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Is Early Education a Great Equalizer? We have to Create National Standards First

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

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.

Pankovits for the Billings Gazette: Lawmakers are considering two charter school bills; one is better

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

By Tressa Pankovits

 

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.”

Read more in the Billings Gazette.

Bledsoe for NYDN: President Biden’s Earth Day promise: The incumbent has a real plan for a greener future, unlike Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis

Posted on by Alyssa Brown

By Paul Bledsoe

Last week, a meeting of Florida flooding policy managers was washed out in South Florida by a deluge of 26 inches of rain in just eight hours, unprecedented rainfall made far larger due to the climate change crisis that Gov. Ron DeSantis and former President Donald Trump consistently belittle. And it’s not even hurricane season yet. In fact, climate change causes extreme flooding year around since warmer air holds more water vapor, making storms produce additional “heavy precipitation events,” according to the U.S. National Climate Assessment.

Sunshine State homeowners now face massive increases in home insurance costs due to climate change impacts, if they can get insurance at all. Since DeSantis became governor four years ago, policy home insurance rates have gone up 50% for Floridians, and increases aren’t stopping. And experts expect reinsurance costs to go up another 50% more this summer.

“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.

Read more in New York Daily News. 

Ritz for Forbes: A Two-Step Solution Can Defuse The Debt-Ceiling Crisis

Posted on by Alyssa Brown

By Ben Ritz

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.

Read more in Forbes.

PPI’s Trade Fact of the Week: Natural disaster death rates fell by over 90% in the last century 

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

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.”

 

FURTHER READING:

Stats on natural disasters from Our World in Data.

… direct to a 1900s-2020s table of declining natural disaster tolls by decade.

… and the University of Louvain’s disaster database.

Japan – 

The Japan Times reports on Japan’s information-sharing on tsunami and earthquake preparation.

… and Minimisanrikyu twelve years after the Great Tohoku Earthquake.

Bangladesh –

The Bangladesh Cyclone Preparedness Program.

The World Meteorological Organization on Cyclone Bhola and its lessons.

The Guardian on super-cyclone Amphan.

And the U.S. National Institutes of Health (2012) reflect on declining cyclone mortality in Bangladesh.

More –

Tsunami preparation in Thailand.

East African Community plans drought and storm responses.

And the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s International division.

And some long looks back at three turn-of-the-last-century U.S. events –

California: The U.S. Geological Survey analyzes the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, thought to have killed 2,000 people.

Texas: NPR on the 1900 Galveston hurricane and its 6,000-12,000 lost lives.

Pennsylvania: Johnstown remembers the 1889 flood and its 2208 deaths.

 

 

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.

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Bledsoe and Sykes for The Hill: Permitting reform can cut consumer energy costs and emissions

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

By Paul Bledsoe and Elan Sykes

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.

Read more in The Hill.

U.S. Black Maternal Mortality is a Human Rights Crisis

Posted on by Alyssa Brown

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.

WHAT’S NEXT: The Future is Now! Featuring Jay Artis-Wright

Posted on by dcadmin
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.

Learn more about Jay-Artis Wright here.

Learn more about the Reinventing America’s Schools Project here.

Learn more about the Progressive Policy Institute here.

Marshall for The Hill: It’s only the beginning of America’s reckoning with Trump

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

By Will Marshall

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.

Read more in The Hill.

WHAT’S NEXT: The Future is Now! Featuring Dr. Constance Lindsay

Posted on by dcadmin
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 third episode of this five-part series, RAS co-director sits down with Dr. Constance Lindsay.

Learn more about Dr. Constance Lindsay here.

Learn more about the Reinventing America’s Schools Project ⁠here⁠.

Learn more about the Progressive Policy Institute ⁠here⁠.

