issue: Politics

How Gallup’s Partisan ID Numbers Could Mean Trouble for Obama in 2012

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In looking ahead to 2012, I’ve been playing around with Gallup’s State of the States numbers on political party affiliations. Gallup asks people whether they identify as Democrats or Republicans, and really pushes Independents to pick a side, which means that you can get a pretty good picture of where voters are

In 2008, Democrats had a party affiliation advantage in 42 states, and that affiliation advantage was at least 10 points in 28 states. In 2010, just two years later, Democrats enjoyed an affiliation advantage in 28 states, and had an advantage of more than 10 points in just 12 states. On average, Democratic Party affiliation advantage has gone down by 9.0 percentage points. In other words, the country went from being solidly Democratic to just slightly so. But it gets a little more troubling for Obama when translated into Electoral College math.

Since Democrats seem to enjoy a party affiliation advantage in Gallup’s polling that is slightly higher than the state voting patterns (Gallup thinks this is because Republicans vote at higher rates), in 2008, the state with the lowest Democratic affiliation advantage that went to Obama was Virginia, which was +9.0% Democrat. If that threshold carries over to 2012, and the party affiliation numbers remain the same, the Republican candidate would pick up at least 358 electoral votes, possibly more, since a couple of states that had even higher Democratic advantages than +9.0% voted for McCain in 2008.

Looking ahead to 2012, the key will be the states in the more than five percent but less than ten percent Democratic advantage range. Here we have a whole bunch of probable swing states: Iowa (+5.1%), North Carolina (+5.2%), Minnesota (+5.4%), Ohio (5.6%), Pennsylvania (6.4%), Michigan (+7.3%), and Washington (+7.7%). If Obama takes these seven states (but still loses West Virginia, which is +9.7% Dem, but he lost last time at +18.9%) Dem, he gets 271 electoral votes, just enough to win.

Key swing states that have fallen below the five percent Democratic advantage now include: Nevada (+4.5%, down from +11.3%), Florida (+3.1%, down from +9.1%), Wisconsin (2.6%, down from 17.8%(!)), Colorado (+2.6%, down from 10.7%), and Virginia (-0.3% down from +9.0%).

Obviously, there is a fair amount of time between now and November 2012, and things could shift back in the other direction. Since we know independents broke strongly for Republicans in 2010, it’s a decent bet that a fair amount of the shift toward Republicans comes from independents, and that those independents could be won back. Moreover, the Republican presidential field continues to look week.

In a subsequent post, I’ll be dealing with what I think is a very intriguing question raised by these numbers: that there is a good deal of variation in the change in Democratic identification across states, ranging from a ranging from a drop of 22.2 percent in New Hampshire (from +13.2% to -9.0%) to a drop of 1.6 percent in Mississippi (already a pretty red state).

Why has the Democratic advantage fallen much more precipitously in some states than others? And could knowing why help Democrats at all? Stay tuned.

A Navy Fighter Pilot’s Perspective on the No-Fly Zone

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In 1999, I was a Navy F-14 pilot enforcing a no-fly zone over Southern Iraq.  As I climbed into my cockpit, I was confident – confident in our mission to destroy Saddam Hussein’s brutal Republican Guard units, confident in my ability to distinguish foes from the innocent Iraqi civilians we were protecting, and confident in the legitimacy and wide support of an United Nations-backed mission.

If I were to suit up today to enforce a no-fly zone over Libyan to help depose dictator Muammar Qaddafi, I would be conducting a murkier – and more dangerous – mission.  First of all, I would not have a clear mission to guide me.  Is it to destroy all Libyan aircraft, to identify and destroy only Qaddafi’s forces, or to just protect civilians from airborne assault?  I would not be able to easily distinguish rebels from government forces on the ground.  Both fighting forces look pretty much the same when you are flying at high speed or high altitude.  I would have none of the policy cohesion and global support that I had in 1999.  Washington, DC would still be trying to sort out what to do.  At the current pace of international negotiations, I probably would have neither United Nations nor NATO support.

I am proud that the United States is considering military actions to “lead from the front” to stop Qaddafi’s planes and tanks from killing civilian protesters.  Yet, the Libyan situation is one that is best resolved with global (or at least regional) consensus. Unilateral action is ill-advised as we have considerable burdens in Iraq and Afghanistan currently. Adding a unilateral military force to the Libyan conflict could unnecessarily burden our military, put additional strain on America as it fights to right its economic course post-recession, and provide additional fodder to those that posit that America routinely acts capriciously and unilaterally.

If the United States were to become involved militarily in the absence of any sort of global consensus, that would take us back to the fragile “coalition of the willing” of the Bush era.  This undermines our work to strengthen NATO and the United Nations as organizations that could take on more global security responsibilities.  When coalitions are ad hoc, it makes for a less predictable and stable climate for our allies to find common ground on which to solve future problems.

We should strive for global, or at a minimum regional, consensus on how to address the Libyan problem.  If the United Nations cannot reach consensus, America should not assume that its actions would be in concert with trans-regional goals.  After all, if our allies are not sufficiently included in the “take-off” planning, they are less likely to be with us for the landing.

Congress and the Obama Administration should strive for policies that would make it relatively safe for a pilot climbing into a cockpit in the near future to enforce a no-fly zone over Libya.  He should know that his aerial bombing targets were properly vetted to distinguish between civilians and armed forces and that the rules of engagement make sense.  He should have the peace of mind to know that America and the global community are behind him 100 percent and that there is recognizable agreement on the preferred diplomatic and military options.

A Comparative Look at Income Inequality

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

What would it mean for theories of U.S. income inequality growth if the U.S experience has been similar to that everywhere else?

Yet again and again [economists and other researchers not named Hacker or Pierson] have found themselves at dead ends or have missed crucial evidence.  After countless arrests and interrogations, the demise of broad-based prosperity remains a frustratingly open case, unresolved even as the list of victims grows longer.

All this, we are convinced, is because a crucial suspect has largely escaped careful scrutiny: American politics.

– Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner Take All Politics

Here’s a chart showing trends in the share of income received by the top one percent for all the modern industrialized nations for which data is available going back to the early twentieth century:

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The data is from a new website created by several of the leading scholars studying inequality with tax data.  The American trend, the thick black line, is from the much cited work of Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, which is part of this new database.

