Both the Congressional Budget Office and the Treasury Department warned Monday that the federal government is likely to exhaust its authority to pay its bills on June 1st if Congress fails to raise or suspend the federal debt limit before the end of this month. The fast-approaching deadline, which previous projections placed far later in the summer or early fall, creates new urgency for President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to strike a deal. Republicans will either need to abandon their attempt to extract meaningful policy concessions in exchange for a debt limit increase or offer President Biden a short-term increase that creates room for a realistic negotiation process. Refusing to do so would be the height of irresponsibility and place the blame for causing the first-ever default on America’s national debt squarely on the GOP’s shoulders.
Apprenticeships have long been ingrained in America’s history, but today, America falls drastically behind other advanced nations despite the benefits the program brings to workers and employers alike. Apprenticeships — a training model that allows people to work and earn while they are learning the critical skills needed for the industry — are especially important today when most U.S. jobs require at least some postsecondary education and training, and there is a serious shortage of skilled workers in many fields.
Today, the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) released a new policy brief titled, “Strengthening America’s Workforce: The Path to 4 Million Apprenticeships,” detailing how the United States needs to scale up apprenticeships to ensure more workers and businesses benefit from these opportunities. Report author Taylor Maag, PPI’s Director of The New Skills for a New Economy Project, recommends mobilizing intermediaries and boosting federal investment to create one million new apprenticeships per year — a roughly 10-fold increase — and requiring funding ties to performance.
“U.S. employers should follow other countries’ lead to create a significant number of apprenticeships to remain competitive in recruitment, workforce quality, and productivity. Apprenticeships are worthwhile for both workers and employers — increasing earnings, widening access to rewarding careers, increasing job satisfaction, ensuring a skilled workforce, and expanding the middle class,” said Taylor Maag. “Growing apprenticeship opportunities is the kind of tangible policies American workers deserve and should expect from their government.”
By the numbers:
There are currently 593,000 apprentices in the U.S. — only .03% of our labor force — compared to countries like the United Kingdom, Australia, and Germany that have roughly 10 times more.
Workers who participate in apprenticeships earn an average salary of $77,000, compared to an average salary of $55,000 for workers who do not. Those who complete an apprenticeship also earn an average of $300,000 more than those who don’t over the course of their career.
For every dollar spent on apprenticeship programs, employers get $1.47 back in increased productivity.
The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org. Find an expert at PPI and follow us on twitter.
Apprenticeship is engrained in America’s history — three of our Founding Fathers started their careers as apprentices. George Washington, for example, apprenticed as a land surveyor. Yet even with this 250-year runway, apprenticeships have not taken off in the United States as they have in other advanced nations.
In 2021, our country had 593,000 registered apprenticeships, mostly in traditional sectors such as building trades and heavy industry. As a share of their labor force, Great Britain, Australia, and Germany have roughly 10 times more opportunities. It is puzzling that the U.S. hasn’t followed its peers in scaling up apprenticeship, a training model that is also a job, allowing people to work and earn while they are learning the critical skills necessary for good jobs and careers. It’s an especially relevant model now, when most U.S. jobs require at least some postsecondary education and training, and when employers, even in our tight labor market, report a serious shortage of skilled workers in their fields.
While many progressives have seized on the panacea of “college for all,” the reality is that 62% of American adults have no bachelor’s degree, and that number rises to 72% for Black adults and 79% for Hispanic adults. Additionally, The college earnings premium appears to be declining for the first time in decades, with 40% of recent college graduates working in jobs that do not require a bachelor’s degree. Soaring college tuition costs, low completion rates, and heavy debt burdens are further pushing the American public to rethink the value proposition of a four-year degree.
Recent data proves this changing mindset. A fall 2021 survey of 1,000 high school students found that the likelihood of attending a four-year college dropped by nearly 20% in less than a year. In the spring of 2022, there were 662,000 fewer students enrolled in undergraduate programs than the previous spring, constituting a drop of 4.7%. And a report from the fall of 2022 elevated survey responses from more than 1,500 Gen Z youth and 600 employers, finding that 81% of employers think they should look at skills rather than degrees when hiring and 72% of employers stating they don’t see a degree as a reliable indicator of job preparedness.
It’s clear that America needs alternatives to a four-year degree that are affordable, trusted by employers, and help people learn the technical and digital skills that today’s jobs require. Our nation’s oldest pathway — apprenticeship — is a viable solution.
