The paper reviews both Starbucks’ recent U.K. tax controversy (including a parliamentary inquiry), which revolved around the intersection of its consistent unprofitability in the United Kingdom with large deductible intragroup payments to Dutch, Swiss and U.S. affiliates, and its more recent submission to the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee. The paper draws from this review two lessons.

First, if Starbucks can organize itself as a successful stateless income generator, any multinational firm can. Starbucks follows a classic bricks and mortar retail business model, with direct customer interactions in thousands of “high street” locations in high-tax countries around the world. Moreover, Starbucks is not a firm driven by hugely valuable identifiable intangibles that are separate from its business model, which it employs whenever it deals with those retail customers. Nonetheless, it appears that Starbucks enjoys a much lower effective tax rate on its non-U.S. income than would be predicted by looking at a weighted average of the tax rates in the countries in which it does business.

Second, The Starbucks story – in particular, its U.K. experience – demonstrates the fundamental opacity of international tax planning, in which neither investors in a public firm nor the tax authorities in any particular jurisdiction have a clear picture of what the firm is up to. It is not appropriate to expect source country tax authorities to engage in elaborate games of Twenty Tax Questions, in turn requiring detailed knowledge of the tax laws and financial accounting rules of many other jurisdictions, in order simply to evaluate the probative value of a taxpayer’s claim that its intragroup dealings necessarily are at arm’s-length by virtue of alleged symmetries in tax treatment for expense and income across the group’s affiliates. U.S.-based multinational firms owe a similar duty of candor and transparency when dealing with the Congress of the United States.

The remedy begins with transparency towards tax authorities and policymakers, through which those institutions have a clear and complete picture of the global tax planning structures of multinational firms, and the implications of those structures for generating stateless income. National governments should recognize their common interest in this regard and promptly require their tax and securities agencies to promulgate rules providing a uniform world-wide disclosure matrix for actual tax burdens by jurisdiction. As a first step the United States should enforce the current rule requiring U.S. firms to quantify the U.S. tax cost of repatriating their offshore “permanently reinvested earnings.”

He sent Secretary of State John Kerry to Moscow this month with an initiative to re-engage diplomatically with Russia to end the war, through an international conference in June. It could not come soon enough. The Syrian government has, by all accounts, begun to win back some of its lost ground, worries are mounting about an increasing dominance of rebel militias by Islamic extremists, and a United Nations vote yesterday shows eroding support for the rebel side in notable quarters of the international community.

Today, after meeting with Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in the White House, Obama turned aside calls for arming Syrian rebels, noting, "There is no magic formula for dealing with an extraordinary violent and difficult situation like Syria's." His view was echoed during the day by Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper, normally a conservative darling. "I would urge on the president extraordinary caution," Harper told a New York audience at the Council on Foreign Relations. "Arming unnamed people is extremely risky."

The high tide of international sympathy for the rebels appears to be receding as the violence mounts in Syria. Countries supporting yesterday's General Assembly resolution dropped to 107, from 133 for the last resolution critical of Damascus in August 2012. Notably among the defectors were four supposedly rising powers in the Group of 20, as Brazil, Argentina, Indonesia, and South Africa joined India in abstaining.

American diplomats with long experience in the region, including Christopher Hill and Ryan Crocker, have become increasingly vocal in rebutting the interventionists in Washington. Hill, in an article in the New York Times today, took issue with the Obama administration's "ill-advised decision, in August 2011, to preclude the possibility of a diplomatic resolution involving all sides," when the president bluntly declared that "Assad must go." The insistence that Bashar Assad leave Syria's presidency, Hill says, "was not carefully arrived at" and "has boxed us in." Today, Obama subtly softened the implied implacability of that stance, affirming simply, "We would've preferred Assad go two years ago, last year, two months ago, a month ago."

One might add another administration misstep last year, in pressing a bit too enthusiastically for the withdrawal of the U.N. monitoring force that had been sent to bolster the April 2012 ceasefire brokered by U.N. mediator Kofi Annan. That ceasefire dissolved within days, but for three more months the U.N. monitors did provide the one shred of independent, on-the-ground international presence and verification. The pace of the war has escalated exponentially since their withdrawal, made clear in the spiraling death toll, and negotiating their re-entry is now far more complicated.