From 1910 to 1970, American inequality trends follow the broad international pattern, and inequality levels are in the middle of the pack.  That’s basically still true from 1970 to 1986:

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It’s rising a bit over the period, but only by a percentage point.  Note I’m keeping the scale of the charts the same for each one.  Here’s the chart for 1988 to 2006:

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Uh-oh.  Now we look like our inequality levels are higher than everywhere else.  What happened?  1986 to 1988 happened, as is evident from the 1970-2006 trend:

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Wow, that’s a four percentage point increase in two years—three times the increase over the 16 years from 1970 to 1986, and bigger than the 12-year increase from 1988 to 2000.  Huh. There are two possibilities here.  One is that the data is right.  You can see where I’m going here.

It helps to know that the 1986 tax reform created big incentives for people who had previously reported income on corporate returns (where it is invisible to the datasets above) to report on individual income tax returns (where it appears as an out-of-the-blue increase).  And if this may be considered a permanent change in the tax regime, then the effect is for more income to show up on individual returns after 1986 than before, artificially lifting the top income share in every subsequent year.

Hmmm…which possibility is more likely? Let’s look at another chart showing the trends just for the northern hemisphere Anglophone countries, to which I’ll add a new line:

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OK, from about 1940 to 1986, these trends line up strikingly, then the U.S. trend goes AWOL.  However, let’s instead assume the post-1986 U.S. trend is an artifact of the 1986 tax reform.  First, let’s increase the top one percent share from 1986 to 1988 by the same rate that it increased in the U.K.  Then let’s let the top share in the U.S. increase by the same rate that it actually did from 1988 to 2006, but from the new, lower 1988 level.  The result is the revised line above.  This makes the U.S. trend and level consistent with not just the U.K., but Canada.
Of course, if the 1988 to 2006 top share levels are more accurate in the U.S. after 1988 than before 1986, then rather than lowering the post-1986 trend, we should raise the pre-1988 trend.  That would make U.S. levels uniformly higher than in the U.K. and Canada.  But of course, the measured U.K. and Canadian top share levels may also be artificially low due to tax avoidance.  And of course, the common trend over the three countries would remain.

So, to review, when the post-1986 U.S. trend is corrected, the U.S. experience with inequality over the past 100 years is broadly consistent with the rest of the modern world.  Here’s the summary chart for 1910-2006, with the revised U.S. trend.

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Comparing levels is more difficult, but many recent cross-national comparisons related to inequality are about why trends differ.  What these five charts clarify is that explanations for the recent rise in American inequality that focus on uniquely American causes—such as greater political muscle-flexing among corporations and the mega-rich—are insufficient (and unnecessary).

Update: I’ve received several responses offline that it’s going to far to say the experience of the U.S. is like that “everywhere else” and that it is really only like the other Anglophone countries. To some extent, that’s a fair criticism. But of 15 countries shown here, only Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland haven’t experienced an increase in inequality since 1980. And the increases in Norway and Finland are as big or bigger than in the U.S., U.K., and Canada. Sweden’s increase is also nearly as great in relative terms (starting from a much lower level of course). But even if this is a story about the U.S., U.K., and Canada or the Anglophone countries versus the rest of the world, that’s still a problem for Hacker’s and Pierson’s U.S.-centric theory.

This piece is cross-posted at Scott Winship’s blog

Dems’ Hard Times in the Anxiety Belt

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Yesterday, I began exploring the idea of an “Anxiety Belt” – an upper Midwest group of six swing states from Pennsylvania west to Iowa. I showed how these states were whiter, older, less well-educated, and slightly poorer than the nation at large, and argued that, with 81 electoral votes between them, Obama needs to pay attention to them. Today, I want to look at what’s happened to the partisan dynamics in those states in the last two years.

Across almost the entire country, the number of individuals identifying as Democrats or at least leaning Democrats (according to Gallup) has declined since 2008. But in the Anxiety Belt, that decline has been more pronounced. In all six states, the state-level decline than the national (average of 7.6 percentage points, compared to 6.1 percentage points nationwide). Overall, the Anxiety Belt went from slightly more Democratic than the rest of the nation to slightly less Democratic. Not an encouraging trend for Dems.

As might be expected, the Republicans have made greater gains in these states. Again, the Republican gain in each of these states is higher than the national average Republican gain, and overall, the average state-level gain among Anxiety Belt states in Republican identification (4.2 percent) is 50 percent more than the national average (2.7 percent).

Republicans won all five governor’s races in these six states last November, with the sixth being Indiana, where Republican Mitch Daniels was elected to a second term in 2008. Republicans also won all four Senate seats up for re-election in these six states.

Of course, it’s worth pointing out that Democrats still enjoy an overall partisan identification advantage in five out of the six states.

Certainly, Obama should still be competitive in all of these states, though Indiana might be a stretch. But the direction of this region is unmistakably away from Democrats, and even moreso than the nation as a whole. Democrats are going to have to continue to think hard about why they are having a particularly time here, and what they can do to speak to these voters.

Gang of Six Steps Up

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

If there’s any hope for making headway this year against America’s debt crisis, it lies with the bipartisan “Gang of Six” in the U.S. Senate. This group is filling the political vacuum created by House Republicans’ lemming-like rush to the ideological cliffs, and President Obama’s reluctance to commit himself on tough fiscal choices.

Led by Virginia Democrat Mark Warner and Georgia Republican Saxby Chambliss, the Gang of Six has picked up where the President’s Fiscal Commission left off. They’ve embraced the commission’s main political breakthrough – a hard-won bargain in which some key conservatives like Sen. Tom Coburn agreed to cut tax expenditures, while liberals such as Sen. Dick Durbin agreed to constrain Social Security costs.

This is the only bipartisan game in town, and it makes the Senate the main arena in Washington’s three-ring budget circus. What’s happening in the GOP House is essentially a sideshow, though it could turn into a very destructive bit of political theater.

Despite the jobless recovery, the House proposes to cut $61 billion in domestic spending this year – the largest immediate spending cut in U.S. history. Everyone knows there’s no way such a draconian measure gets through the Democratic Senate or past a presidential veto. Senate Democrats have countered with $6 billion in domestic program cuts, but that’s not likely to clear the filibuster-proof 60-vote threshold either.

So we’re in for a game of budgetary chicken in which both sides maneuver to blame the other if the federal government runs out of money in two weeks. Even if there is a federal shut-down, however, it’s unlikely to go on for very long, given how fed up U.S. voters already are with the antics of Washington politicians of all stripes.

But what’s really dumb, if not tragic, is to expend all this political blood and energy in a battle over domestic programs, which account for only 12 percent of the federal budget. Yes, their growth needs to be constrained too, but there just isn’t enough money there to make a sizeable dent in our fast-growing national debt, now $12 trillion and inexorably rising toward 90 percent of GDP if we don’t act soon. In the real world, stabilizing the debt at a sustainable level and eventually whittling it down means putting everything on the table – defense spending, taxes and entitlements.