While apprenticeship pre-dated our nation, it wasn’t until 1937 that the U.S. passed the National Apprenticeship Act (NAA). This law established the Registered Apprenticeship Program (RAP) as it exists today. To meet the requirements of a registered apprenticeship, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), or a federally recognized state apprenticeship agency vets apprenticeships for quality and rigor. The work training curriculum must align with industry standards and enable apprentices to earn a portable, nationally recognized credential. Depending on the industry, Registered Apprenticeship can last from one to six years and typically includes 2,000 hours of on-the-job training and 144 hours of technical instruction. While originally developed for the skilled trades, these opportunities have been expanded into new and in-demand industries like health care, technology, and advanced manufacturing.
Even though the legislation is nearly a century old, registered apprenticeships continue to have an impact on economic security. Individuals who complete an apprenticeship earn an average annual salary of $77,000 compared to an average national salary of $55,000. Those who complete an apprenticeship program also earn an average of $300,000 more than those who don’t over the course of their career.
In addition to helping workers find good jobs and careers, these programs offer an array of benefits to employers. Apprenticeships help businesses boost recruitment; increase the diversity of their workforce; improve retention (94% of apprentices stay with their company after the apprenticeship wrap); preserve institutional knowledge; and leverage skilled, experienced workers close to retirement to serve as mentors and instructors. For roughly every dollar spent on apprenticeship, employers get an average of $1.47 back in increased productivity, reduced waste of time and cost, and greater front-line innovation.
Apprenticeship is a model employers can trust, helping to ensure talent is prepared for in-demand opportunities while also providing a quality postsecondary path for young Americans who are questioning the traditional four-year degree. It also is highly attractive to adult learners, who are older and have increased barriers to accessing and completing skill development opportunities due to child care or the need to keep working. Apprenticeships are the original work-education model, allowing adult learners to learn the skills they need without sacrificing a wage and providing education that is applied — ensuring learning connects immediately to the workforce.
To ensure more American workers and businesses benefit from these opportunities and keep pace with other partner nations, our country must dramatically scale up apprenticeship and create roughly 10 times more, reaching the end goal of 4 million apprentices in this country. To get to this number, it is not only a matter of boosting public investment, but also requires a new policy architecture in which public, nonprofit, and private intermediaries play a catalytic role in training and placing apprenticeships in companies.
The United States used to offer the world an attractive model for a free and prosperous society dedicated to the rule of law, civic inclusion and popular self-government. Now, when others look to America, they see democratic dysfunction, epitomized by paralyzing partisanship, national disunity and a defeated president’s attempted coup on Jan. 6, 2021.
That the man found to be the architect of that plot, former President Donald Trump, has the gall to again seek the office he betrayed, is another disconcerting sign. It shows that the antibodies that traditionally have protected our country against demagogues and extremism aren’t working.
But instead of dwelling on the dismal prospect that Republican voters may for a third time award Trump their party’s nomination, let’s imagine for a moment what living in a healthy democracy would be like.
The Progressive Policy Institute joined a coalition letter with 21 organizations and policy experts that supports site-neutral payment reform in Medicare and transparency in service billing in commercial insurance. PPI has long been supportive of site-neutral payment reform and legislative efforts to address this issue.
Medicare — and in many cases, commercial insurers — actually pay hospital-owned facilities higher rates than independent medical practices and other outpatient facilities for the exact same services. The letter explains that these higher payment rates actually create an incentive for hospitals to acquire these independent practices, resulting in higher prices charged to patients and taxpayers:
“Between 2013 and 2018, the share of physician practices that were hospital-owned more than doubled from 14 percent to 31 percent. By 2020, over half of physicians worked directly for a hospital or worked at a physician practice that was owned by a hospital, according to the AMA…An analysis by Northwestern University found the price of physician services increases 14 percent after a hospital purchases a physician practice.”
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that these reforms would generate more than $140 billion in savings for taxpayers over ten years.
Hospitals are integral parts of our communities, but hospital care accounts for the largest health spending category in the United States. 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. Implementing targeted site-neutral policies that promote hospital competition while still protecting rural hospitals and patient access will be critical as Congress considers advancing legislation on site-neutral payments and billing transparency.
FACT: U.S. Customs seizes 75 shipments of counterfeit goods imports each day.