Ryan Crocker, who has served as U.S. ambassador in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, startled an intervention-minded panel at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School recently by observing, "You all seem to have taken for granted [that] Bashar's going to go. What if he doesn't go, which I think is a better than even chance?"

Foreign-policy commentators have looked to other conflicts for guidance on the terms of intervention in Syria. Brookings scholar Michael O'Hanlon, who warns that Assad's overthrow will leave Syria in as much chaos as Iraq's after the U.S. invasion, sees Bosnia as the most apt analogy, and proposes Syria's division into ethnic and sectarian enclaves with U.S. peacekeepers on the ground.

Bosnia surely does provide useful clues, but probably not so much in terms of the final settlement -- most Syrians still affirm the essential unity of their country -- as in the international community's involvement. The United Nations had a frustrating peacekeeper mission on the ground in Bosnia for three years, cordoning off the conflict from outsiders' intervention, and as the parties exhausted themselves in a stalemate, the negotiating track stirred to life, accompanied by brief U.N.-assented action post-Srebrenica by U.S. air power and Franco-British forces on the ground.

The planned June conference will certainly not end the conflict, but it does resurrect the negotiating track to achieve that. Lakhdar Brahimi, who succeeded Annan last summer as the U.N. and Arab League special envoy, was about to quit when Kerry and Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov announced their conference plans. With representatives of both the Syrian government and the Syrian opposition expected to be in the same city, if not the same room, in June, the long-promised "Syrian-led political transition to a democratic, pluralistic political system" the United Nations has repeatedly affirmed can get underway.

"Syrian-led" does not minimize the urgency of pressure from the major countries most concerned about the Syrian outcome, and these go a bit beyond the United States and Russia. The Europeans need to be included, of course, and not just the intervention-minded French and British, whose interest in the region a century ago -- enshrined in the wartime Sykes-Picot pact -- still stirs Syrian suspicions about their intentions.

Other potential spoilers also need to be brought inside the negotiating tent. "Regional ownership of any proposed strategy is indispensable," observes the Carnegie Endowment's Sinan Ülgen, arguing that both Saudi Arabia and Iran must be included. "Otherwise, the external and destabilizing influences on Syria can be neither contained nor mitigated."

The Russians have quite unequivocally said they are "not interested in the fate of certain persons," meaning Assad's presidential authority. Their objection to the U.N. resolutionWednesday was not to its call for a "transitional governing body with full executive powers to which all functions of the presidency and Government are transferred, including those pertaining to military, security, and intelligence issues" -- a Brahimi formulation to which they agreed last year. They have been adamant mainly in resisting the Syrian opposition's insistence on Assad's ouster before the fragmented anti-Assad coalition talks with a decapitated Syrian government.

It is certainly true, as New York Times columnist Bill Keller argued two weeks ago, that Syria is not Iraq. The government Washington opposes has not been under Security Council sanctions imposed for invading its neighbors, and Americans do not have the searing pain of 9/11 stoking calls to go to war. Outside Washington, the country seems strongly opposed to deep involvement. Obama's caution is on the mark.

Goodale, with a career spanning over fifty years, is unusually well-placed to make this case. He, after all, was the general counsel at the New York Times when that paper published the Pentagon Papers in June 1971. His memoir, Fighting for the Press: The Inside Story of the Pentagon Papers and Other Battles (CUNY Journalism Press), published last month, provides an inside account of the intense struggle inside the publication of one of the most famous classified-document leaks in history.

When that great cache of secret documents about the Vietnam War came to the New York Times earlier that year, it was by no means assured that Arthur Ochs Sulzberger could be persuaded to take the risk of publishing their contents. Fighting for the Press provides probably the most detailed account ever written of the internal deliberations at the newspaper and the ensuing legal battle that ended with a 6–3 Supreme Court judgment that rejected prior restraint of publication. From the outset, by instinct and experience, Goodale sided with the reporters in favor of publishing the Pentagon Papers, but there were major obstacles to overcome, mainly the objections of the outside counsel, provided by the firm Lord Day & Lord. At the climactic meeting, Lord Day & Lord partner and former New York Times counsel Louis Loeb gave his professional opinion: "He said not only would it be a crime to publish classified information," Goodale writes, "but it would be a crime even to look at the Pentagon Papers because they were classified."

