Black women are the decision makers at home and a driving force in educational advocacy in our communities so it’s only right that Reinventing America’s Schools (RAS) — a project housed at the Progressive Policy Institute — and our RAS Reports podcast traveled to New Orleans to immerse ourselves in the largest collection of Black women in America…Essence Fest.
Black women have always been leaders in the fight for educational equity from the classroom to the courtroom. From educator and school founder Mary McLeod Bethune to attorney and advocate Constance Baker Motley, Black women have led the way in the age-old fight for the right to education in America.
Book banning, anti-diversity training legislation, and the rolling back of Affirmative Action in higher education threatens to reverse much of the progress Black women fought and died for a generation ago. And yet, Black women persist.
The fight continues for women like former DC Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson. Henderson recently founded Reconstruction, an effort to help students see history and education in a broader context that resonates with their culture and identity. For Steph Walters, leading Team Yellow — the brainchild of artist and producer Pharrell Williams — and their Engagement and Communication work is key to growing their network of micro-schools.
It’s no surprise to those who’ve been paying attention…Black women are winning.
Naomi Shelton is no different. As CEO of the National Charter Collaborative, Naomi is changing the game in how to grow a new generation of charter school leaders of color. And for Crystal Gilliam and Tracey Clark of 4.0, the work can’t wait. At 4.0, Gilliam and Clark are a driving force in providing coaching, curriculum, community, and cash to women leaders with the imagination to create a more equitable education ecosystem.
Started in 1995 by Essence Magazine to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the magazine’s first publication, Essence Fest is the single largest festival in America…period! In 2022, Essence Fest recorded a daily attendance rate of 176,000 attendees and welcomed over 500,000 attendees over the course of the 3-day event. In comparison, South by Southwest (SXSW) welcomed less than 300,000 attendees over a five-day period in 2022.
The energy and impact of Essence Fest was the perfect location for our latest podcast series, titled The Future is Woman. The line-up of guests included some of the brightest and most innovative minds in education discussing their organizations, their ideas, and the tremendous impact Black women play in driving their work.
The Future of Woman series is a must for those who need to hear from those at the forefront of innovation in education or for those leading organizations seeking new ideas to the same old issues.
Famed Capital Prep Charter School founder Dr. Steve Perry said it best, “I could not do what I do without Black women.” After listening to our five-part series, I’ll believe you’ll agree.
Guests include:
Episode 1: Steve Perry, Capital Prep Charter Schools
Episode 2: Steph Walters, Team Yellow
Episode 3: Crystal Gilliam and Tracey Clark, 4.0
Episode 4: Naomi Shelton, National Charter Collaborative
Elections are about the future, not the past, as the old cliché has it. But as the 2024 presidential campaign gets underway, U.S. voters can’t seem to escape the noxious aftermath of the 2020 election.
Many would like to move on, but Donald Trump won’t let them. He wants to rerun the 2020 contest next year, only this time with him winning. Complicating his improbable bid is the belated legal reckoning he and his lackeys now face for scheming to steal the last election.
One of the greatest contributors to America’s rising high health care costs is bloated hospital bills for simple procedures. We hear plenty of stories about how patients are increasingly confused by the shockingly expensive bills they receive from their providers, especially when their medical care shifts from an outpatient to a hospital-based setting.
Both Medicare and private health insurances pay hospital-owned facilities higher rates than independent medical practices and other outpatient facilities for the exact same services. These higher payment rates create an incentive for hospitals to acquire these independent practices, resulting in higher prices charged to patients. Clinic visits are the most commonly billed service under Medicare, which only reimburses $116 for each visit to an outpatient hospital clinic doctor and $46 for the same level visit for an independent doctor.
Congress is considering two different approaches — site-neutral payment reform and “honest billing” for creating greater price transparency and lowering hospital costs. Both have attracted bipartisan support, but site-neutral payment reform holds greater promise for lowering patients’ medical bills and saving taxpayers money.
Making payments “site-neutral” means reimbursing providers by the same amount regardless of where they provide medical services to patients. For example, several bills would apply that principle to Medicare reimbursements. This would save the federal government billions of dollars and reduce premiums for seniors.