THE NUMBERS: Counterfeit goods seizures by U.S. Customs* –
FY2021 value $3.3 billion
Number of seizures 27,115
FY2016 value $1.4 billion
Number of seizures 31,560
FY 2011 value $1.1 billion
Number of seizures 24,792
* CBP data; “value” is at the “Manufacturers Suggested Retail Price” of an authentic item.
WHAT THEY MEAN:
Here’s fashion magazine Allure with a closeup on the criminal fringe of the global manufacturing economy, through the lens of a 2016 seizure of counterfeit perfume in New York:
“Five men have been arrested in New York by U.S. Immigration and Customs (ICE) for knowingly selling counterfeit designer perfumes made with ingredients including antifreeze and urine across at least seven states … The authorities reportedly recovered approximately 10,000 boxes of the faux scents, whose ingredients included the aforementioned urine and antifreeze along with ‘other unpleasant, flammable, or dangerous chemicals that burn when applied to the skin.’ ”
Background: The most recent big-picture study of trade in counterfeits, a 2021 report from the OECD, estimated an upper limit of $464 billion worth of counterfeit goods flowing across borders in 2019. This would have been 2.5% of that year’s $19.8 trillion in goods exports — not much different from the 3.3% counterfeit share they estimated for 2016 and the same as their 2.5% estimate for 2013. By the OECD’s account, 90% of counterfeit goods come from five places — China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates — and the most frequently counterfeited products include shoes, clothes, perfumes and cosmetics (making Allure‘s New York arrest story a pretty representative case), along with watches and leather products like luggage and handbags.
U.S. counterfeit seizure statistics likewise seem to show a fairly stable level of counterfeit trade (or at least of interdictions of counterfeit goods) over the past decade, after a sharp rise in the 2000s. CBP’s FY2011 report tallied 24,792 seizures of counterfeit shipments (about 70 each day), and the 2016 report noted a higher total, at nearly 32,000. The 2021 total, at 27,115 seizures, was in between. Three ways to look at these totals:
(a) Number and kind of products: The 27,115 seizures in 2021 in turn brought in over 115,000 different “lines” of products, which reflect OECD’s report on the most frequently counterfeited goods fairly well: 73,367 seizures of counterfeit designer clothes, shoes, and luggage; 3,155 of personal products like the counterfeit perfumes, medicines, and medical products (including, in that troubled year, 35 million substandard masks and 38,154 useless or dangerous faux-COVID test kits); 5,380 sets of consumer electronics items, and 1,083 shipments of aircraft and auto parts.
(b) Origins: Here the U.S. statistics slightly differ from those of the OECD. As with OECD, they report China and Hong Kong as the top sources, accounting for 51,787 of the 115,000 “lines” of counterfeit goods, and also have Turkey in third with 10,781 lines. The remaining two are the Philippines with 6,416, and Colombia with 5,912.
(c) Transport methods: Counterfeit goods most frequently travel to the U.S. (assuming that CBP’s seizure statistics more or less accurately reflect the counterfeiting industry’s logistics choices) by express deliveries and mail shipments. CBP’s figures show 16,926 of the seized shipments arriving via express delivery, while 7,293 arrived by mail, 2,274 by maritime cargo, and 622 by unspecified other methods. The maritime cargo seizures, however, were apparently very large and valuable; weighted towards consumer electronics counterfeits, they accounted for $1.5 billion or half the total value of all seizures.
The amount of counterfeit goods which get all the way to consumers is by nature uncertain. The CDC, looking closely at medicine, says that “in high-income countries, such as the United States, less than 1% of medicines sold are counterfeit.” Medicines, though, are presumably an area where providers are especially cautious and law enforcement especially vigilant. CBP’s advice to consumers (and the message implicit in Allure’s graphic description of counterfeit perfume ingredients), though, is to be careful with what you buy: “Counterfeit products are low quality and can cause injuries or even death when used.”
FURTHER READING:
Ewww – Allure (2016) on the gross ingredients and nasty side-effects of counterfeit perfume.
… and a similar report this week from CBP, on a seizure of 150 parcels containing 744 counterfeit Botox shipments this Monday in Louisville.
CBP’s one-page, three-point guide for consumer awareness.
… and from the U.S. Trade Representative Office, this morning’s “Special 301” report on intellectual property reviews counterfeiting law and enforcement on pp. 16-20.
U.S. seizure data:
The Customs Service’s annual reports on counterfeit seizures, by country and type of good, back to FY2003. Seizure counts rise steadily from the 5,973 of FY2003 to 14,675 in FY2007 and 19,959 in FY 2010, peak at above 31,000 in FYs 2016, 2017, and 2018, and then drop back a bit to the 27,115 of FY2002. Next update likely in September.