Goodale's persistence against the advice of these senior lawyers ultimately prevailed: Sulzberger agreed to go ahead, with the caveat that, "in the unlikely event the government moves in court to force us to cease publication, we will honor any court injunction." Nonetheless, Lord Day & Lord quit, and Goodale scrambled to recruit other lawyers, including Alexander Bickel of Yale Law School and Floyd Abrams, another First Amendment stalwart, to lead the case. In the weeks of contention about whether to publish, Goodale had been persuaded that the Espionage Act, with serious criminal implications, did not apply nor did the issue of secrecy classifications. "It was simply a First Amendment question," Goodale concluded, "and I had advised the Times to publish because it would win the case under the First Amendment." That turned out to be the right view.

In ruling for the press, Judge Murray Gurfein of the Southern District wrote, with exceptional eloquence, "The security of the Nation is not at the ramparts alone. Security also lies in the value of our free institutions. A cantankerous press, an obstinate press, an ubiquitous press must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know."

It has been forty years since the Pentagon Papers made its indelible mark on journalism, but Goodale contends that many of the same issues that were central then remain today. He sees the continuing WikiLeaks case a second Pentagon Papers, except that so far, the government's attempts to stifle First Amendment rights have proceeded unchecked. Private First Class Bradley Manning, who provided vast amounts of the classified information in question to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, is in Goodale's opinion, a figure comparable to Daniel Ellsberg, the military analyst who gave the Pentagon Papers to the Times. "The publication of leaked information by WikiLeaks raises the same First Amendment issues as did the Pentagon Papers case," Goodale argues, and with criminal prosecution for publishing leaked material still a possibility, journalists have "to fight like a tiger and risk going to jail if necessary. Anything less diminishes the freedom of the press."

In an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review, responding to the assertion that the Obama administration has pursued more alleged leakers of national security information under the 1917 Espionage Act than all previous administrations combined, Goodale was furious. "Antediluvian, conservative, backwards. Worse than Nixon," he pronounced the current administration.

With the news of just how far the Justice Department is willing to go over an AP story about a foiled bomb plot, Goodale's brief has significant persuasive strength.

This is cross-posted from The Atlantic.

The "tea party" movement, for example, reflects the pressure within the GOP to conform to the positions of its most conservative members. Reinforcing this trend is the combined effect of decades of building a conservative infrastructure—an infrastructure that includes numerous well-funded think tanks, an array of advocacy organizations, and, thanks to a Supreme Court dominated by a conservative majority, wide-open fundraising for all sorts of political activities. The total effect is that our politics for a generation have been shaped by a right-sing narrative about policy and values. Progressives have found themselves overmatched and playing defense. For some, this means making reassuring noises about how they are really moderates and not dangerous liberals. In so doing they tend to acknowledge the validity of at least some of the conservative arguments—even arguments that have little basis in reality.

For a time it has almost seemed that the best advice one can offer to someone seeking to do well in D.C. can be summed up in two words: move right.

The issues in play go way beyond what might have been expected just a few years ago, even after a change in party control of statehouses and of the U.S. House of Representatives. It underpins the change of the debate about issues like Social Security and the right of the government to control, to some extent, the conditions under which citizens can buy and carry firearms.

On Social Security the fight has been transformed from past bipartisan support for increasing the incomes of the majority of senior citizens who lack sufficient savings or have lost their employment-related pensions. The question now is how much should be cut from a program that provides only an average of $1,000 month to those too old to work? We've also come a long way from the politics of the Reagan era. Consider the words of President Reagan at the signing of Social Security Amendments of 1983:

This bill demonstrates for all time our nation's ironclad commitment to Social Security. It assures the elderly that America will always keep the promises made in troubled times a half a century ago. It assures those who are still working that they, too, have a pact with the future. From this day forward, they have one pledge that they will get their fair share of benefits when they retire.

On gun control the progressive forces have been waging a rear guard action for years. The debate has shifted from a disagreement about what the Second Amendment really means—e.g., is the reference to a well-regulated militia satisfied by the existence of, say, the national guard or do we all need to have our own guns without background checks? It is taken for granted now that the Constitution provides a nearly absolute right for individuals to own as many guns as they like.

