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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.

Left-Right Convergence?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The latest intra-progressive dustup over health care reform displays a couple of pretty important potential fault lines within the American center-left. One has to do with political strategy, and the role of the Democratic Party and the presidency in promoting progressive policy goals and social movements. I’ll be writing about that subject extensively in the coming days.

But the other potential fault line is ideological, and is sometimes hard to discern because it extends across a variety of issues. To put it simply, and perhaps over-simply, on a variety of fronts (most notably financial restructuring and health care reform, but arguably on climate change as well), the Obama administration has chosen the strategy of deploying regulated and subsidized private sector entities to achieve progressive policy results. This approach was a hallmark of the so-called Clintonian, “New Democrat” movement, and the broader international movement sometimes referred to as “the Third Way,” which often defended the use of private means for public ends. (It’s also arguably central to the American liberal tradition going back to Woodrow Wilson, and is even evident in parts of the New Deal and Great Society initiatives alongside elements of the “social democratic” tradition, which is characterized by support for publicly operated programs in key areas.)

To be clear, this is not the same as the conservative “privatization” strategy, which simply devolves public responsibilities to private entities without much in the way of regulation. In education policy, to cite one example, New Democrats (and the Obama administration) have championed charter public schools, which are highly regulated but privately operated schools that receive public funds in exchange for successful performance of publicly-defined tasks. Conservatives have typically called for private-school vouchers, which simply shift public funds to private schools more or less unconditionally, on the theory that they know best how to educate children.

Now clear as this distinction seems to “New Democrats,” there are a considerable number of progressives who think it’s largely a distinction without a difference, in education policy and elsewhere. And we are seeing that fundamental divergence on opinion on other, more prominent issues right now. On the financial front, the Obama administration reflexively pursued a strategy of regulation and subsidies for the financial sector, without modifying the fundamental nature of financial institutions, even as critics on the left argued for nationalization (at least temporarily) of key financial functions. At the more popular level, critics of TARP from the left joined critics of TARP from the right in deploring “bailouts” of failed financial institutions, even though the two groups of critics held vastly different views of the right alternative course of action.

Similarly in the health care reform debate, the Obama administration pursued legislation that utilized regulated and subsidized private for-profit health insurers to achieve universal health coverage. This approach was inherently flawed to “single-payer” advocates on the left, who strongly believe that private for-profit health insurers are the main problem in the U.S. health care system. The difference was for a long time papered over by the cleverly devised “public option,” which was acceptable to many New Democrat types as a way of ensuring robust competition among private insurers, and which became crucial to single-payer advocates who viewed it as a way to gradually introduce a superior, publicly-operated form of health insurance to those not covered by existing public programs like Medicare and Medicaid. (That’s why the effort to substitute a Medicare buy-in for the public option, which Joe Lieberman killed this week, received such a strong positive response from many progressives whose ultimate goal is an expansion of Medicare-style coverage to all Americans).

Now that the public option compromise is apparently no longer on the table, and there’s no Medicare buy-in to offer single-payer advocates an alternative path to the kind of system they favor, it’s hardly surprising that some progressives have gone into open opposition, and are using the kind of outraged and categorical language deployed by Marcy Wheeler yesterday. As with the financial issue, there’s now a tactical alliance between conservative critics of “ObamaCare,” who view the regulation and subsidization of private health insurers as “socialism,” and progressive critics of the legislation who view the same features as representing “neo-feudalism.”

To put it more bluntly, on a widening range of issues, Obama’s critics to the right say he’s engineering a government takeover of the private sector, while his critics to the left accuse him of promoting a corporate takeover of the public sector. They can’t both be right, of course, and these critics would take the country in completely different directions if given a chance. But the tactical convergence is there if they choose to pursue it.

For those of us whose primary interest is progressive unity and political success for the Democratic Party, it’s very tempting to downplay or even ignore this potential fault-line and the left-right convergence it makes possible. It’s also easy to dismiss critics-from-the-left of Obama as people primarily interested in long-range movement-building rather than short-term political success; that’s true for some of them. But sorting out these differences in ideology and perspective is, in my opinion, essential to the progressive political project. And with a rejuvenated and increasingly radical right’s hounds baying and sniffing at the doors of the Capitol, we don’t have the time or energy to spare in dialogues of the deaf wherein we call each other names while getting ready for the elections of 2010 and 2012.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Republicans Are Incumbents, Too!