Another set of proposals that fall under an “honest billing” category, would not make any changes to Medicare reimbursement and instead focuses on billing hospitals separately for each off-campus outpatient department. While these other “honest billing” proposals present a step forward in advancing site-neutral payment reform to cut costs, they don’t fully move towards equalization of reimbursing hospital versus non-hospital settings and thereby don’t truly implement site-neutral payments. These bills give insurers more transparency about where services are being performed, but they wouldn’t meaningfully reduce costs.
Both the House Education and Workforce (E&W) and House Energy and Commerce (E&C) Committees have separate bills that were recently marked up in committee and fall under the “honest billing” category. The House E&W bill, H.R. 4509, the Transparency In Billing Act, would require hospitals and their hospital outpatient departments (HOPDs) to provide unique health identifiers to insurers for the location where the service was provided to ensure that insurers can bill appropriately. If not, then insurers wouldn’t be required to pay the claims. However, this would only apply to the group market and would require the Department of Labor to issue rulemaking and establish a process for reporting violations. The House E&C bill, H.R. 3237, would also require each provider’s department to include a unique identifier number for claims and services on any billing and requires hospitals to attest every two years that it is in compliance.
The House Committee on Ways and Means held their markup yesterday to consider their own legislation to implement site-neutral payments, which included consideration of H.R. 4822, the Health Care Price Transparency Act. The bill was approved by the Committee in a party-line vote: Democrats opposed the bill due to a removal of a provision to address private equity acquisitions of hospitals and nursing homes, while Republicans all voted in favor.
Similar to the House E&C proposal, this bill would require all off-campus outpatient departments to have a separate national provider identification (NPI) number to bill Medicare. The bill would equalize payments between off-campus hospital outpatient services and physician practices for only drug administration services. On-campus hospitals would still be able to charge more than physician offices for performing the exact same service, which would leave most of the potential savings from site-neutral payments unrealized.
Meanwhile, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) postponed their markup scheduled for this week of a health workforce package that contains several additional health reforms, including a provision that would regulate hospital facility fees. Different from the other “honest billing” proposals, the provision would prohibit hospitals from charging facility fees for services provided by off-site physicians and prohibits both the hospital and physician from separately billing for services. Notably, it would cap both the hospital and physician fees at “the median amount the health plan or issuer pays when those services are provided in a physician’s office.” Hospitals would also be prohibited from charging facility fees for on-site primary care, telehealth, and low-complexity services that could be provided in an ambulatory setting.
This type of proposal is a more promising approach than the “honest billing” policies that are under consideration since it would directly affect patient health care costs since facility fees are billed directly to the patient and “honest billing” only addresses NPI numbers for insurance coding. While there are other issues with the bill that likely make it a nonstarter for Republicans, Senator Bill Cassidy has signaled that he’s open to the facility fee provision in another context which is a hopeful sign for future bipartisan support.
Hospitals have countered attempts by Congressional efforts to curb the rising costs of hospital-based care, claiming that any reform to reduce payment rates for hospital outpatient departments would lead to negatively impacting their financial stability. However, a recent study released by the JAMA Network that evaluated hospital financial performance before and during the COVID-19 pandemic shows that 75% of hospitals had a net positive operating income during 2020 and 2021. This was partly due to the COVID-19 relief funding dedicated to aiding hospital net operating margins, resulting in an all-time high in profitability for those hospitals. The study concludes that the relief funds received during COVID-19 were likely larger than necessary for many hospitals.
Congress needs to focus on implementing targeted policies that equalize payments across the three types of facilities, including outpatient departments, off and on campus departments, and ambulatory surgical centers, to save the most for patients and the federal government. It’s abundantly clear that Americans should not be paying more out of pocket for medical services — like chemotherapy, cardiac imaging, and colonoscopies — because of where they received the services at, especially at a time when most hospital profits are at an all time high.
The United States’ Unemployment Insurance (UI) system is a lifeline for jobless Americans, and provides an income-smoothing effect for workers and their families, as well as sustains and stabilizes consumer spending during economic downturns. However, UI also has the potential to spur entrepreneurship through the Self-Employment Assistance (SEA) program. SEA is a program within our system that offers workers the opportunity to build a new business while accessing income support during times of job-loss.