That’s why the deal struck within the Fiscal Commission is so significant. It targets over $1 trillion in tax expenditures, like the tax exclusion for employer-paid health and scads of smaller business subsidies. To Senate conservatives like Chambliss, Coburn and Gang of Six member Mike Crapo of Idaho, these are essentially back-door spending programs administered through the tax code. And unlike many House Republicans and self-appointed tax commissar Grover Norquist, the GOP Senators don’t regard closing loopholes as tantamount to raising taxes. That brave departure from anti-tax fundamentalism is crucial to any bipartisan budget deal, because no self-respecting Democrat is going to negotiate deficit reductions on the spending side of the budget alone.

In a reciprocal show of political courage and country-first patriotism, commissioners Durbin and Kent Conrad of North Dakota signaled their willingness to entertain reforms in Social Security, notwithstanding all the overheated blather in the lefty blogosphere and cable TV land about the “cat food commission.”

According to today’s Washington Post, the Gang of Six is trying to recruit other Senators to join their center-out coalition. Let’s hope they succeed – and that President Obama enters the lists soon. Obama did the Fiscal Commission he created no favors by declining to endorse any of its recommendations. Worse, top White House aides lately have dropped hints that the administration may try to separate Social Security reform from negotiations over deficit reduction. If true, it would represent backsliding from Obama’s forthright pledges on taking office to confront Social Security’s problems.

In a recent op-ed, OMB Director Jack Lew argued that “Social Security does not cause our deficits,” and added: “Strengthening Social Security is an important, but parallel, issue that needs to be addressed as quickly as possible. But let’s not confuse it as either the cause of or a solution to our short-term fiscal problems.”

It’s true that health care costs are a far bigger problem, but Social Security also faces a long-term spending gap that will contribute to our mounting national debt as the baby boomers retire. The fact that it’s more easily fixed than Medicare or Medicaid is no reason to put that chore off. On the contrary, Democrats’ willingness to get serious about entitlement reform is an indispensible element of any plausible bipartisan deal for getting our fiscal house in order. It’s also the best way to take the heat off domestic programs, including progressive investments in education, infrastructure and social mobility that Democrats rightly defend.

If Durbin, the Democrats’ Senate whip, understands this, then surely President Obama does as well. His reticence on the specifics of a bipartisan budget deal may be purely a matter of tactics, but Durbin, and the Gang of Six, deserve his unequivocal support.

Romney Agonistes

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

It’s not exactly Sophie’s choice, but you have to admit there’s something a little poignant about Mitt Romney’s dilemma. To win the GOP nomination for president, he’s being forced by Tea Party types to distance himself from his greatest public achievement – making Massachusetts the first state in the union to achieve universal health care.

To mask this abject act of self-repudiation, Romney is attacking Obamacare with unwonted ideological zeal. “Obamacare is bad law constitutionally, bad policy and it is bad for America’s families,” he assured a group of New Hampshire Republicans over the weekend. Ladling on the conservative boilerplate, he added, “The federal government isn’t the answer for running health care any more than it’s the answer for running Amtrak or the Post Office.”

The problem for Romney – as his presidential rivals gleefully keep reminding conservatives — is that Romneycare is the policy template for Obamacare. It has the same basic architecture: a menu of competing private health care options (“exchanges” in the federal law, the “Connector” in Massachusetts), public subsidies for those who need them, and an individual mandate requiring all adults to buy medical coverage. The biggest difference between the two approaches, ironically, is that Obamacare is a lot tougher on containing health care costs than the Massachusetts law.

Nationally, about 15 percent of Americans (roughly 45 million) lack basic health care coverage. Thanks to Romneycare, it’s less than three percent in Massachusetts. Romney says he’s proud of that accomplishment, but Massachusetts may have to file a paternity suit to get him to own up to the individual mandate.

Romney’s disingenuous attempts to disavow the obvious similarities between his approach and the President’s aren’t doing much for his reputation for intellectual honesty. Given conservatives’ fanatical loathing for the President’s bill – “Repealing Obamacare is the driving motivation of my life,” avers Minnesota Republican and Tea Party pin-up Rep. Michele Bachmann – Romney evidently feels the bill he hammered out with Massachusetts Democrats poses an existential threat to his candidacy.

So the GOP front-runner is seeking refuge in federalism: “One thing I would never do is to usurp the constitutional power of states with a one-size-fits-all federal takeover,” he said in New Hampshire. Let me get this straight: it’s OK for states to adopt a “socialist” approach to universal coverage, including the heartily despised individual mandate, as long as it’s not foisted on them by Washington?

Maybe Romney will find a way to persuade conservatives to forgive him for governing effectively in a deep-died blue state. But at what cost? Let’s face it, Romney is basically a pragmatic problem-solver, not a right-wing ideologue. Pretending to be otherwise will cast further doubt on his authenticity as a candidate, even if it’s the only way to run in today’s radicalized Republican Party.

More Trust, Less Anger Will Help Obama in 2012

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Pew has some new data out about trust in and anger towards government. The short headline: a little more trust, a little less anger than a year ago at this time. All of this bodes well for Obama in 2012. Fewer angry voters and more trust (particularly among Republicans) means fewer voters who are motivated to devote long hours to campaigning to defeat Obama.

Overall, 29 percent of Americans now say that they can trust the government in Washington to do what is right at least most of the time, up from 22 percent last March (which was pretty much an all-time low). On this front Democrats look exactly as they did a year ago (34 percent). But Republicans have gone from 13 percent to 24 percent, and Independents from 20 to 27 percent. Interestingly, the biggest shift has been among self-identified moderate and liberal Republicans (a dying breed). In March 2010, 17 percent had trust in the government. Now 36 percent do.

Looking more deeply at the anger numbers also is revealing. A year ago, 21 percent of Americans claimed to be “angry” with the federal government. Now only 14 percent do. Again, the big drop-off is among Republicans (from 30 percent a year ago to 16 now), and Independents (from 25 percent a year ago to 15 now). Democrats are flat (9 percent a year ago to 10 percent now). Interestingly also is that the percent expressing anger among has remained flat for both Blacks (12 percent) and Latinos (17 percent). But for Whites, it’s fallen from 23 percent to 14 percent.