And the World Health Organization’s home-page for counterfeit medicine.
And beyond the borders:
Wealthy countries with sophisticated and efficient customs enforcement record most seizures of counterfeit goods; in lower-income regions, seizures are less systematic and counterfeits are much more likely to reach consumers. As an example, the UN’s Office of Crime and Drug Control reports that substandard or counterfeit medicine rates are above 40% in eight countries — Venezuela, Suriname, Mali, Ghana, Malawi, Nepal, Bhutan, and Vietnam — and between 20% and 39% in 15 more. They published estimates this spring that these counterfeits contribute to as many as 267,000 annual deaths from malaria, and 169,000 deaths from childhood pneumonia. UNODC’s examination of counterfeit medicine in Africa, with a closeup on especially vulnerable low-income Sahelian states.
ABOUT ED
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.
Jasmine Stoughton, Project Director of the Mosaic Project at the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), released the following response in reaction to President Biden’s reelection campaign:
“President Biden has led our country out of chaos, bigotry, and destruction from the Trump Administration, fighting to protect our democracy at every turn. As extremists across the country are working to take away our fundamental freedoms, President Biden continues to fight back.
“President Biden has made tremendous progress fighting for gender equality — from protecting reproductive rights, to increasing opportunities for women-owned small businesses, to prioritizing affordable and accessible childcare. We still have a long way to go, and we urge President Biden to continue creating equal opportunities for women across the country.
“Furthermore, it is with deeds not words that President Biden has proven his commitment to equality and diversity, creating one of the most representative cabinets in history. Appointing diverse and qualified leaders is among the most important elements of successful governance.”
The Mosaic Projectis a network of diverse women with expertise in the fields of economics and technology. Mosaic programming aims to bring new voices to the policy arena by connecting cohort members with opportunities to engage with top industry leaders, lawmakers, and the media.
The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org.
In America, education has been famously coined the “great equalizer.” This should mean that regardless of who you are or where you are from, if you have access to education you can succeed and advance in our economy. While it is true that quality education from a young age ensures long-term prosperity and leaves people better off, not all education is created equal. Access to education, especially at an early age, is not only difficult to find, but varies greatly in quality.
The lack of effective learning opportunities for young children is a fundamental flaw in our nation’s education system. High-quality preschool and other early education options provide children with social, emotional, and motivational skills that close school-readiness gaps. These socio-emotional skills also have positive effects on an individual’s educational success and lifetime earnings, increasing upward social mobility across demographics.
While quality prekindergarten learning environments are critical to the future well-being of individuals, these opportunities are inaccessible to the majority of American families. Private programs have high tuition rates, and the publicly funded programs do not reach as many people as they should. The public program Head Start, which is available to families from low-economic backgrounds, reaches only 41% of income-eligible households. Aside from cost, availability is a huge roadblock for families — with 51% of the U.S. population residing in a child care desert.
In addition to access, quality education is also more difficult to find for low-income Americans. Lower-quality education reduces the impact of pre-K on a child’s development and later success. The quality of programming is critical but greatly varies depending on where you live. In economically disadvantaged communities, even when programs are available they face higher rates of negative student-teacher interactions and worse structural quality.
The federal government currently addresses early education through a patchwork of different programs and funding streams aimed at solving different challenges of the early care conundrum. The last federal appropriations bill, which funded the federal government and associated programs for the 2022 fiscal year, included $11 billion for Head Start and $6 billion for The Child Care Development Block Grant, which provides families from low-income backgrounds financial aid for child care. Additionally, the Preschool Development Grant Birth Through 5 Grant (PDGB-5) received only $290 million. This grant is for state and local governments to improve their preschool’s infrastructure, provide states with comprehensive evaluations of their current programs, and other general funding to improve learning outcomes.
Despite these investments, it is clear our country does not have a cohesive early education policy, which disrupts the reach and efficacy of existing programs. Even without a strong national effort, however, some states and districts across the country have figured out ways to expand access and offer high-quality early education programs. For example, Washington, D.C., subsidizes two years of full-day preschool for district residents. Since 2017, 9 out of 10 of D.C.’s four-year-olds have been enrolled in publicly and privately funded programs. Students in these public programs are effectively mirroring the population demographics, as the percentage of applicants and the percentage of matched students are almost equal across all races and income levels. Elementary students in D.C. have shown academic improvement in reading since 2007, outpacing the national average for large cities. Another example is Oklahoma. The state also boasts a successful pre-K program, serving 70% of the state’s four-year-olds. Today, third-graders in Oklahoma who attended its pre-K program had stronger socio-emotional skills, and performed better in math.