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

An explosive political scandal in my home state of Georgia serves as a reminder that in state elections in 2010, there are many Republicans who are currently in control of statehouses, and could suffer the vicissitudes associated with malfeasance in office and a surly, wrong-track-dominated electorate.

Georgia’s Republican House Speaker Glenn Richardson resigned today, a few days after his ex-wife in a television interview said she knew for a fact that the conservative solon had conducted an extramarital affair with a utilities lobbyist even as he championed legislation highly beneficial to the lobbyist’s employer.  What made this charge political dynamite is that House Democrats had filed an ethics complaint against Richardson in 2007 making that exact charge, which was briskly dismissed by Republicans.

The story was made more lurid by the fact that Richardson had obtained considerable public sympathy last month by disclosing he had attempted suicide out of depression over the dissolution of his marriage. His ex-wife took to the airwaves in part to charge that the “suicide attempt” was in fact no more than an act of manipulation aimed at controlling her–and presumably, her mouth.

Georgia Republicans, of course, quickly handed Richardson an anvil, but it may not be so easy for them to avoid collateral damage; the scandal is already bleeding over into the borderline-vicious GOP gubernatorial primary for 2010.

One candidate, Secretary of State Karen Handel, has already reminded Georgians that one of her rivals, former state senator Eric Johnson, chaired the ethics panel that peremptorily dismissed the Democratic complaint against Richardson, which now appears to have been entirely legitimate. Another of her rivals, state Rep. Austin Scott, was one of Richardson’s strongest allies in the legislature.  Moreover, the blame-game over Richardson’s sex-and-corruption scandal can’t help but remind voters of the cozy relationship between the GOP and corporate influence-peddlers.

With two Democratic candidates for governor, former Gov. Roy Barnes and Attorney General Thurbert Baker, both looking reasonably competitive against the fractious GOP field, Republicans may not have much of a margin for error, even in this conservative state. Power has its privileges, but in this particular day and age, being the incumbent party comes with handicaps as well.

This piece is cross-posted at The New Republic.

More on the Public Option as Symbol

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Over at The Democratic Strategist, PPI Senior Fellow Ed Kilgore responds to my post on the public option. The impetus for my piece was the blogger Digby’s claim that the public option has “long since gone way beyond a policy to become a symbol.”

Ed notes that my post missed something important: that Digby is treating the public option as a symbol largely because that is what its opponents have done. Even in its weakened state, the foes of a public option have kept bashing away, transforming it into “a matter of pure power politics” that progressives like Digby believe the left must engage. From there, Ed argues that there is, in fact, less dividing progressives on the issue, that “if and when it’s sacrificed, it will be a matter of relative indifference to some of the ‘robust’ PO’s strongest supporters.”

I hope he’s right. For my part, my concern regarding the politics of the public option springs not from the fight over it but from what comes after passage. After acquiring such outsized status on the left, the absence of a public option — or the presence of a version barely recognizable to its supporters — in the final bill could well send progressives into despair over the administration and its achievement.

And that would be a shame. As Ezra Klein notes today:

It might have been a necessary thing from an activism point of view, but convincing liberals that this bill was worthless in the absence of the public option was a terrible decision, wrong on the merits and unfair to the base. The achievement of this bill is $900 billion to help people purchase health-care coverage, a new market that begins to equalize the conditions of the unemployed and the employed, and a regulatory structure in which this country can build, for the first time, a universal health-care system. Thousands and thousands of lives will be saved by this bill. Bankruptcies will be averted. Rescission letters won’t be sent. Parents won’t have to fret because they can’t take their child, or themselves, to the emergency room. This bill will, without doubt, do more good than any single piece of legislation passed during my (admittedly brief) lifetime. If it passes, the party that fought for it for decades deserves to feel a sense of accomplishment.

Mike Lux at Open Left also touches on this in a post today, posing the crucial question: “The deal on health care is about to get done: will progressives come out of it feeling like we got the first major progressive policy since the 1960s passed, or feeling like they got sold down the river?” If the public option becomes the standard by which health reform is judged, and there is a weak one or none at all in the final bill, then the latter seems likely. It would be nothing less than a tragedy if the progressive backlash against Obama and this Congress were to come on the heels of the passage of the most consequential progressive legislation this country has seen in decades.