Most of this makes sense. With Republicans gaining a stake in government by winning the House, Republican voters are more likely to feel that somebody is representing them, and they are thus more likely to have faith in government, since faith in government is effectively a question of how much faith you have in the people running the government, which is also tied up with the state of the economy (which seems to be doing a little better). And likewise, since anger is often aroused in response to blame, with shared control of the government, it becomes less clear who to blame when things go wrong, and therefore harder to get angry.

The declining anger is likely to especially benefit Obama. Anger is a potent mobilizing force in politics. But if anger is on the decline, there will be fewer Republican campaign activists to do all the hard campaign volunteering work. This will make it harder for a Republican to win in 2012.

This is a number worth keeping close tabs on. If the percent of voters who are angry stays low and the number trusting Washington continues to increase, Obama should do well.

Gov. Scott Stages a Trainwreck in Florida

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Why is Florida’s rookie Republican Gov. Rick Scott hell-bent on rejecting $2.4 billion in federal funds for a Tampa-Orlando high-speed railway? Is it because his argument that Florida taxpayers would be “on the hook” for cost overruns was about to be exposed as a bunch of hooey?

Until Scott announced he would veto the rail program on Feb. 16, the new 84-mile rail line was going to be put out to private bid. It was an open secret in business circles that expected bidders, including Japan’s JR Central (builder of the high-speed Shinkansen) and South Korea’s Hyundai Rotem (builder of Korea’s bullet trains), would be willing to pay for Florida’s $280 million share of the project, plus any construction cost overruns and operating losses, in return for a 30-year lease on the Tampa-Orlando railway.

In other words, the private sector, not the Florida taxpayer, would cover any non-federal costs for the project. Since such a revelation would throw a monkey wrench into Scott’s ideological stance that “Obama rail” is “a federal boondoggle,” he tried to veto the program before it got to the bidding stage.

But Scott may have overstepped his state constitutional authority. Two state senators, Republican Thad Altman and Democrat Arthenia Joyner, filed a lawsuit Tuesday before the Florida Supreme Court arguing that Scott exceeded his powers by “retroactively vetoing” the project after the legislature voted to move ahead with the project and prior governor, Charlie Crist, agreed to accept the federal rail funds.

According to the suit, “The legislation implementing high-speed rail and the appropriation of the state and federal monies were fully accomplished prior to the election or inauguration of the Respondent, [but] once elected, Gov. Scott has refused to permit the Grant Amendment to be executed by the Florida Rail Enterprise,” thus halting the process of issuing a so-called “design-build-operate-maintain-and-finance” contract with a private bidder.

Predictably, Scott roared back yesterday by saying the two legislators overstepped their bounds by criticizing him. “Fortunately for the taxpayers of Florida, nothing in Florida law compels the Governor … to pour millions of dollars into a black hole during the historic fiscal crisis with which the state is presently grappling,” wrote Scott’s general counsel.

Scott vowed to veto any future appropriation for high-speed rail by the Florida legislature and added imperiously that he would reserve the right to declare the federal government’s stimulus package, from which the high-speed rail funds were derived, “an unconstitutional infringement on his rights as governor.”

The governor’s intransigence has set off a scramble by federal, state, and local officials to circumvent his office and save the long-planned project. Local governments, including Orlando, Tampa, and Miami, have formed a coalition they said could assume responsibility for putting the project out to bid and ensure that a private company would cover any construction cost overruns. A group of mayors presented the plan to Scott earlier this week, but he did not budge from his anti-train stance.

There is no dispute that the project would create about 30,000 construction jobs in the economically depressed central part of Florida and aid tourism by providing a fast ride from Orlando International Airport to Disney World.

Scott campaigned for office promising to create thousands of new jobs for Florida. But those jobs are to be created “his way” by building new roads, expanding local ports and cutting taxes, not by accepting a program whose job creation might rub off favorably on Barack Obama during the 2012 presidential election.

Scott may be speeding toward his own political fall – his poll numbers are slipping – but at the moment he seems to have the momentum to bring down the Obama administration’s most “do-able” passenger rail project. So far, it’s unclear whether the White House wants to stand up and fight Scott or redirect the federal funds to places like California and New York where the governors are openly campaigning for the money.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has given Scott until the end of Friday to accept or reject the federal rail funds. Doubtless we know what Scott will do. The Florida story, however, won’t be over until the local entities give up on their plan to take over the project and the state Supreme Court weighs in on the constitutional issues raised by the Altman-Joyner suit.

We Can Do Better on an Oil Spill Liability Cap Compromise

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Last year’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill revealed not just technological problems, but policy gaps as well. Among the most notable of these gaps is the federal limit on liability for oil spills, set at $75 million for offshore facilities. This is three or four orders of magnitude smaller than the damages associated with a major offshore spill like Deepwater Horizon, whose damages are estimated in the tens of billions. Firms that cause more damage than the limit aren’t liable, at least not under federal law. It is only BP’s decision to waive this limit that has kept it from being a much larger problem.

But we may not be so lucky next time, and the spill has greatly increased pressure to increase or eliminate the cap. I and my colleagues at Resources for the Future have written on this and, most notably, the President’s Commission on the spill recommended significantly raising liability caps. Congress could not agree on a measure to do so last year, however, and urgency ebbed in the election season. The problem still exists, however, and discussions in Congress have begun again. The latest development is a potential compromise between Democratic Sens. Mark Begich and Mary Landrieu. But unfortunately, this compromise is likely to make the situation worse, not better.

The Begich/Landrieu compromise has two elements: first, it raises the liability cap to $250 million. This is relatively meaningless given the size of large-spill damages, but let’s set that obvious objection aside for now. The deeper problems with the compromise exist even if the cap number is much higher. The second element is a kind of insurance pool, funded by contributions from all drilling firms, that would cover spill damages above the cap level.

This insurance pool creates problems that undermine any benefit from an increased cap. The first is moral hazard – liability works because, by forcing wrongdoers to pay for damages they cause, it creates incentives to avoid dangerous or negligent activity. But when liability is pooled, these incentives are blunted. Under the compromise, if a firm spilled oil that caused damage over $250 million, it would not pay much for these “excess” damages – but its competitors would. In a sense, the pool lets firms outsource the costs of their dangerous activity, and therefore erases much of the incentive to avoid it. This “moral hazard” is a recognized problem with insurance and particularly pooled insurance. There are ways to deal with it, but it is impossible to resolve it entirely.