Report author Taylor Maag, PPI’s Director of Workforce Policy and the New Skills for a New Economy Project, recommends updating SEA to cut some of the “red tape” requirements that make it difficult for individuals to access and states to administer. She also suggests creating a new pilot program that can help policymakers understand the true impact of entrepreneurial opportunities for Americans who may not have as much access to means and capital.
“Our nation’s Unemployment Insurance system offers critical support during times of job loss, however it falls short in fostering opportunities for entrepreneurship, which plays a vital role in our country’s economy,” said Taylor Maag. “By enabling dislocated workers to pursue entrepreneurship, we can provide increased economic opportunity for individuals, communities, and the nation at large. Policymakers should not overlook UI’s untapped potential to create more of these economic opportunities.”
Read and download the report here.
The report makes the following policy recommendations:
Strike down arbitrary eligibility requirements for SEA, which make it harder for individuals to access this program.
Remove requirements that make SEA too costly for states to administer and disincentive states from participating in the program.
Create a pilot program to empower UI to support more entrepreneurship.The pilot would be a competitive grant program incentivizing states without active SEA programs to participate.
The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C., with offices in Brussels, Berlin and the United Kingdom. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org.
The past two months have made clear that President Biden’s approach to making higher education more affordable isn’t working. First, bipartisan majorities of both the U.S. House and Senate voted to block his debt cancellation policies. Then, shortly after Biden thwarted that effort with his veto pen, the Supreme Court ruled that his attempt to cancel up to $20,000 of student loan debt per borrower was an illegal overreach of executive authority.
Biden responded to the setback by announcing two debt-cancellation schemes shortly after the Supreme Court issued its ruling. The first was the finalization of a new income-driven repayment (IDR) plan known as the SAVE plan. Biden also announced he would start a new process under the Higher Education Act to cancel more debt “for as many borrowers as possible, as fast as possible” through executive action.
At present, the United States is enjoying a stunningly low rate of unemployment. The federal government’s most recent report puts that rate at 3.6% and notes that job openings continue to rise.That’s a dramatic rebound from the dark days of Spring 2020, when unemployment skyrocketed to 13%.
To cope with the flood of laid off workers during the COVID-19 crisis, America relied heavily on our nation’s Unemployment Insurance (UI) system. Its mission is twofold: First, to provide an income-smoothing effect for workers and their families during times of joblessness; and second, to sustain and stabilize consumer spending during economic downturns. The UI system enables unemployed workers to keep paying bills and caring for their families, which, in turn, keeps other workers employed and regional economies vital.
In short, the UI system is a lifeline for jobless Americans in bad economic times that also has the “countercyclical” effect of shortening recessions. However, the system nearly crashed in many states during the pandemic, and experts believe it’s not prepared should the economy start contracting and shedding jobs. U.S. policymakers need to act now, while the system is not under stress, to make it more resilient against future emergencies.
As they do that, policymakers should not overlook UI’s untapped potential to create more opportunities for entrepreneurship. Currently, a small program within America’s UI system seeks to address this need — the Self-Employment Assistance Program (SEA). SEA offers qualifying individuals the opportunity for self-employment by combining income support during periods of unemployment with activities related to starting a business. Only 5 states have active programs and as a result, the SEA program serves a very small, distinctive slice of UI recipients, with less than 1% of UI claimants participating in the program. In fact, in 2022, there were only 1,404 SEA participants nationwide. This is a stark comparison to the number of entrepreneurs across America’s workforce — with some research now showing there are 31 million entrepreneurs in the U.S. making up 16% of the adult workforce.
While UI undeniably offers support during job loss, it falls short in fostering opportunities for entrepreneurship. This policy brief aims to illuminate the importance of creating more opportunities for entrepreneurship in the U.S., the transformative role UI can and should play in creating these pathways to self-employment and outlines actionable policy recommendations for federal leaders to consider. By enabling dislocated workers to pursue entrepreneurship even amidst financial distress, we can provide increased economic opportunity for individuals, communities, and the nation at large.
FACT: The U.S. GSP system has now been lapsed for over 2 1/2 years.