The shifts on these and a host of other issues represent a significant break with several decades of a fine balance that existed between the two parties. That balance meant that both sought ways to appeal to the political center, often muting the more extreme components of their membership. Today, however, all sorts of schemes that normally would be advocated only in highly partisan gatherings are now vying to become central items on the Republican Party's agenda. The old "normal" has been shattered. The overarching question for progressives is whether to accept this change or challenge it at every opportunity. It's time for both liberal and moderate politicians to draw a line in the sand and find out whether or not the country can be rallied against the rightward shift. The results of the 2012 election suggest that the opportunity is there for those with the guts to seize it.

That’s the legal.

The political is that no matter how the court case is resolved the most recent era of the NLRB is likely over. But if history is any guide, then Democrats will continue to act as if the old rules still apply, while Republicans forge ahead with a new set of rules. 

Most of the attention and analysis of the Noel Canning decision has focused on the question of recess appointments, while simply accepting as fact the premise of inherent controversy of appointments to these agencies.

While the CFPB, which is only a few years old and has never had a confirmed director, has been attacked from its inception, it is important to remember that appointments to the NLRB have not always been controversial affairs. The history of NLRB member appointments is instructive as we determine what comes next. And why what the Court does with the Noel Canning case may not matter when it comes to how the NLRB works.

The NLRB was conceived in 1935 as an agency that would be headed by career civil servants rather than the wildly unstable agency it has become. Law professor Joan Flynn has written about how the NLRB was consciously set up differently than its predecessor National Labor Board (NLB), which was stocked by equal numbers of industry and labor representatives. As opposed to the NLB, the NLRB was conceived of as a “strictly nonpartisan” body. For much of its history, the NLRB retained its original character in spite of Republican attempts to turn it into a partisan body.

Under President Roosevelt, who established the NLRB in 1935, and President Truman, appointments to the NLRB were almost all government employees, with the remainder being academics. In 1952, President Eisenhower broke with the norm and appointed a management attorney to chair the board, a management-side industrial relations director as a member, and a management attorney to the position of General Counsel. There was outcry in the Senate, with many arguing that Eisenhower was changing the nature of the NLRB and turning it into a partisan body.

Presidents Kennedy and Johnson returned the NLRB to its original form, appointing no management or labor representatives. Presidents Nixon and Ford followed Eisenhower’s lead and appointed several management representatives to the Board. It was President Reagan, in his multi-pronged attacks on labor, who permanently changed the nature of the NLRB and set its appointment process on an untenable course.

Reagan’s appointments went well beyond the mainstream management representatives of his predecessor Republican presidents. Political science professor Terry Moe has written that “Reagan imposed on the NLRB a brand of radical anti-unionism that business leaders did not demand and, in fact, had long resisted.” First, Reagan appointed Robert Hunter, a policy strategist from the Heritage Foundation that specialized in anti-labor policy. Next, he appointed John Van de Water, a non-lawyer union buster for the chair of the Board. In Senate hearings, AFL-CIO president Tom Donahue read from an article that Van de Water had published a decade earlier where he bragged that he had personally been involved in 130 employer campaigns to block unions, and he had been successful in 125 of them. Democrats and labor attacked the Van de Water nomination, and after being unable to gain Senate confirmation, Van de Water served shortly on a recess appointment.

Reagan then appointed Donald Dotson, a management-side attorney who not only displayed radical anti-union views, but also had an approach that historian James Gross has said “appealed to the Reagan White House seen as ‘interested in destroying established traditions, not in following them.’” Dotson was despised at the Labor Board for his scorched earth policies, with many unwilling to even lunch with him, and his successor reportedly mounting a photo of Dotson on Dotson’s former toilet in the Chairman’s bathroom. Dotson publicly went to war with the moderate Republican General Counsel, Rosemary Collyer, and in the process diminished some of the authority of the traditionally independent General Counsel position. Following Reagan’s early appointments to the NLRB, labor had enough and AFL-CIO president Lane Kirkland announced that labor would now seek labor representatives to the Board, and that “all the old rules were off.”

Almost 60 years after the Board’s creation, President Clinton, in 1994, nominated Margaret Browning as the first labor-side attorney to the NLRB. Clinton also ushered in the era of “packaged” nominations, where individual appointments would not be considered individually, but rather as part of a package deal. Under this compromise, a Democratic president would pick 3 members from labor, and Republicans would recommend 2 members from management. Under a Republican president, it would be 3 from management and 2 from labor. Professor Flynn marks this deal as the completion of the full circle to the partisan Board that was consciously avoided in creating the NLRB in 1935. 