But this isn’t the only way the compromise would kill firms’ incentive to operate safely. It would also undercut spill victims’ only real remedy under current law. Critics of the federal spill liability cap often forget that it isn’t the only game in town – spill victims can sue under state law. And with the big exception of Louisiana, state law has no liability caps at all. This means that victims can recover damages even beyond the federal cap levels. Now federal caps do still matter – for procedural reasons and due to protections offered under federal law, it is a better route for most victims. And of course Louisianans are out of luck under either law.

But if there is an insurance pool, victims won’t pursue claims under state law. No good lawyer would advise them to do so when they could just recover from the insurance pool. State liability laws would become largely meaningless, and any incentives they give firms to operate safely would fade. This makes the moral hazard problem even worse. The only remaining reasons for firms to prevent major spills would be avoiding bad press and cleanup costs (which aren’t covered under the caps). And that’s not likely to be enough to increase safety investments, as the recent spill has shown is necessary.

The spill illustrated something we probably should have recognized earlier – that our liability policy for oil spills is totally inadequate. The liability cap was too low when it was passed, and it is far too low now. There’s a very strong case that we shouldn’t have one at all.

But changes to the liability cap won’t happen without compromise. It’s a good thing that legislators continue to discuss the issue and are making such compromises (though getting Republicans on board will be necessary eventually). But whatever political benefits the Landrieu/Begich compromise has, it’s bad policy. It will make the problems with current liability policy worse, not better. The senators risk expending political capital only to make the Gulf less safe. Oil companies and the legislators that champion them may still oppose this compromise, but there will be a certain amount of Br’er Rabbit and the briar patch in their cries. Even if politics means an ideal spill liability policy is impossible, we can do better than this.

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

Wingnut Watch: How The Battle of Madison Became an Apocalyptic Struggle for the Right

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

One of the salient realities of politics is that much of the contention revolves around efforts to get the news media and the public to focus on events that reinforce one group’s point of view over others.  There are, of course, front-and-center national and international news developments that literally command attention.  But when it comes to, say, a noisy dispute over a budget in a medium-sized state, you’d normally see one side or the other trying to “nationalize” the event to gain external allies.

But that’s what is most fascinating about the ongoing saga in Madison, Wisconsin: what began as a series of union protests against Gov. Scott Walker’s efforts to take away public employees’ collective bargaining rights, and then evolved into a national cause célèbre for unions and progressives generally, has become of equal importance to the Right, where the belief that Walker is sparking a nationwide revolt against “union thugs” is very strong.

Even as polls in Wisconsin and nationally show Walker with relatively low and flagging levels of support for his confrontational tactics, conservative gabbers are treating the events like the Battle of Algiers.  The highly influential RedState blog has become completely obsessed with Wisconsin and its political and economic implications; on Monday of this week, the site featured no less than five front-page posts on the subject.  Here’s a taste of the tone, from RedState diarist Mark Meed:

I appreciate it might seem unnecessarily provocative to compare union thugs to dogs — especially to those in the moderate attack dog community — so let me offer a “scratch behind the ears” qualification. These aren’t just any dogs, they’re the ones out of “Animal Farm”. These are the pack animals that are inevitably dispatched when socialists run out of other people’s money, and those other people finally notice.

Nice, eh?  But the focus on Wisconsin is not limited to the fever swamps of the conservative blogosphere; it’s breaking out on the presidential campaign trail as well.  Tim Pawlenty released a video with dramatic footage of the Madison protests and ending with the proto-candidate himself gravely intoning: “It’s important that Americans stand with Scott Walker, stand with Wisconsin.” Newt Gingrich recently devoted his Human Events column to a lurid characterization of the Wisconsin fight.  A sample:

In Madison, Wisconsin, we are witnessing a profound struggle between the right of the people to govern themselves and the power of entrenched, selfish interests to stop reforms and defy the will of the people.

Not a lot of nuance there.  Meanwhile, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels is taking some conservative heat for failing to follow Walker’s lead in declaring war on unions, compounding the hostility he earlier aroused by calling for a “truce” on cultural issues.

There is one underlying difference of opinion among conservatives about Wisconsin that’s worth noting and pondering: while some focus strictly on public-sector unionism, others view the assault on public-employee collective bargaining as just one front in a broader fight against unions and collective bargaining generally.  Most obviously, conservatives are aware of the important role of unions in Democratic Party campaign financing and voter mobilization efforts, and naturally welcome any opportunity to weaken the “other team” (even as they characterize Democratic defenders of unions as parties to a corrupt bargain that shakes down taxpayers and businesses for higher wages and benefits in exchange for political assistance).

But some conservatives are willing to go further and denounce all forms of collective bargain as either corrupt, as coercive, or as incompatible with economic growth.  Here’s Robert VerBruggen writing for the National Review site:

In reality, “collective bargaining” is when a majority of employees vote to unionize, and then the union has the legal right to represent all the employees. In other words, it forces workers to accept unions as their bargaining agents, and it forbids employers to negotiate with non-union workers on an individual basis.

A more colloquial version of this argument was made by a conservative blogger calling himself USA Admiral:

There is no real use for [unions].  If you can’t negotiate your own contracts, you need to be flipping burgers.

The larger, macroeconomic case against unions as an institution in the private as well as the public sector is mainly made by Right-to-Work agitators, but it occasionally is taken up by conservative politicians as well.  It’s probably not surprising that the most overt stance against the very existence of unions was recently made by South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who appointed a corporate labor relations lawyer (i.e., someone whose job is to oppose unions and unionization) to head up the state labor department.  Haley was not shy about her motivation in taking this unusual step: “She [the appointee] is ready for the challenge,” Haley said. “We’re going to fight the unions and I needed a partner to help me do it. She’s the right person to help me do it.”

In the end, the sense that Scott Walker is fighting the ancient enemy of the conservative movement probably best explains why so many conservatives can’t resist blowing the Wisconsin saga up into an apocalyptic struggle of immense importance.  If Walker loses, it will be interesting to see if he’s treated as a martyr or just as insufficiently vicious.

Will Congress Regret Banning Earmarks?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Over in the New York Times, Carl Hulse writes notes that one of the many unique aspects of this year’s unfolding budget clash is that this will be first budget battle without earmarks.

Generally, the disappearance of earmarks been seen as positive development, since everybody loves to hate earmarks. But say all you want about earmarks being wasteful or corrupt (even though that’s a debatable claim), they helped broker compromise. By giving enough members a stake in an omnibus appropriation bill, earmarks were mechanism whereby leaders could assemble a winning coalition to pass a budget bill, a powerful tool to avoid a government shutdown.