THE NUMBERS: Packaged tuna imported from the Solomon Islands –
2021 – 2023 None
2018 – 2020 440 tons per year
WHAT THEY MEAN:
A passage from State Department a briefing by two “senior official”-types, in the runup to Secretary Blinken’s trip a month back:
“…in competition with China … managing the competition responsibly … America’s ability to outcompete China … major strides … an approach that is competitive without veering into confrontation … as the competition continues … intense competition requires intense diplomacy … working with competitors when our interests call for it … competing vigorously and talking with the PRC on a range of issues … manage the competition, and work together when our interests align from a position of confidence…”
Point probably made … “competing in noun, verb, and adjectival forms. With that in mind, a depressing story featuring (a) a small Pacific island country currently an object of this “competition,” (b) 500 missing tons of canned tuna, and (c) the also missing U.S. Generalized System of Trade Preferences (“GSP”), a duty-free program for low- and middle-income countries which, launched in 1974, has been “lapsed” in the midst of Congressional arguments over eligibility rules since New Year’s Day 2021:
The country: Home to 708,000 people and one of the GSP’s 119 “beneficiary countries,” the Solomon Islands are geographically a string of six big islands and 986 smaller ones extending southwest from Papua New Guinea toward Vanuatu and Fiji. The Solomons’ economy mostly runs on three things: (a) tourism; (b) exports of rosewood, akua, and other local timber; and (c) fisheries for export and local use. The first pillar, tourism, went down under the COVID shock and has yet to recover. Since then, and with the caution that GDP data is jumpy for small island countries, the Solomons’ post-COVID economic figures look dire. The International Monetary Fund reports that after shrinking by -3.5% in 2020, the Solomons’ economy contracted again by -0.6% in 2021 and by -4.1% in 2022, though a small +2.5% rebound looks likely this year.
“Competition” (1): Meanwhile, the Solomons have won an uneasy place as a center of attention in the “competition” the two U.S. senior-official briefers were talking up in June. This has featured in sequence an early 2022 “security agreement” with China carrying murky hints of intelligence and naval strategy; controversy over it within both S.I. politics and the 16-country Pacific Forum (the principal regional association for Pacific Islands states); then the rapid opening of a new U.S. embassy in Honiara last February, all accompanied by strings of press releases from the U.S. and China announcing new aid programs, important visits, etc.
“Competition” (2): With respect to the second and third growth drivers noted above, China buys most of the Solomons’ wood exports, valued at up to $200 million a year — half of the Solomons’ annual export earnings and an eighth of their $1.6 billion GDP. Until 2020, Americans were offsetting this, more in wage-paying employment than in dollars, through purchases of 400-500 tons of packaged tuna a year, from the cannery at Noro in New Georgia. Again noting that small-country economic stats can be blurry, an Australian press analysis asserts that the cannery contributes fully 18% of the Solomons’ national GDP. ILO figures, meanwhile, suggest that its 2,000 employees account for about one in thirty of the country’s 65,000 wage-earning, formal-sector workers.* Canned tuna is normally a very high-tariff product in the U.S., taxed at rates ranging from 12.5% to 35%, but through 2020 GSP was waiving these tariffs for least-developed countries like the Solomons and gave them a regular set of American buyers
The missing tuna: Not for the last three years, though. GSP benefits are not permanent, but have been periodically “reauthorized” by Congress for periods of ten years, three years, 1.5 years, and so forth. When the program lapsed at the end of 2020, canned tuna ceased moving from Noro to Hawaii and California. Since then, as Congress has argued over how many new eligibility rules to add, no more tuna has come in. Americans are actually buying more than before – about 210,000 tons per year before 2020, now about 240,000 tons — but buyers of the Solomons’ modest shipments appear to have shifted to larger Southeast Asian and Latin American sources.
Final thought: The “competition” in the briefers’ comments above is a metaphor drawn mainly from sports or games. “Competitors” who put only part of their teams on the field are typically at a disadvantage, and often don’t finish first.
* According to the International Labour Organization, the Solomon Islands have a “labor force” of 370,000, of whom 18%, or about 65,000, have wage-paying jobs. The other 305,000 are “own account” workers in agriculture, odd jobs, and temporary work. In American terms, 18% of GDP would translate to “the combined economies of California, Oregon, and Washington”, and 3% of wage-paying employment would be comparable to “all the workers in Georgia” or “all the workers in Michigan.”