Why a Key NATO Ally Will Likely Sit Out the Surge

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

You win some, you lose some: This morning NATO announced it would add 7,000 troops to the alliance’s Afghanistan deployment, a coup for Secretary Clinton and a much-needed boost to President Obama’s surge strategy. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that Germany is unlikely to be part of that mix.

Berlin, which has the third-largest deployment in the country, is holding off from committing more troops until a multinational planning conference in January. A few weeks ago, during a swing through Washington, German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg was still bullish, if vague, about the prospects for additional soldiers.

But what a difference a few weeks can make. Since then, the Kunduz truck-bombing scandal has claimed several heads, including those of the labor minister (formerly the defense minister) and the country’s top uniformed officer. It has also forced an embarrassing about-face from zu Guttenberg, who initially said the attack was justified but now says it was “militarily inappropriate.”

The scandal has sent public support for the war, already tenuous, into a tail spin. According to a new poll by ARD-Deutschlandtrend, 69 percent want Germany to withdraw immediately, a dramatic rise since the last survey, in September. The primary reason, according to 75 percent of respondents, is a loss of trust in the government’s ability to be “full and honest” about Afghanistan. The war is also fueling left-wing violence in Berlin and Hamburg, including a recent firebombing of a federal police station in the capital.

Merkel and zu Guttenberg remain steadfast behind the mission, but their coalition partners, the Free Democrats, are using the scandal to push for reduced combat roles and an accelerated withdrawal timetable. Their leader, Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, has said the January conference is not a “donor conference for troops” and declared in “a clear statement from the government” that Berlin will begin moving its soldiers to training and civil-affairs operations, rather than combat.

Even in the news reports surrounding NATO’s additional commitment, analysts expressed hope that Germany would commit more than 1,000 additional troops to Afghanistan come January. Unless the political dynamic inside the country changes dramatically in the next few weeks, those hopes will be dashed.

Confidence-Building in the West Bank

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Last week, Israeli PM Benyamin Netanyahu issued a unilateral 10-month halt to Israeli settlement construction in parts of the West Bank. The moratorium is riddled with loopholes — it excludes projects in East Jerusalem, as well as those already underway, and exempts public buildings like schools and synagogues.**

Furthermore, cynics believe that Netanyahu proposed the suspension at a time of Palestinian political weakness, putting the onus to respond on a divided Arab leadership that has become increasingly fragile in the wake of President Mahmoud Abbas’ announcement that he will not seek another term as Palestinian president in next year’s already postponed elections.

That’s why this moment is so critical: The Obama administration could play a pivotal role in facilitating some sort of coherent Palestinian response — something (anything!) more than a quick dismissal. It could be the smallest of gestures — even issuing an official statement of acceptance of Israel’s freeze and pledging that the next Palestinian government would like to work with Israel on the peace process — but it must show the world some measure of Palestinian unity and resolve to move forward.

That’s how confidence-building measures work, and the Obama administration should help the Palestinians to remain unified enough to issue a coherent response.

**If you’ll permit a bit of a digression, that last loophole reminds me of an infamous rumor attributed to the Australian Embassy here in D.C. A few years ago, the staff apparently requested funding from Canberra to build a bar in one of the embassy’s back rooms. Twice rejected because Australia’s Foreign Ministry didn’t want to further its diplomatic corps’ rowdy reputation, the staff remained undeterred, and merely switched “bar” to “chapel” on the funding request’s third — and successful — attempt. The moral here is that you can call a facility whatever you want, but its use is the only thing that counts.

The Neoconservative Pere et Fils

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PPI Senior Fellow Mike Signer has written a piece in Dissent magazine on Irving Kristol, his son, Bill, and the morphing of neoconservatism from an ideology of skepticism to one of hubris. An excerpt:

NEOCONSERVATISM, AS formulated by Irving Kristol, originated in privation, intellectual combat, and a reckoning with the harsh practical consequences of dangerous ideas. Irving Kristol’s parents were Eastern Europeans who arrived in America in the 1890s.  His father was a garment worker and later a clothing subcontractor; his mother gave birth to Irving in Brooklyn in 1920. When he was sixteen years old, he enrolled at the City College of New York (CCNY). Instead of paying much attention to classes, however, he dove into the extempore debate among the students.

The 1930s were a fervent time to be a student at CCNY. Fascism was taking hold in Italy, and communism was surging in the Soviet Union. The sometimes cheerful, sometimes angry clashes among students who were trying to decide where the world should go at this momentous period helped to launch an intellectual movement that was skeptical about the applications of pure theory.