Here’s Diana Evans, a professor of political science at Trinity College, from a book about earmarks called Greasing the Wheels:

Pork barrel benefits, the most reviled of Congress’s legislative products, are used by policy coalition leaders to produce the type of policy that is most admired: general interest legislation. This book makes the case that buying votes with pork is an important way in which Congress solves its well-known collective action problem.

And here’s Scott A. Frisch and Sean Q. Kelly, writing in the National Journal last November:

The reality, as we see it, is that without earmarks it will be much more difficult to get moderate and liberal members to go along with spending cuts that may be necessary to reduce the deficit – one of the major goals of the tea party movement.  By eliminating earmarks, tea party supporters may have lost one of their most effective tools for building coalitions to make painful cuts in spending. Earmarks can be viewed as the spoonful of sugar that makes the bitter medicine of deficit reduction go down; without earmarked projects, enacting tough legislation will be even more difficult.

(Frisch and Kelly are the authors of a book called Cheese Factories on the Moon: Why Earmarks are Good for Democracy.)

Remember, even at their height, earmarks accounted for roughly two percent of all appropriations expenditures. And that two percent hasn’t necessarily been cut out of the budget – it’s just been transferred the executive branch for allocation instead of being Congressionally-directed.

Now, I understand that there were some lobbying abuses in the world of earmarks, but my sense is that most offices were actually remarkably transparent about their earmarks (and indeed happy to brag about their projects). I never saw any reason for banning them and thought it was all silly red-herring type politics that distracted us from more difficult but far more consequential fights over entitlements.

Maybe the folks in Congress will figure out how to come to some sort of eventual budget agreement without a bunch of earmarks to grease the wheels, and we’ll all be better off because of it. But I’m beginning to wonder if, when budget negotiations grind to a standstill, the good folks running Congress might wish that they hadn’t prevented themselves from sweetening the pot with a few special district spending programs.

Obama Gets His Comeuppance For Failing the Lobbying Purity Test

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

If you search through the White House visitor logs, you can find me. In fact, I’ve been to the Obama White House twice (though I seem to have two records for the same visit). Let me explain: A good friend of mine worked at CEQ for a while. Once, she took some friends on a tour of the White House. Once, we went to see the Christmastime decorations at the East Wing. However, if I had visited this friend at her office, which was not the White House but instead at Jackson Place, there’d be no trace of me in the White House visitor logs.

Yesterday, Politico ran a story noting this fact and insinuating that lobbying meetings were intentionally being moved to Jackson Place, or to the nearby Caribou Coffee on 17th Street, just so that they wouldn’t show up in the visitor logs. Many bloggers, especially those on the right have jumped all over Obama for this supposed hypocrisy. The ever-clever Michelle Malkin triumphantly rhymed: “Obama lied, transparency died.” Common Cause asked Obama to disclose every meeting regardless of where it occurs.

Now, I really don’t know if the Administration moved meetings off-campus so that they didn’t show up in the visitor logs. It seems to me like a silly thing to do. I’m trying to imagine what visitor would be so terrible that his or her presence in the visitor logs would be an instant scandal. I can’t. Based on what I know about the scarcity of space in the White House, I’m willing to buy the rationale that meetings were held elsewhere just because that’s where space could be found.

But I can see why people in the White House might be unnecessarily sensitive about who they are meeting with. The problem is that from Day One, when the Administration placed a ban on registered lobbyists serving in the White House, it tried to place itself somehow above and beyond the influence of lobbyists.

But as anybody who has spent any time in Washington knows, lobbyists are part of the policymaking fabric in this town, like it or not. To try to govern without at least getting their input and occasional buy-in is simply impossible. There are reasons to be concerned about their influence and power, but simply demonizing them as to-be-avoided-at-all-costs is not helpful, and almost certainly counter-productive.

In many ways, Obama has held himself to a standard that was far beyond reach. Of course he wasn’t going to rid Washington of special interests. But that’s politics. Everybody comes to Washington to change the way business is done. Nobody is ever powerful/foolhardy enough to do so.

One of the reasons that Obama was able to make White House visitor logs public is because the Secret Service keeps close track of everyone going in and out of the White House. When I’ve visited, somebody had to see my ID and check me in. What I can glean from yesterday’s press conference transcript is that this puts me into something called the “the WAVES system.” And when you’ve got an electronic database, it’s easy to make it public. And there’s no reason not to do so.

Maybe meeting disclosure should extend to Jackson Place. Maybe it should extend to Caribou Coffee. Should it extend to every phone call? Every kid’s soccer game an administration staffer attends where lobbyists might have kids playing as well? Where do you draw the line?  Washington is in many respects one big social network. And lobbyists, the majority of whom once worked in government, are part of that network.

I suppose what Obama should have said from the beginning was that he was doing the best he can. He was going to make White House visitor logs public because the White House belongs to everyone, and everyone should know who is visiting. But that he also recognized that the White House is not a compound on a hill, and that disclosing visitor logs is not going to capture all the conversations he or anyone on his staff ever has with an interested party. Moreover, he could have also said that he valued the inputs of everyone, be they lobbyists or not. And that he and his staff had enough integrity, thank you very much, to cut through the self-serving BS of lobbyists.

But instead, Obama succumbed to the familiar politics of purity and moralizing when it came to lobbyists. This moment of gotcha journalism, I suppose is his comeuppance. When you hold yourself to unrealistic standards, it’s bound to come sooner or later.

Six Months Is Too Short For Egypt’s Elections

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Arab revolutions have overthrown one dictator after another in strikingly orderly fashion. There’s an almost biblical quality to it: Tunisia begat Egypt, and Egypt begat Libya and Bahrain. One of the problems of such a linear evolution of revolutions is that we tend to focus on only one at a time. Remember Egypt? Barely – it’s yesterday’s news. And Tunisia feels like it happened in the Bush administration (note: it didn’t).

As our gaze floats from one country to the next, it’s worth remembering that now—when the hard work of democracy begins—is just as crucial a time across the Arab world. Political parties, civil society organizations and democratic institutions are just beginning to form. As in any power vacuum, Egypt’s infant governing class is scrambling first to organize the pillars of democracy, and then to contest power.

In the United States, we have become conditioned to expect things immediately – I’ve taken time to respond to no less than three emails as I’ve written the paragraphs above – rather than applying a good dose of patience as I crank this piece out. To us, the six months set between a revolution and Egyptian elections seems like more than enough time to hold a democratic vote. But when you’re starting from nothing, six months just isn’t enough time.