These outcomes demonstrate D.C. and Oklahoma’s ability to provide high-quality and far-reaching education. The state of Oklahoma meets 9 out of 10 quality standards of the Nation Institute for Early Education Research, including extensive professional development, small class sizes, and a continuous quality improvement system. Washington, D.C., has developed a comprehensive system called CLASS to evaluate their program on an annual basis, ensuring quality and consistency for the district’s students. While politically D.C. and Oklahoma could not be more different, leaders in both regions understand that early education is fundamental to the future success of their constituents and that this public investment yields strong return on investments.
Bipartisan support amongst the states can make it all the more possible to develop a comprehensive, national approach to early education. The federal government should define standards and create a quality evaluation system that encourages effective learning environments, addresses teacher-student ratios, cultural diversity, and minimum training requirements for teachers. Policymakers would not have to start from scratch either. Leaders can look to D.C. and Oklahoma, or to other national leaders like The National Association for the Education of Young Children, to ensure federally funded efforts have strong outcomes for pre-kindergarten students.
To effectively implement a national early education policy, federal leaders should coordinate and expand their current programs and funding streams to create a more comprehensive early education system that meets the needs of all young students. The PDBG-5 should be expanded and improved upon to enable and incentivize state and local governments to build education programs that meet the national standards established by the federal government. State programs need the resources and guidelines to create effective and far-reaching programs that lead to strong learning outcomes. Expanding support of state programs does not mean that Head Start has to go away, either. Recent studies argue that Head Start is successful at improving cognitive skills and school-readiness for students who would otherwise be learning at home. The funding for federal and state pre-kindergarten programs should be attached to quality standards, including a comprehensive annual evaluation system, which would help programs ensure stronger socio-economic outcomes and mobility for our nation’s most disadvantaged students. Federal and state programs should be designed to work together to reach every student from low- and middle- income homes, turning the current patchwork of programs and funding for early education into a wide-reaching system that works for all Americans.
Expanding access and developing quality standards needs to be addressed nationally. These efforts can help states and regions offer high quality early education programs that foster equality, collaboration, and consistency. Oklahoma, D.C., and federal programs like Head Start demonstrate that publicly funded programs with the right quality guardrails are successful and have strong impacts on child well-being and their future success. If we want to close readiness gaps in education and ensure upward mobility for all, we need to start with early education and development, making “education as a great equalizer” ring true for the generations to come.
Montana is making progress on creating more school choices for families, but it needs to ensure the quality of choices families have to choose from is good. Thus, lawmakers should carefully decide between competing public charter school bills pending in Helena. One focuses on public charter schools’ core purpose: improving student outcomes. The other is likely to polarize communities, politicize education, and doesn’t guarantee high-quality new schools for its students.
HB 549 would make each of Montana’s 302 school districts a charter school “authorizer,” which is the term for the entity that grants a charter school the right to exist and to use taxpayer dollars to provide free public education. HB 549 would effectively turn the state’s school boards into fiefdoms with the power to deny a charter school sought by its citizens, no matter how much the community wants it. That could pit parents against one another and roil school board meetings. While well-intentioned, it invites chaos around what should be professional, pragmatic decisions based on merit, not emotion.
To further understand why this is a bad idea, consider research from the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) — the nation’s foremost authority on charter school authorizing practices. After studying authorizing practices nationwide for 15 years, NACSA released a report that nailed “the” critical element in authorizing that produces high-quality schools. NACSA Executive Director Karega Rausch wrote, “When there’s institutional commitment, the work of authorizing is visible, it’s part of the larger organization’s strategic plan and goals, and it’s adequately resourced.”
“Most homeowners’ insurance policies do not include flood insurance,” says state Insurance Commissioner David Altmaier. Flood insurance can easily add another $1,500 to the bill. All of these costs help make inflation higher in Florida than the national average. By 2100, if greenhouse gas emissions are not dramatically reduced, Florida could face sea levels rise by up to 6 feet, with more than 900,000 properties at risk of being underwater. Welcome to the world of increasingly brutal climate disasters that will make the lives of average Americans, especially the elderly, far more insecure and expensive, if emissions are allowed to continue rising, as they will if Trump or DeSantis becomes president after the next election.