Though it took decades for it to become “neoconservatism,” the roots of the movement lay in the young intellectuals’ effort to steer America away from the shoals of Stalinism, the horrible outgrowth of what had begun, decades earlier, as an ambitious political theory. This may help explain why Irving Kristol’s own political theory, for all its lushness and bombast, often counseled caution and modesty.  In a lecture he gave in 1970, he pronounced that “moral earnestness and intellectual sobriety” were the “elements . . . most wanted in a democracy.” Strikingly, he applied this ethic of restraint to democracy itself. In 1978, he wrote, “It is the fundamental fallacy of American foreign policy to believe, in face of the evidence, that all peoples, everywhere, are immediately ‘entitled’ to a liberal constitutional government—and a thoroughly democratic one at that.”

By contrast, in the years to come his son fixed neoconservative foreign policy on abstractions and evils—on metaphysics rather than physics—particularly when it came to democracy. As a result, the striking feature of Bill Kristol’s political theory is not the ideas but the extravagance surrounding them.  In a now-famous 1996 Foreign Affairsarticle co-authored with Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol wrote that Republicans should endorse a policy of “benevolent hegemony” that was “good for conservatives, good for America, and good for the world.” “America,” he added, “has the capacity to contain or destroy many of the world’s monsters, most of which can be found without much searching.”

Read the whole thing here.

Atlanta Mayoral Election: A Dog That Didn’t Bark

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Given the enormous attention that was paid by the chattering classes of Washington to gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey last month, you’d think any significant election would be deeply analyzed for possible national political implications. But earlier this week, one of America’s major cities, Atlanta, had a mayoral election that largely passed notice at all outside Georgia.

As it happens, state senator Kasim Reed, a Democrat, narrowly defeated city councilwoman Mary Norwood, an independent, in a runoff called when Norwood fell a bit short of a majority in the general election on November 3.  (note: Norwood has demanded a recount, but virtually no one outside her campaign believes it will reverse the outcome).

Had a thousand votes changed hands, and Norwood prevailed, I suspect we’d be hearing a lot from national Republicans about the significance of this election. After all, Reed was endorsed by the Georgia Democratic Party, whose 2010 gubernatorial front-runner, former Gov. Roy Barnes, cut ads for his fellow-Democrat.  Moreover, Norwood’s candidacy was fueled initially by her opposition to a local property tax hike, which could have made her a player in the Right’s national tax revolt narrative.  On a more sinister level, some conservatives might have played with a racial angle: Norwood was the first viable white candidate for mayor in Atlanta since 1981, while Reed is the protégé of outgoing African-American mayor Shirley Franklin, herself the protégé of the first two black mayors of the city, Andrew Young and the late Maynard Jackson.

The vote did in fact break largely (though not strictly) on racial lines, though in part that’s because the ideological differences between the candidate actually diminished during the runoff campaign.  Norwood displeased some early Republican backers by claiming to have voted for every Democratic presidential nominee since 1992, and also sought to outflank Reed among Atlanta’s sizable GLBT population by announcing her support for gay marriage.

We’ll never know for sure what sort of spin might have been applied to the results on Fox News had the result been different.  But there’s another mayoral runoff on tap December 12 in another southern sun belt center, Houston, with a similar racial angle, but with different ideological dynamics.  As in Atlanta, a white female candidate, city controller Annise Parker, ran first in the general election, and an African-American man, former city attorney Gene Locke, came from back of the pack to finish second.  Both candidates are considered progressive Democrats.  But the crucial difference from Atlanta is that Parker is an open lesbian, and Locke is flirting with an alliance with hard-line conservatives who warn that Parker’s election (along with that of two openly gay city council candidates) would represent a “gay takeover” of the city.   We’ll see how that one turns out, and whether any national dogs bark.

STATEMENT: Bipartisan Group Urges For Cost Containment on Health Care Reform

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Signatories

The signatories to this memo are all members of the “Fiscal Seminar,” a group of budget experts that has been meeting together for several years. The views expressed are those of the individuals involved and should not be interpreted as representing the views of their respective institutions. For purposes of identification, the affiliation of each signatory is listed.

Download the PDF version of the statement.

December 3, 2009

We are a politically diverse group of veteran budget and policy analysts. Our mission is to raise public awareness of America’s fiscal predicament, which threatens to undermine our country’s economic strength and independence, and to propose constructive remedies.