FURTHER READING
GSP:
Reps. Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.) and Neal Dunn (R-Fla.) with 64 others urge rapid GSP renewal.
Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.
Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.
Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank Progressive Economy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.
Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.
PPI’s Reinventing America’s Schools (RAS) Project has a new podcast series on titled “The Future is Woman” recorded live at the 2023 Essence Festival in New Orleans, Louisiana.
In the fifth and final episode of this five-part series, RAS co-director Curtis Valentine sits down with Dr. Kaya Henderson, Chief Executive Officer of Reconstruction.
Learn more about the Reinventing America’s Schools Project here.
Learn more about the Progressive Policy Institute here.
Scientists have been warning us of these climate impacts for decades — and that if left unchecked, emissions will cause feedback loops and tipping points in natural systems that will greatly accelerate global warming and its deadly impacts.
We are, in fact, far closer to disastrous, runaway climate change than our leaders are willing to admit. Collectively, we are sleepwalking toward catastrophe, willfully ignoring the signs of impending calamity much as monarchs and heads of state did in Europe in 1914 and 1939 on the precipice of the 20th century’s world wars.
The New York City suburb of Scarsdale, located in Westchester County, New York, is one of the country’s wealthiest communities, and its residents are reliably liberal. In 2020, three-quarters of Scarsdale voters cast ballots for Joe Biden over Donald Trump. One can safely presume that few Scarsdale residents are ardent backers of Trump’s wall on the Mexican border. But many of them support a less visible kind of wall, erected by zoning regulations that ban multifamily housing and keep non-wealthy people, many of them people of color, out of their community.
Across the country, a lot of good white liberals, people who purchase copies of White Fragility and decry the U.S. Supreme Court for ending affirmative action, sleep every night in exclusive suburbs that socially engineer economic (and thereby racial) segregation by government edict. The huge inequalities between upscale municipalities and their poorer neighbors didn’t just happen; they are in large measure the product of laws that are hard to square with the inclusive In This House, We Believe signs on lawns in many highly educated, deep-blue suburbs.
PPI’s Reinventing America’s Schools (RAS) Project has a new podcast series on titled “The Future is Woman” recorded live at the 2023 Essence Festival in New Orleans, Louisiana.
In the fourth episode of this five-part series, RAS co-director Curtis Valentine sits down with Naomi Shelton, Chief Executive Officer at the National Charter Collaborative.
Learn more about the Reinventing America’s Schools Project here.
Learn more about the Progressive Policy Institute here.
Over the past two years, Congress has passed several much-needed laws and allocated over a trillion dollars to grow and update infrastructure and clean energy technology in the United States to combat climate change and lower consumer energy costs. However, these projects cannot become a reality under the current regulatory structure, which takes several years just to approve single projects.
Policymakers on both sides of the aisle have an interest in addressing this issue, and Congress recently enacted a first-pass set of permitting reforms as part of an agreement to raise the debt ceiling. While the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) supported this legislation, it doesn’t go far enough — and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy agree. Additional reform is needed to create ambitious changes required to fully modernize the outdated American regulatory process and unleash clean energy deployment that can outcompete the rest of the world.
“The scale and pace of deployment needed for the clean energy transition must be met with an equally ambitious update to America’s environmental regulations. After half a century operating under restrictions designed without climate change in mind, growing ever more burdensome, we believe that Congress must aim higher than modest change around the edges,” said Elan Sykes, Energy Policy Analyst at PPI. “We must use modern technology to revamp our entire approach and ask federal agencies to review problems rather than projects, giving transparency to developers and communities alike and bringing countless economic and environmental benefits to households across the country.”
“Recent modest permitting reforms included in the June budget deal were important, but they will not bring about the transformative policy changes needed to quickly permit and build the thousands of energy projects currently pending approval,” said Paul Bledsoe, Strategic Advisor at PPI. “The reforms proposed in the report have the opportunity to rapidly unleash new projects, helping to drive economic growth and reduce energy costs which are key components of inflation. We look forward to working with both parties in Congress on this crucial economic and environmental opportunity.”