From WSJ:

As hopes rise for Egypt’s first elections, political parties are sprouting like weeds. Activists, businessmen and community leaders are all forming new parties they hope will widen Egypt’s limited menu of political options.

The nascent parties are both secular and Islamist, but for the most part they agree on one thing: more time than the target for elections—in less than six months—may be needed for these groups to have a real impact. Some also worry that elections too soon would greatly favor the Muslim Brotherhood, which already has a large-scale social organization in place.

And the Washington Post:

Al-Wasat waited 15 years, one month and nine days for official permission to operate, which a court granted Saturday. The party, started by a group that split away from the Muslim Brotherhood to promote a more tolerant form of Islam, has little more behind it than a Web site, the bonds formed during years of suppression and a shared desire for democracy.

An organization so recently banned has no sign announcing its presence, and reporters traveled around the block a few times searching for the office… “We could never meet people here in Egypt,” said Tareq El Malt, an architect and member of the executive committee whose own neighbors don’t know the party exists. Elections are expected in six months, but El Malt said that before the party thinks about winning seats in parliament, it has to figure out how to organize and operate.

Six months is too short for a truly organized, healthy political class to mature into a set of diverse but not scattered parties that can form a stable governing coalition. Is a year? Most probably not, but it would be better.

If the time comes when Egypt’s temporary ruling council delays the vote beyond August, it’s not necessarily because the council is attempting to thwart democracy. It may be just the opposite – a delay, even a relatively short one, would likely significantly benefit the long-term prospects for a stable Egyptian governing coalition.

Overcoming the Obstacles to Charter School Growth

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

High-performing charter schools need to grow faster to serve more students, but to do so, they will have to overcome not just organizational obstacles but also significant political ones. That was the takeaway from a panel discussion on charter schools the Progressive Policy Institute held at the National Press Club today to launch a new PPI report: “Going Exponential: Speeding the Growth of High-Quality Charter Schools,” by Emily Ayscue Hassel, Bryan C. Hassel and Joe Ableidinger.

Bryan Hassel led off the panel by discussing his report, which begins from the premise that high-performing charter schools need to grow faster in order to serve more low-income children. “They only serve a tiny fraction of the students, only ten percent,” he said. “And the average number of schools being added annually is 1.3 schools. Only five CMOs [Charter Management Organizations] are planning to have more than 30 schools in their network by 2025. I don’t see a lot of prospects for serving millions of kids who need these schools.”

Hassel’s report focuses on urging leading CMOs to think big, and he distills nine lessons from high-growth organizations in the private sector that could apply to charters. On the panel he focused on four: generating cash flow, tackling talent scarcity, reaching customers where they are, and finding top leaders committed to growth.

To improve cash flow, he proposed a pay-for-performance scheme: “What if the best charters were paid more?” Hassel asked. “What if the top 10 percent received 10 percent more? Then they could invest in growth. And then we’d pay worse charter schools less, which would hasten the closing of the worst charter schools.”

To improve reach, Hassel proposed micro-reach and micro-chartering strategies: “How do you do more without having to find a facility?” Hassel said. “One idea is that policymakers could issue charters not just to whole schools but to individual teachers who want to serve 20-40 kids.”

Eva Moskowitz, CEO of Success Charter Network (who was featured in the documentary “Waiting for Superman”), applauded the goal of rapid growth. Success Charter Network has doubled in size every for the last four years, and will open up two more in the next year. “And I don’t die of exhaustion,” said Moskowitz, “I could keep going.”

And when she says exhaustion, she means exhaustion from the politics. “In our world it’s really hand-to-hand combat,” she said. “It’s the teachers’ union blockading students and preventing them from entering the school. We’re talking about having to ask police to come to usher our kids, five year olds, into the building” These politics, she noted, put real obstacles on growth.

Andrew Rotherham, partner at Bellwether Education Partners and former PPI colleague, echoed Hassel’s call for scaling up. “This field does not understand scale,” he said. “The only thing we consistently know how to scale is problems, bad ideas, and perverse incentives.”

Like Moskowitz, he also put a focus on politics. “We’ve done a poor job of using regulation and incentives,” he said. “Really there’s only one state, Michigan, that in meaningful ways incentivizes a process where good charter schools can replicate effectively.”

Rotherham noted that in many ways, top charter schools have grown beyond expectations. Once upon a time people predicted KIPP would never expand beyond two dozen schools (it is now at 100) and TFA would never expand beyond 500 core members (it now has 20,000 alums). But he also posed a question for future growth: “Do we need more CMOs or bigger CMOs? We talk about more-more-more, but what should it look like.”

R. Brooks Garber, vice president of federal advocacy for National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, added a note of caution to the rapid growth strategy. Quality control is important, he said. “It takes only one failure, and one failure would be the end of the brand. We open schools one grade at a time.” But he agreed that charter schools could be more strategic.

Hassel responded by suggesting that even if rapid expansion resulted in slightly reduced performance for top charter schools, it would still probably be better than the alternative – the continuation of inferior public or other charter schools.

All and all, the discussion highlighted the tensions between the aspirations of rapid growth and the substantial on-the-ground obstacles, both political and organizational. Everyone wants high-performing charters to grow faster. But it ain’t easy.

Wingnut Watch: Re-capping the CPAC Fireworks

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The 2011 Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) meeting in Washington over the weekend provided, as always, a sort of dysfunctional family picnic for the self-conscious Right, and an opportunity for a large cast of would-be 2012 presidential candidates to tug the forelock to The Movement and beat up on the godless socialist foe.

Aficionados of conservative ideological infighting had a lot of entertainment at this year’s CPAC. There was, as reported in last week’s Wingnut Watch, lots of maneuvering over participation in the conference, with the conservative gay organization GOProud and the conservative Muslim group Muslims for America serving as the big flashpoints.

While most CPAC attendees (and some not attending, such as Sarah Palin) more or less defended inclusion of GOProud, its leader, Chris Barron, did himself no favors by calling critics “bigots.” There are reports the group won’t be invited back next year. Similarly, Muslims for America’s patron, anti-tax commissar Grover Norquist, made few friends by calling critics of CPAC’s agenda “losers,” and promptly earned an anathema from Red State’s Erick Erickson, who called on conservatives to come up with a better venue for coordination than Norquist’s famous Wednesday meetings.

The most visible sign of ideological problems at CPAC involved, predictably, the Ron Paul brand of libertarians, who noisily heckled the presentation of a “Defender of the Constitution” award by Dick Cheney to Donald Rumsfeld. (Paulites might justly claim this was too much provocation for any libertarian to resist, and CPAC organizers really screwed up by scheduling the award just after a speech by Rand Paul.)