Despite our different political leanings, we are united by the conviction that slowing the growth rate of U.S. health-care costs is essential to defusing the nation’s fiscal crisis. That’s because escalating medical costs, together with the aging of our population and gains in longevity, are fueling the unsustainable growth of our big entitlement programs: Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

No one has made this argument more convincingly than President Obama. “So to say it as plainly as I can, health care is the single most important thing we can do for America’s long-term fiscal health,” he told the American Medical Association in June.

The President added:

And if we fail to act, federal spending on Medicaid and Medicare will grow over the coming decades by an amount almost equal to the amount our government currently spends on our nation’s defense. It will, in fact, eventually grow larger than what our government spends on anything else today. It’s a scenario that will swamp our federal and state budgets, and impose a vicious choice of either unprecedented tax hikes, or overwhelming deficits, or drastic cuts in our federal and state budgets.

We agree with the President that health care reform must expand coverage in a fiscally responsible way. We applaud as well his insistence that health-care legislation not only must be fully paid for, but must also include effective steps to “bend down the curve” of health care cost growth over time.

The bill now being considered by the Senate comes closest to meeting these conditions. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Senate bill goes beyond deficit neutrality. It would reduce the federal deficit by $130 billion in the next decade but by only one-quarter of 1 percent of GDP over the following decade. These conclusions, however, rest on large projected cuts in Medicare provider payments. If Congress decides to scale back those cuts, as it has done before, the net effect will be to expand the federal deficit, even if health reform is scored as deficit-neutral.

The Senate bill’s cost containment features include an excise tax on high-cost insurance plans, a Medicare Commission charged with weeding out ineffective and inefficient care, and pilot projects designed to test incentives for providing high quality care, rather than a higher volume of services. These measures point in a promising direction. But we can do better. At a time of exploding deficits and debt, we owe it to our children to reform health care in ways that strengthen, not weaken, America’s long-term budget outlook.

Therefore, we urge President Obama and Senate leaders to work together to build even stronger cost containment provisions into the Senate bill. While members of our groupdiffer on the best prescriptions for lowering costs, we agree that a credible menu of options should include the following:

  • More thorough reform of the open-ended tax treatment of employer-sponsored health plans. This subsidy creates strong incentives for higher health care spending, and perversely bestows its largest benefits on high earners with the costliest health plans. To really bend the cost curve, Congress must go beyond half-measures intended simply to raise revenue. Instead it should sharply limit the tax exemption or shift it toward a uniform credit.
  • A stronger Medicare Commission that delivers both structural reform and immediate savings. Medicare’s costs have risen steadily even though its payment rates are well below those of private insurers. Congress should empower the Commission to examine all aspects of Medicare – including its dominant, fee-for-service design – not just prices and payments. And it should take up on an expedited basis the Commission’s recommendations for savings that would be used both to defray part of the cost of expanding health coverage and to reduce the program’s long-term liabilities.
  • Powerful incentives to promote more efficient and cost-effective practices. Health reform should encourage public and private insurers to replace fee-for-service payment systems with innovative methods – including performance-based payments, bundled payments, and capitated payments – that promote more efficient use of resources. In addition, new approaches to health care delivery, such as accountable care organizations, should be developed as a way of improving the efficiency and quality of care provided to patients. Research into the comparative effectiveness of treatments also could help link payment systems to performance. Health IT bonuses for “meaningful use” should be linked to achieving better results as part of systems of quality measurement, quality improvement and care coordination.
  • A federal health care budget. We believe substantive reforms in America’s big health programs are more likely to happen if they are buttressed by changes in the federal budget process. Last year, our group proposed that Congress establish an explicit budget for health care programs, and entitlements in general. Like budget caps and PAYGO rules, a health budget would be an action-forcing mechanism for moving toward serious, structural reforms of the nation’s entitlement programs.
  • Medical malpractice reform. None of the bills in Congress confronts the urgent need for a more reliable and less costly system of medical justice. Yet CBO recently estimated that enacting a “typical” package of tort reform proposals would reduce U.S. health care spending by roughly $54 billion over 10 years.

Health care reform and fiscal responsibility must go hand-in-hand. If we fail to get America’s fiscal house in order, more of our nation’s wealth will be siphoned off to service a crushing national debt. Automatic entitlement spending, which accounts for nearly half of federal spending, will eventually absorb nearly every dollar in taxes the government raises and crowd out spending on other pressing needs. Further, we will have to borrow even more from foreign lenders to make up the difference between what we consume and what we produce. This abject fiscal dependence erodes our sovereignty by giving other countries too much leverage over U.S. economic policy.