The report builds on existing policy recommendations, but goes further by emphasizing moving away from single-project reviews and individual permits to a more systematic approach of programmatic reviews and general permits. Providing clear and transparent rules for by-right approval is the only way to meet the scale of clean energy deployment at the pace the United States needs to compete globally and lower emissions.
The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C., with offices in Brussels, Berlin and the United Kingdom. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org.
America needs to build bigger and cleaner. Facing economic and regulatory headwinds that affect our ability to grow the economy, channel investment into clean energy, and scale up the technologies needed to prevent climate change, we can no longer accept the burden of a regulatory framework designed for different problems and offering then-current solutions half a century ago that now penalizes and delays cleaner projects in the name of environmental protection. Reforming this system of environmental reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the many types of permits issued by federal agencies that require a prerequisite NEPA review is a necessary shift in economic and climate policy that remains unfinished.
In 2021 and 2022, Congress passed a trio of much-needed laws designed to grow and update U.S. infrastructure, clean energy technology, and research and development. Allocating over a trillion dollars in funding across a wide range of policy tools, the bills included tax credits, grants, and loans; a wide range of technologies, including not just technology-specific boosts like the hydrogen tax credits or grants for port modernization but also technology-neutral incentives for clean energy generation; and a wide distribution of benefits, both in geographic and socioeconomic terms.
Yet this funding cannot manifest as meaningful real-world construction under the current policy structure: According to data from the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council, the average time from formal start to final decision for projects under NEPA review averaged 4.3 years for transmission lines, 3.5 for natural gas pipelines, and 2.7 years for renewable energy generation projects. In order to maximize the public return on investment and build public confidence in this program, projects will need to move out of the theoretical realm and into the ground to start providing people with tangible results in the form of cheaper, cleaner power, bigger and better factories producing clean new cars and appliances, and also new facilities to produce the materials and components needed for all of this new technology.
Policymakers on both sides of the aisle have an interest in fixing this issue. A deal between Senator Joe Manchin and Majority Leader Senator Chuck Schumer in the fall of 2022 secured support from nearly all Senate Democrats for permitting reform modeled on existing programs for transportation and other infrastructure. PPI endorsed that effort and issued a major report with further policy recommendations at the time, but the measure fell short for lack of Republican support. This spring, in addition to several new Democratic proposals from President Biden, Senator Tom Carper, and Representatives Sean Casten and Mike Levin, Republicans introduced several iterations of their own reforms. As part of an agreement to raise the debt ceiling reached between President Biden and the Republican-majority House in May, Congress passed a series of fiscal measures and included parts of Rep. Garret Graves’ BUILDER Act as a first-pass set of permitting reforms. Specifically, these include:
• Streamlined interagency review process with a lead agency and coordinated timetables;
• 1-2 year “Shot clocks” to encourage faster environmental reviews;
• Sharing Categorical Exclusions across federal agencies;
• Minor changes to NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) changes: Programmatic NEPA reviews are authorized for use in subsequent documents for five years without further study, Page limits are imposed for NEPA documents (not including citations or appendices), clear standards for levels of review for different actions, narrow changes for the consideration of project alternatives and impacts, including considering the environmental benefits of a project, and authorizing a study on E-NEPA (improvements to the law’s administrative technology suite);
• Other changes: giving energy storage projects eligibility for the FAST-414 permit streamlining process, approving the Mountain Valley Pipeline, and authorizing a study on interregional transfer capacity for U.S. electric grids.
These reforms, which line up with PPI’s September 2022 recommendations, were negotiated under the severe pressure of default, and will unlock small but meaningful gains in permitting timelines and costs. They did not, however, include appropriately the ambitious changes required to fully modernize the sorely outdated American regulatory process and unleash clean energy deployment that can outcompete the rest of the world.
The imperative to deploy clean energy as quickly and cheaply as possible has not changed, but with Congress split and only part of the task complete, the political calculus has. Policymakers on both sides of the aisle have proposed crucial pieces of an even more ambitious reform package, and both need the other’s support to accomplish their own self-defined goals. While many progressive Democrats opposed reform last September, even their stance may be shifting as stalwart environmentalists like Bill McKibben, previously a dedicated activist focused on stringent supply-side fossil fuel restrictions, have come out in favor of shaking up the permitting system at least for the cleanest and most urgent projects for climate progress. The Republican-led House and Democratic-majority Senate will need to avoid polarizing themselves out of a deal that would bring substantial, meaningful wins to both their base constituencies on their own terms. Both sides must realize that a permitting and transmission deal will provide huge benefits to all major constituencies and stakeholders such that policy compromises will be rewarded politically rather than punished.