MOSAIC MOMENT: Internet Access as We Know

Posted on by dcadmin
According to The International Telecommunications Union, two-thirds of the world now has internet access. On this month’s episode of the Mosaic Moment, PPI’s Ed Gresser sits down with two of the nation’s leading broadband experts, Meagan Bolton and Christine O’Connor to discuss where connectivity gaps remain and what U.S. policymakers are doing to bridge this digital divide.

From infrastructure challenges to new digital trade policies, hear what these experts have to say about the future of internet access, adoption, and affordability.

Follow Ed Gresser on Twitter: @EBGresser

  • Follow Christine O’Connor on Twitter: @CNOConnor

Follow PPI on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ppi

PPI’s Trade Fact of the Week: U.S. tariffs on cheap stainless steel spoons are 5 times higher than on sterling silver spoons 

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

FACT: U.S. tariffs on cheap stainless steel spoons are four times higher than tariffs on sterling silver spoons.

THE NUMBERS: U.S. tariff rates –

Sterling silver spoons:                                  3.3%
Stainless steel spoons, ≥25 cents each:       6.8%
Stainless steel spoons, <25 cents each:      14.0%

* About 20% for a spoon valued at 25 cents on imports; 25% for a spoon costing 10 cents or less. Tariff lines are 71141130 for sterling silver, 82159930 for stainless steel spoons costing less than 25 cents each, and 82159935 for spoons at or above 25 cents each.


WHAT THEY MEAN:

How is it that cheap spoons are taxed more heavily than sterling silver?

In his 1832 essay on the U.S.’ tariff law, the former Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin — then  a 70-year-old observer and occasional commentator on policy; in earlier life a teenage immigrant from Geneva in the 1780s, a Jeffersonian-Republican politician and founder of the Ways and Means Committee in the 1790s, and Treasury Sec. for the Jefferson and Madison administrations from 1801-1814 — makes a cautious case for progressive taxation:

“Higher duties on luxuries than on articles generally, and in some cases exclusively, used by the less wealthy classes of society are justified by the propriety of laying a heavier burden on those who are the best able to bear it.”

He then glumly notes that, tariffs being an especially opaque way to raise money, and businesses and wealthy people being more able to investigate and complain about their “burdens” than the public in general and the poor in particular, the tariff laws of 1816 and 1828 had done the opposite.

“The principal commodities which have been selected for special protection, iron and all the coarser woollen articles of clothing, are as well as salt, coal, and sugar, essentially necessary to all classes of society.  The duties laid on such commodities fall therefore much more heavily, in proportion to their means, on the less wealthy classes; and it has already been seen with what singular ingenuity that on woollens has been so arranged, as to make the poor pay, in every instance, considerably more than the rich.  This your memorialists consider to be one of the most obnoxious features of the restrictive system.”

Income and payroll taxes now far exceed the $90 billion tariff system as a U.S. revenue source. But 190 years after Gallatin’s essay, the case of spoons raises some strikingly similar questions. Buyers of cheap stainless steel spoons pay about four times the tax on wealthy neighbors buying sterling, to wit:

(1) Mass-market: Low-priced stainless steel spoons, imported at prices below 25 cents each, get a 14% tariff. For readers familiar with the D.C. metro area, think middle-class and low-income families in Rockville or P.G. County, or the Salvadoran and Ethiopian restaurants along Georgia Avenue just north of the District. No such spoons seem to be made in the U.S. at all.

(2) Luxury: The tariff on sterling silver spoons is 3.3%, a bit less than a quarter of the cheap-stainless rate. Say, McLean and Georgetown, the Mayflower and the Four Seasons, downtown law firms, etc. In this sector, American companies and individuals do make sterling silver spoons, sometimes in batches and sometimes as artisanal pieces, but the prices are high enough to make tariff rates irrelevant.

(3) Mid-tier: More expensive stainless steel falls in the middle, with a 6.8% tariff.  One company in upstate New York, Sherill Industries, makes high-priced stainless steel silverware, whose prices seem to average around $4.00 per piece.

