more for the additional time worked, an average increase of over 13 percent, while only 44 percent of new schools that start up offer increased compensation; and
  • Data suggest that more time may boost academic achievement, with students in schools with a significantly expanded school day outperforming their district peers.

While the limited data show a positive relationship between student performance and daily time, more study is needed to know what impact these schools will have on closing achievement gaps and providing a more well-rounded education. Even at this stage, however, we can surmise that the act of giving students and teachers more time together has the potential to unlock greater student achievement and engagement, as past research has been fairly clear in establishing a link between time spent learning and student retention and mastery.

As leaders in Washington, D.C. and throughout the country seek to spur the kinds of educational innovation that will bring us closer to our ambitious goal of universal student proficiency, it is clear that expanded time will be a part of the solution. Our challenge will be to learn from the highest performers and ensure that best practices are implemented as this movement expands.

No Free Lunch when It Comes to Bending the Curve

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

If you’ll forgive me for egregiously mixed metaphors, I want to draw attention to an implicit assumption among many health care reform advocates related to controlling healthcare spending: that if not for the politics involved, it would be fairly easy to rein in costs.

That’s because, the argument goes, there is easily identifiable inefficiency in the way we currently spend health care dollars. There are enormous regional disparities in, for instance, per capita Medicare spending. What is more, these differences are apparently unrelated to differences in the health of the underlying populations, and they don’t produce better outcomes. Rather, the differences reflect the ways that health care providers diagnose and treat patients in different parts of the country. So say the much-revered Dartmouth College health researchers, whose findings have been fairly uncritically embraced by many on the left.

Politics aside (the difficulty is that one person’s wasteful diagnostic test is another’s life-saving intervention), I always was suspicious of this argument. If there are excess profits to be made, then why is it that providers in only some parts of the country go after them or successfully extract them? Then a fascinating study came out that was mostly ignored but that should have raised questions about the Dartmouth research.

A potential problem with the Dartmouth research is that if there are unmeasured differences in health between patients who go to different providers, then the finding that greater spending is unrelated to outcomes could simply derive from people in worse health being very expensive to treat. The Dartmouth researchers use relatively crude measures to statistically control for these differences (because they are the only ones available).

MIT economist Joseph Doyle got around this problem by looking at patients who needed emergency care while they were visiting Florida. Because there is no reason to expect that unhealthy tourists are more likely to end up in higher-spending ERs, any differences in outcomes between those who went to high-spending hospitals and those who went to low-spending ones should reflect only the spending difference. Doyle found that higher spending did produce better outcomes.

Disparities in Data

Now MedPAC, the panel that monitors how Medicare reimburses providers and makes recommendations to Congress, has released a study that shows that disparities in Medicare spending are quite a bit smaller when other important factors — such as regional differences in wages and extra reimbursement related to medical education — are taken into account (hat tip to Mickey Kaus). If one looks only at per capita Medicare spending, high-spending areas of the country have costs that are 55 percent higher than low-spending areas of the country (I’m talking about the 90th and 10th percentiles, for those of you statistically inclined). After making MedPAC’s adjustments, however, that difference shrinks to 30 percent.

Thirty percent might still be considered a big number — in a perfect world adjusted spending shouldn’t differ at all — but other evidence in the MedPAC data gives reason to question the precision of any of these kinds of comparisons. I put the figures for all 404 geographic areas into a spreadsheet (which you can get from me if you’re interested — data wants to be free!) and looked at the top and bottom quarter of adjusted spending.

High-spending areas are dominated by the South, particularly the states stretching from Florida across to Texas and Oklahoma. They also include 15 of the 30 biggest metropolitan areas, including all of the biggest southern and midwestern metros, save Atlanta and Minneapolis, and none of the biggest northeastern or western metros, save Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Denver, and Pittsburgh.

On the other hand, low-spending areas are dominated by the West, particularly Alaska, Hawaii, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and most of California (with the exception of Los Angeles and San Diego). Also overrepresented are small metropolitan areas in the upper Midwest and Dakotas, in New York, Maine, Virginia, and Georgia. None of the biggest ten metropolitan areas are represented in the bottom quarter, and only four of the biggest thirty are (San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, and Sacramento).

Compare these findings to those of the Dartmouth folks (Map 1). While many of the same conclusions show up in their map, there are some notable differences. Most importantly, California and the Boston-Washington corridor look like they spend a lot more in the Dartmouth map than they do in the MedPAC data (and the Mountain West states look like they spend a lot less).

Fixing Inefficiencies Not a Silver Bullet

If different sets of rankings differ as notably as these two do, then that says to me that there is a lot of noise in these rankings and that perfectly adjusted spending figures would potentially produce a distribution of areas that would look different from either set. In particular, I suspect that it would show that the vast majority of spending variation could be explained by factors that had nothing to do with inefficiencies.

The point is that even discounting the political difficulties of enacting policies that rely on comparative effectiveness research to weed out inefficiencies in healthcare spending, it’s not at all clear that regional variation in healthcare spending is proof that such inefficiencies exist. That’s not to say that there are no inefficiencies, but weeding them out won’t be as simple as making Florida providers act like Minnesota ones.

The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect those of the Progressive Policy Institute.