Health care reform, of course, is not the only step necessary to keep America’s debts from mushrooming out of control. We must also get to work on rebalancing the big entitlement programs to reflect both the aging of America and lengthening life spans. Overhauling our archaic tax system will be essential, as well.

But health care reform is the issue before us today, and slowing the pace of rising costs, while expanding coverage, must be an urgent priority.

Joe Antos
American Enterprise Institute
Will Marshall
Progressive Policy Institute
Robert Bixby
The Concord Coalition
Pietro Nivola
The Brookings Institution
Stuart Butler
Heritage Foundation
Rudolph Penner
Urban Institute
Alison Fraser
Heritage Foundation
Isabel Sawhill
The Brookings Institution
Ron Haskins
The Brookings Institution
C. Eugene Steuerle
Urban Institute
Maya MacGuineas
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Code Pink Goes Back to Its Normal Self

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

On December 1st and 2nd, Code Pink sponsored 18 anti-Afghanistan-escalation rallies across the country. Says Code Pink co-founder Jodie Evans in the press release:

Adding troops will lead to more civilian casualties which will lead to more recruits for the Taliban [sic] — and a protracted war that the American people don’t support. This is not the “hope” so many voted for.

But that rhetoric doesn’t jive with what Ms. Evans and Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin said following their week-long trip to Afghanistan this fall (which I wrote about here). While she said Code Pink would go on opposing additional troops, Ms. Benjamin made a surprising shift at the end of her fact-finding mission:

We would leave with the same parameters of an exit strategy but we might perhaps be more flexible about a timeline.  That’s where we have opened ourselves, being here, to some other possibilities. We have been feeling a sense of fear of the people of the return of the Taliban. So many people are saying that, ‘If the US troops left, the country would collapse. We’d go into civil war.’ A palpable sense of fear that is making us start to reconsider that.

So even though Code Pink has been on the ground in Afghanistan and heard from Afghans themselves of the U.S. military’s tangible benefit to Afghan civil society, it chose to intensify its opposition against the U.S. military presence with a series of rallies.

Well, you can’t have it both ways — either you think U.S. troops are protecting the population (as the McChrystal counter-insurgency strategy is designed to do, and which Code Pink acknowledged was the case at the end of their fact-finding mission) or you think U.S. troops will cause more casualties (which they claim in this week’s press release). Of course, if Code Pink endorsed so much as an extended timeline for troop withdrawal, it would drive its core constituency into a meltdown.

At the very least, it might have shown some restraint and not convened 18 protests. This could have been an opportunity for Code Pink to use its high profile and the knowledge its founders gained during their time on the ground in Afghanistan to educate its supporters on America’s mission there. But that’s not Code Pink. Instead, Jodie Evans and Medea Benjamin passed on that chance and stuck their heads in the sand.

An Innovative Way to Improve Teacher Quality

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

How does a school or school district consistently attract, develop, and retain effective teachers? If you can answer this, you’ll not only boost your chances of receiving some Race to the Top funds — you’ll also put to rest one of the hotly debated topics in education today.

A recent report from Education Sector, titled Teachers At Work: Improving Teacher Quality Through School Design, examines a less widely discussed approach to improving teacher quality: school design. The report argues that in order for reform initiatives to be sustainable, we need to “fundamentally overhaul the way the work of teachers is organized within schools.”

The report focuses on the Generation Schools model, developed by Furman Brown and Jonathan Spear, which restructures the traditional school day and school year. The average Generation Schools day for students consists of two 85-minute foundation courses in the morning during which students focus on core academic learning (English, math, science, and social studies) and three 60-minute studios in the afternoon, during which students take additional required courses, electives, or mandated services such as art, foreign language, and fitness. Students also participate in two month-long career and college planning units at staggered times during the course of the year, and the overall school year is 200 days, about 20 days longer than the typical school year.

In addition to rethinking the way time is used, the model reconsiders the way teachers interact with one another. Among other things, teachers are organized into grade- and subject-based teams and are allotted two hours per day for planning and preparation. These changes are intended to “blend different types of expertise and levels of experience” and allow time for teachers to reflect on their work and learn from one another. It’s not only whom you hire to teach and how you evaluate and reward them – it’s also about the structures in place to support and develop teachers. And all of this is achieved without increasing the time required from teachers – and, by extension, the costs to a school.