After months of dithering, Washington is finally beginning to grapple with the need to raise or suspend the federal debt limit. The White House has said for months it would not entertain negotiations until House Republicans laid out a coherent negotiating position. Speaker Kevin McCarthy sought to do just that on Monday with a speech at the New York Stock Exchange outlining his party’s vision and urging Wall Street titans to back him up. But it’s becoming apparent that his plan is half-baked and a backup is needed.
McCarthy proposes to make steep reductions in some categories of spending in conjunction with a $1.5 trillion debt-limit increase that should last through March 2024. Although some reductions in spending make sense at a time when loose fiscal policy has contributed to record-high inflation and our nation’s debt remains on an unstainable trajectory, many of the specific cuts McCarthy proposes would be deeply harmful to economic growth. Moreover, the House GOP’s decision to use the threat of defaulting on our nation’s debts if they don’t get their way threatens global financial stability at a precarious point for our economy.
The most aggressive of McCarthy’s proposed policies is a spending cap that would reduce discretionary programs by more than $3 trillion over the next decade. Depending on how these cuts are structured to comply with the GOP’s previous commitments not to reduce spending on Republican priorities, including national defense and veterans benefits, they could result in a real reduction of nearly 60% for most domestic discretionary spending. A majority of that spending is for critical public investments in infrastructure, education, and scientific research, meaning McCarthy’s cuts would likely reduce long-term economic growth. Among other misguided cuts, McCarthy also proposes to “save” money by reversing a recent funding boost to the IRS — but this move will actually increase deficits by making it easier for wealthy Americans to cheat on their taxes.
FACT: Natural disaster death rates fell by over 90% in the last century.
THE NUMBERS: Annual deaths to natural disasters* –
2020s 13,000 (world population 8 billion)
1970s 99,000 (world population 4 billion)
1920s 524,000 (world population 2 billion)
* Our World in Data
WHAT THEY MEAN:
Each year brings about the same count of floods, earthquakes and tsunamis, droughts, hurricanes and cyclones, and other tragedies and disasters of geology and weather. But the toll these events take on life, society, and the economy seems to lessen over time. Website Our World in Data, using a simultaneously gloomy and hopeful database developed by the University of Louvain, summarizes:
“[O]ver the course of the 20th century there was a significant decline in global deaths from natural disasters. In the early 1900s, the annual average was often in the range of 400,000 to 500,000 deaths. In the second half of the century and into the early 2000s, we have seen a significant decline to less than 100,000 — at least five times lower than these peaks. This decline is even more impressive when we consider the rate of population growth over this period. When we correct for population — showing this data in terms of death rates (measured per 100,000 people) — then we see a more than 10-fold decline over the past century.”
Why? Gingerly comparing two sets of historical tragedies and disasters:
Japan and Earthquakes: This September marks the centennial of the Great Kanto Earthquake, the deadliest in Japanese history, which struck Taisho-era Tokyo in 1923. Believed to have reached 7.8 on the Richter Scale,* the quake killed over 105,000 of the city’s then-2.2 million residents through building collapses and fires. (Based on the Japanese government’s most recent estimates; earlier estimates were closer to 150,000.) The vastly larger Great Tohoku Earthquake of 2011 — 9.1 on the Richter scale, 20 times more powerful than the 1923 event — is thought by geologists the fourth-largest earthquake ever measured anywhere. It nonetheless took many fewer lives, because of the efficiency of Japan’s urban building codes, sea walls able to absorb at least some of the tsunami impact, immediate electronic warnings to bullet trains and motorists, and rapid-response civil defense bureaucracy.
Bangladesh and Cyclones: The Bhola Cyclone which struck Bangladesh in 1970, during which winds reached 145 mph, may have killed half a million people. More recent cyclones, though sometimes comparably powerful, are less deadly. The 2020 “super-Cyclone Amphan” and its 150 mph winds, for example, took 26 lives in Bangladesh, 98 in India’s neighboring West Bengal province, and 4 in Sri Lanka. Drawn from a least-developed country rather than Japan’s high-income, high-tech economy, Bangladesh’s post-Bhola experience is an equally powerful illustration of the ways in which weather service, evacuation drills, cultivated coastal mangrove forests to absorb storm impact, and evacuation drills are, though unable to prevent disasters, can make them far less dangerous.