Agreement is not yet assured, but it is possible if a deal contains both broader reforms of permitting under NEPA than the debt ceiling deal, along with better coordination of compliance with other relevant environmental laws and appropriately scaled changes to the process of planning, siting, and paying for crucial electricity transmission. Both elements — NEPA reforms and transmission expansions — will be necessary for legislation to bring about a true renaissance in the U.S. energy economy that will provide unprecedented economic benefits to consumers, workers, and businesses while boosting U.S. competitiveness and reducing emissions.
When President Biden agreed to a debt limit deal with House Republicans in June, he greenlit many of their changes to the federal approval process for energy projects, typically referred to as permitting reform. Both parties came away with a win. Job well done, right?
Not quite, especially when it comes to the growth of clean energy in this country. Permitting reform isn’t just a Republican priority. Democrats passed significant new financing for the energy transition earlier in Biden’s presidency, but without further permitting reform that addresses their key issues, it won’t achieve nearly enough. And Republicans who may have taken a victory lap on the debt-limit deal have permitting goals to accomplish, too. A better deal could still be had.
FACT: The number of poor countries has fallen by more than half since 2000.
THE NUMBERS:
2022 26
2012 36
2002 54
1992 55
*World Bank definition and estimate, based on per capita gross national income.
WHAT THEY MEAN:
Since the mid-1980s, the World Bank has been informally grouping economies into four tiers of wealth. They begin at “low-income” and ascend through “lower-middle income” and “upper-middle-income” to “high income”, divided by annually adjusted levels of Gross National Income per capita. The list comes out each year, with the thresholds slightly adjusted to take account of inflation and a few arcane macro-issues. It is meant less to measure inequality among countries (though it does offer some comparisons) than to give a stable definition of what it means for an economy to be poor, rich, or somewhere in the middle. Over time, it also allows you to see change — this year, with a vivid four-color visualization — as some countries rise, others descend, and the world as a whole changes. First the numbers, then the colors and the trend they show:
Numbers: In the 2023 list, a “low-income” economy has a GNI per capita of $1,135 or less per year. The Bank finds 26 such countries, from Burundi (the poorest country in the world at $240 per person per year, with Afghanistan and Somalia a bit above) to Ethiopia at $1,020. A “high-income” economy’s GNI per capita, meanwhile, is anything above $13,845. This group’s brackets are two small-island tourist favorites: Seychelles in the Indian Ocean at $14,340 and Bermuda at $125,240. (The U.S. is seventh at $76,370; more below.) In between are (a) lower-middle-income countries from $1,136 to $4,445 per person per year, in practical terms from Tanzania, Tajikistan, Nepal, and Myanmar just above the low-income line to Mongolia, Jordan, and Ukraine at $4,200+; and (b) upper-middle-income countries from Indonesia and the West Bank and Gaza a bit above $4,500 to China, Bulgaria, and pre-invasion Russia, each a few hundred dollars below “high-income” status.
The list changes a bit each year, sometimes to add some new economies but mostly to report shifts in classification. The 2023 list, for example, the Palestinian territories and El Salvador in upper-middle income territory for the first time, and restores Indonesia (which first entered this group in 2019, but temporarily fell back out during the Covid pandemic). Guinea and Zambia likewise cross from low-income to lower-middle income, and Guyana and American Samoa from upper-middle to high-income. More systemic changes show up over decades rather than years: taken in 10-year jumps, the last 30 years reveal a steady upward drift across the entire list:
1992: This early edition of the list, contemporary with the birth of the World Wide Web, the creation of the WTO, etc. included 204 economies. Of this total, 55 were low-income, 71 lower-middle income, 39 upper-middle income, and 39 high income. Using a simpler breakdown, the list was weighted toward the bottom, with 126 low- and lower-middle income states and 78 upper-middle and high-income economies. Thus about 62% of economies fell below the line separating the low and lower-middle income tier from the upper-middle and high-income region, while 38% placed above it.