The student performance results at the Generation Schools pilot school, Brooklyn Generation School, a public high school in New York, have been positive so far. Teacher satisfaction also seems high, with only one teacher electing to leave after the first year, although all had the option to return to their previous schools. The United Federation of Teachers has also supported the initiative. In order to implement their unique organizational structure, the school entered into a side-letter agreement to the teachers’ contract, initially for one year in 2007, then an additional three-year period.

The Generation Schools model is not alone in thinking creatively about the use of people and time. Education Resource Strategies, an organization focused on the strategic use of resources, has done an in-depth study of nine high-performing high schools across the country that have also rethought the traditional school model with positive results. Many charter schools are also experimenting with innovative ways to use resources. While no one model is right for all schools, the basic idea is key: examine your resources and think creatively about using them efficiently and effectively to maximize teacher effectiveness.

To be sure, there are impediments to this kind of creative thinking, ranging from laws restricting the length of the school year to rigid line-item budgeting requirements for school funding. Models like Generation Schools will have trouble being scaled up unless policy makers act to remove such obstacles. State and federal governments should continue to find ways to encourage experimentation on a local level — even as they continue to hold schools accountable for the results.

Too Big to Run

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In discussions about the dismal state of the economy, the existence of “too big to fail” institutions has emerged as a recurring cause for concern. In particular, Bank of America and Citigroup (the first and third largest banks in the country, respectively) are firms whose size makes them an “existential threat” to the well-being of the economy.

(Bank #2 in size is JPMorgan, whose chief, Jamie Dimon, has been going around saying that we can end “too big to fail” without capping the size of financial institutions by providing regulators with resolution authority over banks — the ability to wind them down in an orderly fashion. While resolution authority can help in cases — like Lehman’s — where banks become insolvent, these after-the-fact measures would not prevent the liquidity crisis that selling against a too-big-to-fail institution would cause.)

While Citigroup has made efforts to break itself up, including selling off its half of the Smith Barney joint venture with Morgan Stanley, Bank of America under Ken Lewis has been resistant to downsizing, adamant that clients benefit from its size. But with the embattled Lewis having announced he will step down at the end of the year, the bank is looking for a new chief.

And that search has run up against a problem — not only are these firms seen as “too big to fail,” they’re also too big to run:

At least two candidates for the top job at Bank of America Corp. told directors that the giant bank should consider breaking itself up… [One candidate, former Bank of Hawaii CEO Michael O’Neill] recently told the Bank of America search committee that the bank’s risk-adjusted capital wasn’t being used productively. He added that the company should become simpler and less prone to volatility

How big is Bank of America? With over $2.25 trillion in assets, it has a pervasive presence in our economy. The numbers from the Wall Street Journal are staggering:

Bank of America is the largest U.S. bank by assets and has 6,000 branches, 18,000 automated-teller machines and relationships with 53 million households, or roughly one out of every two households in the U.S.

Whereas the mantra “bigger is better” was applied to the financial industry over the past 20 years, there is now a reassessment of that idea. But instead of providing clear guidance on how to get financial institutions to a more reasonable size (and, indeed, what that size is), the government is sending unclear signals, with conflicting announcements on which companies it is willing to bail out and tepid additional reporting requirements that won’t rein in outsized firms.

Rather than add to the uncertainty, the administration should come out with guidelines on how it proposes to solve the “too big to fail” problem. Whether through voluntary break-up of banks it has a stake in, anti-trust measures, or by instituting a too-big-to-fail tax, the administration should lay out clear rules for banks to follow. This will allow big banks to stop chasing their tails on executive decisions — like Bank of America is doing — and get back to business.

The Public Option as Symbol

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In recent days, there seems to have been a shift in the progressive community over the question of whether the public option, in its current state, is still worth fighting for. Some on the militantly pro-public-option left aren’t responding well to the weakening front.

Over at Hullabaloo, the influential Digby gives the game away. She cites Ezra Klein, who wrote today:

Having something called a public option is not, in the end analysis, as important as achieving the goals of the public option, and at this point, the policy itself is getting so watered down that it might be worth attempting to achieve its goals in a more straightforward fashion.