More generally, the Our World in Data figures suggest that the level of annual disaster deaths is quite variable, and not precisely comparable across time since large individual events often affect not only annual totals but decade-long averages. Nonetheless, the broad trend seems clear. The 1920s featured the highest number of annual disaster deaths on average in OWiD‘s table, at over half a million per year. In the 1970s, a half-century later, the average was just below 100,000 disaster deaths per year. For the 2010s, it was 45,000 per year; and for the incomplete 2020s, the lowest of all at 13,000 per year.
The scale of this decline varies for different kinds of events. The sharpest reductions are in deaths to droughts and consequent famines, which are down 99.8% from the 472,400 per year average of the 1920s to 2,012 per year in the 2010s and 837 per year so far in the 2020s. (Famines remained significant causes of death in South Asia through the 1940s and in China to the early 1960s, and in the Horn of Africa until the last such event in anarchic Somalia 30 years ago. Better infrastructure, emergency relief, globalization, and multiple sources of food can ensure that people don’t starve when local or individual international sources go down, people no longer starve.) Losses to inland river floods have dropped almost as sharply. Those to earthquakes and tsunamis seem more uneven, with the recent averages much affected by the 2007 Port-au-Prince earthquake and the Indian Ocean tsunami which struck Indonesia, Thailand, and Sri Lanka in 2004. Hurricane and cyclone mortality, finally, is down about 90%, from 12,000 to 14,000 per year in the mid-20th century to about 1,600 per year so far in the 2020s, with Bangladesh’s post-Bhola experience striking evidence for the success of preparation and disaster relief in vulnerable least-developed countries. Last word to Our World in Data:
“This trend does not mean that disasters have become less frequent, or less intense. It means the world today is much better at preventing deaths from disasters than in the past.”
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.
America could have cleaner, cheaper energy if only we could agree to get out of our own way. The obstacle we have created is a thicket of federal and state regulations requiring energy projects to undergo lengthy, expensive, one-by-one government studies, in theory, to determine their environmental impact. But as Earth Day approaches, it’s time we align these regulations with the need to rapidly build clean energy infrastructure to both address the climate crisis and reduce consumer energy costs.
This regulatory process is termed “permitting” because of more than 60 types of federal government permits that can be required for projects, and it stems primarily from the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Initially conceived as a quick and simple examination for most routine projects, the combination of project siting, NEPA review and issuing permits has morphed into a many-years-long process rife with opportunities for narrow interests to block projects even where they demonstrably serve consumer and public interests and cut emissions. Perversely, clean energy projects, especially low-cost solar power, are most often the projects facing the longest delays.
Black Maternal Health Week is a week-long initiative that raises awareness of the diminished maternal outcomes for Black women in America, who experience higher rates of pregnancy- and childbirth-related deaths. Alarmingly, Black women are three to four times more likely than white women to die from pregnancy-related causes. The CDC lists multiple factors that lead to increased rates of mortality for Black mothers, including implicit bias and discrimination, variation in quality of health care, and underlying health conditions. While differences in coverage and access to care certainly contribute to poorer health outcomes for Black women, they are still facing disparities in maternal and infant health regardless of their socioeconomic circumstances, including their education level or income. While Black women of any background should not be subjected to such poor maternal health outcomes, this starkly demonstrates how racism and discrimination factor into Black women’s maternal health experiences. Worse, Black women had the highest maternal mortality rates across racial and ethnic groups during the pandemic in 2020 and 2021 and had the largest increase when compared to data from 2019. Overall, the United States ranks worse in overall maternal health outcomes than all of our Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) counterparts. Additionally, the only countries with rising maternal mortality rates are the United States, Afghanistan, and Sudan.
Compounding the Black maternal health crisis in the U.S. is the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Now, 26 states have fully banned some or basically all access to abortion care, forcing millions of women of reproductive age to navigate their health care options where it is essentially impossible to obtain an abortion care.
Black women are disproportionately harmed by abortion restrictions and bans, which will likely widen the already stark disparities in maternal and infant health in this country. We know that teen birth rates declined over the last several decades thanks to expanded access to reproductive health care, but were higher among Black, Hispanic, American Indian and Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander teens compared to their white counterparts.