Gallatin’s term “obnoxious” is subjective, but doesn’t seem unreasonable here. Neither the cheap-spoon line (“82159930”) nor the sterling line (71141130”) appear to affect trade flows much, so in this case the tariff system is acting much more in its ‘tax’ role than its ‘trade’ role. There’s little doubt that in this case the poor are taxed considerably more than the rich, and the spoons case is more a typical case than a weird anomaly. An illustrative table of 12 products, drawn from PPI testimony to the International Trade Commission last year:

In this perspective, Gallatin seems to identify a structural challenge that remains powerful despite the passage of nineteen decades. Perhaps especially in tariffs as opposed to more transparent income or sales taxes, low-income people often don’t know when they are being taxed and aren’t in a position to ask for lighter burdens.  And in the political system, most tariff analysis relates to trade policy rather than the role of tariffs in taxation; Gallatin’s Ways and Means Committee, in fact, appears not to have held a hearing on the tax implications of tariff policy since 1974. So with little knowledge about strange phenomena like the differential rates on stainless steel and sterling even among policymakers, policies rarely get critical examination and “the less wealthy classes” seem to wind up carrying the heavier burdens.

 

 

FURTHER READING:

Analysis then and now:

Frederick Taussig’s State Papers and Speeches on the Tariff collection (1892), featuring Gallatin’s 1832 essay along with other 18th- and 19th-century trade policy luminaries (Alexander Hamilton, Daniel Webster, and the now-obscure Robert Walker, who was James K. Polk’s Treasury Secretary in the 1840s).

Economists Miguel Acosta and Lydia Cox trace the low-tariffs/luxury vs. high-tariff/mass-market skew of the U.S. tariff system back to agreements of the 1930s and 1940s.

PPI’s Ed Gresser looks at consumer goods tariff inequities in 2022 testimony to the International Trade Commission.

Tariff schedule:

The Harmonized Tariff Schedule; see Chapter 71, heading 7114 for sterling silver and other precious-metal “silverware,” and Chapter 81, heading 8215 for “base metal.”

And a summary of the 11,414 current U.S. tariff lines – how many “duty-free,” how many covered by tariffs, how many the various Free Trade Agreements waive.

And via the St. Louis Fed, a copy of the 1828 tariff law which so annoyed ex-Secretary Gallatin.

More on Gallatin:

The Treasury Department’s Albert Gallatin statue.

Nicholas Dungan’s admiring 2010 bio.

And a silverware-maker:

Liberty Tabletop in New York.

 

 

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.

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Five Tax Loopholes That Congress Should Close

Posted on by Alyssa Brown

Introduction

The federal tax code is riddled with provisions that benefit individuals and businesses working in certain sectors or engaging in specific activities. In 2019, these provisions — known as tax expenditures — cost the federal government 6.6% of gross domestic product (GDP) in lost revenue, which is greater than the amounts spent on Social Security (4.9% of GDP), Medicare (3.7%), national defense (3.2%), and the entire nondefense discretionary budget (3.1%). Although some tax expenditures help working-class people, 24.1% of their overall benefits go to the top 1% of income-earners, and 58.8% go to the top 20%. The regressive and economically inefficient nature of tax expenditures makes them a ripe target for progressive reform.

This isn’t to suggest that every expenditure helps special interests. For example, the earned income tax credit subsidizes the wages of low-paid workers and pulls four million Americans out of poverty every year. But according to the U.S. Treasury Department, the tax code is littered with over 160 expenditures, including highly regressive expenditures such as the mortgage interest deduction, the state and local tax deduction, the carried interest loophole, and the pass-through business loophole. These carveouts leave the federal government with a Swiss cheese tax code — one that fulfills its basic purpose but is littered with holes. Just as PPI has advocated a regulatory improvement commission to streamline economic regulations, the U.S. also needs to examine the many cracks and holes in the federal tax code.