But Digby is having none of that:

Ezra believes that if the votes aren’t there for a decent public option then the horse trading should be around getting something good in return for giving up the public option rather than negotiating the terms of the public option. That would make sense if the public option were just another feature of the health care bill. But it is not. It is the central demand of the liberal base of the Democratic Party in this rube goldberg health care plan and has long since gone way beyond a policy to become a symbol.

Perhaps that is wrong on policy grounds. People will argue about that forever. But that doesn’t change the fact that it is no longer a matter of policy but rather a matter of political power. And to that extent it cannot be “bargained away” for something like better subsidies, even if it made sense. “Bargaining away” the Public Option is also the bargaining away of liberal influence and strength.

[…]

Again, as a matter of policy I don’t know that the public option actually means much anymore. But as a matter of politics, it’s very important.

Let the boldness – and the destructiveness – of that declaration sink in. On the most important progressive policy achievement in a generation, Digby says forget the policy – it’s the symbolism that matters.

Digby argues that the implications of the public option extend far beyond health care, that “powerful people” are “desperate that the liberals are not seen to win this battle.” Funny, because I thought the way that progressives win this battle is by making health care accessible and affordable to millions of Americans who currently don’t have it. According to some very smart people, the public option is playing a steadily diminishing role in achieving that goal. But don’t tell that to Digby, whose position now boils down to: Why bother with policy advances when we can have symbolic victories (or, heck, defeats)?

From the start, PPI has argued that the fixation on the public option has been distracting us from the more important conversation we could be having about making the exchanges more robust. Paul Starr, in an op-ed for the New York Times on Monday, said as much in a column titled “Fighting the Wrong Health Care Battle”:

[G]iving the exchanges the necessary authority to regulate private insurers could solve many of the problems that motivated the public option in the first place. Strengthening that authority and accelerating the timetable for reform are what liberals in Congress should be looking for in a deal.

But Starr is, of course, commenting on policy. For Digby, that’s no longer what the health care debate is about.

States Undermining Stimulus

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

It’s reasonably well understood that this year’s federal economic stimulus legislation helped (though not as much as it might have) cushion state and local governments from a fiscal disaster attributable to falling revenues, automatically increasing entitlement expenditures, and balanced budget requirements. The rationale for this federal aid — to keep states and localities from counteracting the stimulative effect of federal spending via tax increases and spending cuts — is less well understood. So, too, is the fact that the continuing fiscal crisis around the country continues to undermine the impact of federal stimulus.

That’s the departure point for an important new article by Harold Meyerson in The American Prospect. Aggregating the numbers, Meyerson reaches a startling but entirely justified conclusion:

[H]ow much does the government’s stimulus come to when we subtract the amount the states and localities are taking out of the economy from the amount the feds are putting in? The two-year Obama stimulus amounted to $787 billion, of which $70 billion was really just the usual taxpayers’ annual exemption from the alternative minimum tax, and $146 billion was actually appropriated for the years 2011 to 2019. That leaves $571 billion that the federal government is pumping into the economy during 2009 and 2010. Subtract the amount that state and local governments are withdrawing from the economy (they have a combined shortfall of around $365 billion, but let’s say they do enough fiscal finagling so that the total of their cutbacks and tax hikes is just $325 billion), and we’re left with $246 billion.

At $787 billion, the stimulus came to 2.6 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product for 2009 and 2010 — not big enough, but a respectable figure. At $246 billion — the net of the federal stimulus minus the state and local anti-stimulus — it comes to just 0.8 percent of GDP, a level lower than those of many of the nations that the U.S. chastised for failing to stimulate their economies sufficiently.

In other words, most of the debates we’ve heard about the size and impact of the federal stimulus effort have ignored the actual net spending once you aggregate federal, state and local government actions. That’s a pretty big omission, and that’s why the University of Chicago’s Harold Pollack and I argued earlier this year that we need to start thinking comprehensively about intergovernmental coordination:

[F]ederal budget debates should expand to include the national budget, the sum total of spending, taxes and policies that implement and finance national governance. At a minimum, the Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office should routinely scrutinize the financial impact of proposed federal policies on every level of government.

Meyerson goes on to examine other damaging aspects of our federal system with respect to economic policy that are well worth reading. But what’s most interesting and alarming about his analysis is that it’s so unusual. Most policy discussions in Washington either ignore state and local governments, treat them as an unimportant sideshow, or assume that the many parts of the intergovernmental system move roughly in coordination, and in the same direction. Now more than ever, it’s time to understand that the left hand of our system may be working at active cross-purposes with the right.