Meanwhile, the recent ruling by a Trump-appointed Texas District Court Judge to take back its approval of mifepristone, a drug for inducing abortions, used safely in this country for 23 years, is threatening to worsen U.S. Black maternal mortality. More than half of all U.S. abortions are done through medications. Mifepristone has been used by nearly 5 million people in the U.S. since it came to the market and is proven to be safer than Tylenol or Viagra. With this ruling, 40 million more could lose access to abortion care, stripping away their ability to make their own choices about their health care because of the egregiousness of one unelected, right-wing judicial activist. One in four women will have an abortion in their lifetime, and the average person who seeks abortion care is a woman of color who is already a mother and lives below the federal poverty line.
While access to abortion care will not fix the maternal health crisis in this country, restricting it will most certainly contribute to worsen America’s devastating maternal mortality crisis. Per the UN General Assembly, carrying a pregnancy to term against a person’s will is, by definition, a violation of human rights. Research confirms that women who are denied access to abortion care are more likely to experience poorer health outcomes. For example, abortion is one option for treatment for gestational diabetes and gestational hypertension, which are contributors to eclampsia. Preeclampsia is one of the most common disorders during both pregnancy and postpartum, and occurs at a 60% higher rate for Black women than white women. Because of the increased maternal mortality for Black women, it is particularly unconscionable to force them to continue an unwanted pregnancy.
Concurrently, this country has also seen a disturbing increase of maternity care deserts. In fact, 36% of U.S. counties are now maternity care deserts, meaning that 7 million women across the country live in these areas where access to maternity health care services is limited or nonexistent. Per a March of Dimes report, American counties classified as deserts increased by 2% since their 2020 report. Overall, one in eight babies born in the U.S. were born in maternity deserts, and one in six Black babies are born in areas with limited or no maternity care services. We are witnessing, in real time, a full on split of this country into abortion and maternal health deserts, prohibiting millions of Americans from accessing lifesaving care.
The Biden administration has taken some significant steps to addressing the maternal mortality crisis. In October 2022, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), through the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare (CMS), announced that through the American Rescue Plan (ARP) that was enacted in March 2021, more than half of all states have expanded Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) to provide 12 months of extended coverage after pregnancy. An estimated 418,000 Americans have now gained this coverage in combination with previously approved state extensions. If remaining states all approved this expansion, an estimated 720,000 Americans would be guaranteed Medicaid and CHIP coverage for 12 months postpartum. Last June 2022, the Biden administration released a blueprint for addressing the maternal health crisis, which offers a broad vision and call to action to address the maternal health crisis.
The most visible effort to address Black maternal mortality in Congress is the Momnibus Act of 2021, sponsored by Congresswomen Alma Adams (D-N.C.), Lauren Underwood (D-Ill.), and Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and other members of the Black Maternal Health Caucus. The Momnibus Act of 2021 is a package of 12 bills that builds on existing legislation to address various issues within the Black maternal health crisis, including: making critical investments in social determinants of health as well as for community-based organizations, providing resources to diversity the perinatal workforce, invests in telemedicine and innovative payment models, and provides support for mothers with maternal mental health conditions and substance use disorders, among others. The Protecting Moms Who Served Act, which supports the Department of Veterans Affairs in studying the unique maternal health risks facing pregnant and postpartum veterans, became the first of these bills to become law in November 2021. The Momnibus Act is highly popular, with support from 72% of registered voters.
The intersection of the curtailing of abortion access and the growing Black maternal mortality crisis in this country, while a preventable and unnecessary circumstance, is a political and policy choice. What does it say about the state of this society and the future of this country if we cannot care for all life givers, especially Black mothers, to ensure that at the very least, they live through their birth experiences? Black mothers deserve to thrive; they deserve to return home to their families, to rest and heal from the life-altering experience of giving birth, to receive support and care from their communities and health care providers. Black women deserve so much more than the bare minimum of surviving pregnancy — they should be able to decide how, when, and whether to grow their families and should receive high quality health care that is accessible, safe, respectful, and culturally competent.
PPI’s Reinventing America’s Schools (RAS) Project has a new podcast series on titled “WHAT NEXT: The Future is Now!” recorded at the SXSW Education conference in Austin, Texas. In the fourth episode of this five-part series, RAS co-director sits down with Jay Artis-Wright.
Accountability — legal, moral and political — is knocking on Donald Trump’s door. Whether you call it justice or karma, a lifetime of sociopathic misconduct is finally catching up with America’s artful dodger.
Don’t be misled by the underwhelming case Manhattan Attorney General Alvin Bragg has brought against Trump. The former president is in a world of legal hurt, and his 34-count felony indictment in New York is only the beginning of the reckoning he faces.