A few large tax expenditures are already well-known. But most are quite small, and they survive largely by remaining out of sight and out of mind. They also sometimes benefit from lobbying efforts by well-connected industry leaders who prefer that their pet carveouts remain free from public scrutiny. This post, therefore, sheds light on five smaller tax expenditures — the types that don’t normally make the headlines — which ought to be eliminated to boost federal revenues and remove unfair loopholes. Specifically, Congress should:

 

  1.     Eliminate the percentage depletion deduction for certain fossil fuel producers;
  2.     Tax employee awards under either the personal income tax or the corporate profits tax;
  3.     Remove the special deduction for Blue Cross Blue Shield and certain other health insurance providers;
  4.     Eliminate the 5010 credit for wine and flavor additives in distilled spirits; and
  5.     Remove automatic partnership classification for companies that derive 90% or more of their income from fossil fuels and other depletable natural resources.

 

These five changes, if enacted by themselves, would raise just under $31 billion over 10 years. But more importantly, these five arcane loopholes are just the tip of the iceberg — policymakers who are willing to take a deeper dive into the tax code will find even greater savings hidden under the surface.

 

READ THE FULL POLICY BRIEF HERE

Jacoby for Liberties Journal: The Battle of Irpin

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

By Tamar Jacoby

On the day the Russians invaded Ukraine, Patol Moshevitz, a landscape architect and painter, woke early and looked out the window of his apartment on the fourteenth floor of one of the newest, most desirable buildings in the city of Irpin. He could see for miles in almost every direction: Kyiv, Bucha, most of Irpin, and the Hostomel airfield just across the marsh to the north. A big bear of a man with a shaved head, he saw a swarm of Russian helicopters descending on the airport. The noise was deafening even where he was, and a dark plume of smoke rose on the horizon.

 

Read more in Liberties Journal.

Jacoby for Bulwark: Why Ukraine Fights

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

By Tamar Jacoby

One of the most popular memes circulating on Ukrainian social media in the past year used an image, first popularized on Russian social media, of a grotesque creature with the body of a fish and the snout of a pig—a shvino karas, or pig fish. “A few decades ago, almost all Ukrainian popular culture was derivative of something Russian,” online meme curator and web developer Bohdan Andrieiev, 32, explained. “Before independence and for more than a decade afterward, we had no popular culture of our own.” This has changed dramatically in recent years, culminating in a burst of new Ukrainian creativity since the Russian invasion in February 2022. Social media, meme culture, pop music, and viral jokes have emerged as powerful tools of national solidarity—the bottom-up, ironic Ukrainian equivalent of old-style totalitarian propaganda.

According to Andrieiev, virtually none of this new popular culture draws on Russian sources—that’s now widely seen as inappropriate. “But this is an exception,” he said, “because we’re inverting the reference. It’s like the word ‘queer.’ What was a slur is now a badge of pride. Russians call Ukrainians pigs and pig fish and look down on us. But if we’re so pathetic, how come we’re beating them on the battlefield?”

Even after a year of intensive media coverage of the war in Ukraine, it’s easy to forget how new the Ukrainian nation is. In 1987, when Ronald Reagan admonished Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall,” Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union—the rough political equivalent of a U.S. state. Ukrainians had their own language and folk traditions and there had been a few short-lived attempts over the years to form a Ukrainian government. But not until 1991 did Ukrainians establish an independent nation—and even then, the shadow of the Soviet Union hung heavily over the new country, both politically and culturally.

Read more in Bulwark.

WHAT’S NEXT: The Future is Now! Featuring Dr. Charles Cole

Posted on by dcadmin
PPI’s Reinventing America’s Schools (RAS) Project has a new podcast series titled “WHAT NEXT: The Future is Now!” recorded at the SXSW Education conference in Austin, Texas.
In the second episode of this five-part series, RAS co-director sits down with Dr. Charles Cole.

Learn more about Dr. Charles Cole here.

Learn more about the Reinventing America’s Schools Project here.

Learn more about the Progressive Policy Institute here.