But the social conservative complaint that fiscal hawks, libertarians, and/or political pragmatists were trying to subordinate their agenda probably exposed a more serious problem for the Right, and also a source of considerable confusion about the much-envied role of the Tea Party Movement. Certainly those, most conspicuously Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, who have argued for a temporary suspension of any talk about cultural issues, are being touted by many observers as representing the Tea Partiers’ alleged single-minded focus on deficits, debts, and limited government.

But no less prominent a figure as Rush Limbaugh has sought to identify the Tea Party Movement with social conservatives and indeed with anyone wanting an ideologically exclusive Republican Party:

Talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh, himself considered a conservative icon, blasted this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference for drowning out tea partiers and those concerned with social issues, lamenting, “That’s not the CPAC that I’ve always thought of or known.”

Saying he was concerned that “I might just drum myself out of a movement,” Limbaugh blamed the “ruling class” at CPAC for missing the message of the 2010 election, namely that there is “an unmistakable conservative ascendancy happening in this country,” evidenced most prominently in the tea-party movement….

Instead, Limbaugh said, CPAC seemed smitten with the idea of dumping traditionally conservative values in order to broaden the Republican Party’s tent.

“So you had a weird list of priorities and focus. I mean we had it all,” Limbaugh said. “We had GOProud, the gay conservatives. We had demands to legalize drugs, marijuana at CPAC. Most conservatives strongly oppose gay marriage and legalized pot.”

He continued, “The position of some people who spoke at CPAC: ‘Look, if you’re worried about immigration, stop it. We don’t want to be seen as racist. Stop talking about abortion, stop talking about the social issues, stop talking about all this. That’s only gonna hurt; we don’t need to deal with that in our party.’ This is what the ruling class guys were saying at CPAC.”

A conservative movement that can’t decide whether Mitch Daniels is the leader of the Tea Party Movement, or its deadliest “ruling class” enemy, has got some issues to sort out.

Ideological conflict aside, the role of CPAC as the first serious event in the Invisible Primary leading to the Republican presidential nomination was on full display this weekend, but produced no game-changing results.

The presidential straw poll held on the final day of the conference was easily won, for the second year in a row, by Ron Paul (whose collegiate admirers were out in force), an outcome that instantly devalued it as a indicator of future developments in the nominating process. Mitt Romney, whose PAC probably devoted more resources to the conference than anyone else’s, finished second, while every other name wound up in the low-to-mid single digits.

As for speechifying, there were some putative presidents who did better than others (though experts differed on “winners and losers”), but no real knockout punches or disasters. None of the longest shots (e.g., Herman Cain, John Bolton, Rick Santorum) did anything to vault themselves into serious contention.

Most candidates modestly met their most immediate needs. Tim Pawlenty showed he could give a fiery red-meat speech. Haley Barbour touted a right-wing record as governor of Mississippi (boasting of both Medicaid cuts and harassment of abortion providers), reminding listeners he’s a serious reactionary, not just a fundraiser. Mitt Romney stuck to tried-and-true conservative themes and showed once again he’s as smooth as Obama as a speaker. Mitch Daniels dealt with his “cultural issues truce” problem, and interestingly enough, did so by doubling down on his argument that fiscal issues, the “red menace” of our time, have to come first. Newt Gingrich showed he can still wow a live audience with his wonkery and one-liners.

It’s not really clear, however, that the no-shows (most notably Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee) lost anything by spending their weekend elsewhere.

We’ll soon see if the ideological fissures exposed by CPAC continue to widen or instead subside; the internal fights of the congressional GOP over legislative and budget priorities show all’s not well on that front.

Meanwhile, it’s finally fish-or-cut-bait time for GOP presidential candidates, or those who don’t already have near-universal name ID and some sort of history with Iowans. Newt Gingrich has said he’ll make up his mind whether to run by the end of February; John Thune seems to be on the same timetable. Haley Barbour and Mitch Daniels, both sitting governors, will wait until their current legislative sessions end in April. At present, you’d have to guess Gingrich and Barbour are in, while Thune and Daniels are out, though nobody knows for sure. And it’s anybody’s guess what Palin and Huckabee will do; the shape of the field will remain amorphous until those two figure out how they will spend their time in 2012.

End Separate War Spending

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

It’s federal budget season. Before you doze off, stick with me: there’s a deceptive budgetary maneuver that is costing you billions in defense dollars, forcing progressive members of Congress into uncomfortable votes on Iraq and Afghanistan, and defying every historical precedent in Pentagon budgeting.

This maneuver is the supplemental appropriation for war funding. Every year since the United States launched military operations in Afghanistan in response to the September 11th attacks, Congress has appropriated separate funds for unanticipated wartime costs in addition to the Pentagon’s baseline budget. In some years, only one extra war spending bill is approved; in 2010, two supplemental appropriations were passed.

Supplemental war funding appropriations are hardly new, beginning in World War II. When used correctly, the process serves as a vital tool that delivers timely funding to America’s fighting men and women. In the initial stages of combat, supplemental appropriations are extraordinarily useful in the face of the lengthy Congressional budget process, which does not allow for unanticipated military spending. Typically, the supplemental funds pay for pre-deployment costs, servicemembers’ transportation to the warzone, combat operations, equipment needs, and military construction. Without this tool, the Pentagon would essentially be forced to sacrifice long-term projects to meet immediate wartime needs.

Here’s the rub: Under the Bush administration, allegedly “emergency” supplemental appropriations for war costs became routine avenues for backdoor spending. Their opaque nature and lack of oversight have created a propensity to fund low-priority programs that has effectively eroded any sense of fiscal discipline at the Pentagon, bloating military spending. We must put an end to the practice

The Department of Defense (DoD) is the unquestioned champion of discretionary spending—money the government chooses to spend, rather than is obliged to pay for entitlements like Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security. With more than $700 billion in discretionary funds available, the Pentagon far outpaces its nearest competition, the Department of Health and Human Services, at $80 billion.

Since 2001, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) estimates that Congress has approved $1.12 trillion in supplemental appropriations, 90 percent of which—$1.01 trillion—has been destined for the Department of Defense. One estimate is that Congress has no control over one-fifth of supplemental war spending; therefore, a rough calculation suggests that some $200 billion has been wasted in 10 years.

While those on the extreme left and in the Tea Party would like to see slashes in the Pentagon’s spending, what DoD’s budget really needs is not gutting, but a solid dose of discipline.

Read the policy memo