2002: 209 economies, of which 64 were low-income, 54 lower-middle, 34 upper-middle, and 57 high income.
2012: 215 economies (larger in part because of a couple of declarations of independence, but mainly due to more complete coverage of small islands), of which 36 were low-income, 48 lower-middle, 55 upper-middle, and 76 high income.
2022: This most recent edition, out in early July, covers 217 economies, of which only 26 are low-income, 54 lower-middle, an identical 54 upper-middle, and 83 are high income. So 137 of them, or about 63%, are now above the “median” line and 37% below, reversing the 1992 proportions.
Colors: Accompanying this year’s release, a time-series map colors high-income countries dark forest green, upper-middles a lighter emerald shade, lower-middles a kind of lilac purple, and low-incomes dark purple or violet. The 1992 map has no green anywhere between Germany and South Korea; all the most populous countries in the heart of Asia — Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Vietnam, and China — combine in a forbidding block of low-income violet, relieved only by lilac Thailand, emerald Malaysia, and tiny dark green dots for Brunei, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Africa meanwhile has some light green at the top and bottom, but apart from a bit more light green for oil-exporting Gabon and light purples for Namibia and Angola, it’s gloomy violet all the way from the Sahara to the Kalahari. In the Western Hemisphere, a light purple shading extends through nearly all of Latin America; and Western Europe’s, dark green ends at the eastern borders of Germany, Austria, and Italy, with a bit of light green for Hungary and everything else lower-middle income lilac.
As the time-lapse proceeds, Asia’s violet block fades to lilac for China and Southeast Asia by the 2000s, and then (with exceptions for Afghanistan and North Korea) goes green in the north and lilac in South Asia. Africa’s violet retreats from the continent’s maritime rim, and now concentrated in inland states and the Horn, is almost completely ringed by lilac. The light purples in Latin America mostly vanish (though Venezuela falls off the green map, and the Bank isn’t venturing a guess this year), and dark green high-income tones turn up in Panama, Chile, Uruguay, and five Caribbean island states. And the forest-green edge of western Europe flows east and south as EU and NATO membership grows, sequentially incorporating Poland, the Baltic states, the Czech Republic and Hungary, Croatia, and most recently Romania.
In practical human-being terms, as this has proceeded the number of people living in deep poverty has dropped from 1.995 billion of 5.3 billion people then – that is, 38% or nearly two-fifths of humanity — to 655 million of 8 billion, or about 8%, as of the last estimate covering the year 2018. Sometimes, things do get better.
* Technically by “Gross National Income Per Capita, Atlas Method.”
FURTHER READING
The WB’s visualization, with links to this year’s country income groups and explanations of the various calculations they involve.
The U.S. and the top end The U.S.’ 2022 ranking is seventh among the 216 economies by per capita income, just above Denmark and Qatar at $76,370 per person. The top six are Bermuda at $125,240, Norway at $95,610, Luxembourg at $91,200, Switzerland at $89,450, Ireland at $81,070, and the Isle of Man at $79,300. An alternative calculation, by purchasing-power parities, lifts Norway into first, followed by Qatar and Singapore, then Bermuda, Luxembourg, Ireland, the United Arab Emirates, and Switzerland with the U.S. ranked ninth.
The big economies — Among the world’s 16 largest economies (as measured by total GDP), the list reports nine in the high-income group, six at “upper-middle-income,” and one “lower-middle-income” economy, and no low-income economies. A list with these 16 and their “rankings,” along with Bermuda and Burundi in italics as the top and bottom bounds:
Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.
Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.
Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank Progressive Economy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.
Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.
PPI’s Reinventing America’s Schools (RAS) Project has a new podcast series on titled “The Future is Woman” recorded live at the 2023 Essence Festival in New Orleans, Louisiana.
In the third episode of this five-part series, RAS co-director Curtis Valentine sits down with Tracey Dumas Clark, Chief Program Officer at 4.0 and Crystal Gilliam, Director of Philanthropic Programming at 4.0.
Learn more about the Reinventing America’s Schools Project here.
Learn more about the Progressive Policy Institute here.