The packaged deal model held through the Clinton and Bush presidencies. However, under President Obama, the Republican minority in the Senate decided it would simply refuse to confirm Obama’s packaged group of NLRB appointments. After having his appointments languish in the Senate for much of 2011, Obama filled the vacancies with recess appointments in January 2012. Now, the Noel Canning decision has placed the validity of these recess appointments in jeopardy. The GOP-controlled House seized on this decision and advanced HR 1120—the cumbersomely titled “Preventing Greater Uncertainty in Labor-Management Relations Act”—which would freeze all workings of the Board until there is a quorum of 3 members confirmed by the Senate.

Obama has recently offered a new package of nominations to the Senate, with 2 Republicans and 1 Democrat, but it is unlikely to be accepted.  If the Supreme Court strikes down Obama’s recess appointments, then Republicans will likely demand a new package deal of majority conservative Board members.  Republicans would hold all the power in such a bargaining stance because many would be equally satisfied with either a pro-management Board or a non-functioning Board. If the Supreme Court affirms Obama’s recess appointments, Republican senators could still block confirmations, and the authority of a Board permanently comprised of short-lived recess appointees would be diminished.

Cambanis’ argument is twofold. Iran, already suffering from sanctions, is spending untold millions propping up the al-Assad regime. Outside of monetary concerns, and its loss of an IRGC member in mid-February, Iran has squandered much of its influence in the region. Arab allies, like Hamas, have distanced themselves from Tehran while Hezbollah, Iran’s most potent ally in the region, is losing some of its credibility as a resistance force and is becoming viewed more and more as a Shia sectarian outfit.

The sectarian nature of the conflict is becoming all too clear in Lebanon as Hezbollah and FSA fighters move rapidly between positions in the Beqaa Valley of Lebanon and clashes in Syria. For those keeping score at home, Cambanis argues Iran not only risks losing blood and treasure in supporting the al-Assad regime, but regional influence and allies as well. 

Click here to read Thanassis' full article in Foreign Policy. 

• The Washington Post’s Wonkblog discussed some of the ways that federal financial aid programs have actually had the perverse effect of increasing the price of college tuition.
• A new report from the New America Foundation finds that some colleges have responded to increased federal aid for the poor by shifting their own institutional aid to the wealthiest students.
• Last week, ProPublica reported on the ways that colleges improve (and sometimes distort) their admissions statistics. Outright lying is the most overtly egregious practice cited—at least five universities have admitted to fudging their numbers.

But for advocates of increasing college access and equity, one of the most troubling trends is colleges’ continued reliance on early admissions to boost their “yield,” or the percentage of admitted students who ultimately enroll.

As my colleague Richard D. Kahlenberg has noted, early admissions programs consistently disadvantage low-income students, who are less likely to have access to the advising and information needed to find out about the programs and apply in time. Binding early decision programs (as opposed to non-binding early action) further exclude low-income students by requiring applicants to commit to attending without being able to compare financial aid awards at different schools.

The “admissions arms race” is not likely to end any time soon, but it does not have to perpetuate inequality. There are many tactics other than early admissions that colleges could use to optimize their statistics, attract students, and increase their prestige. With a slight shift in thinking and strategy, colleges could boost their numbers and widen college access at the same time.

One way to convince colleges to increase access is to make that a factor in college rankings. U.S. News could incorporate measures of equity—such as the percentage of low-income and first-generation students—into their formulas for ranking the best colleges. (U.S. News does offer a list showing the percentage of students receiving Pell Grants at top-ranked schools, but this information is not a factor in the rankings.)

Convincing U.S. News to change their formulas based on equity may be a hard sell, but there are good reasons for colleges to pursue this change on their own.

The main goal behind having impressive admissions statistics is to attract students. While some students might care about economic diversity per se, many others might not. But students do seem to care about geographic diversity. NYU has a snazzy page highlighting enrollment statistics that boasts that NYU students come from more than 90 countries.

What if colleges expanded geography to think about high schools across the U.S.? How many different high schools are represented in each college’s application pool? Among admitted and enrolled students? If selective colleges made it a goal to increase the number of high schools from which students apply and are admitted, chances are that many of the new schools would be under-resourced and many of the students would be low-income or first-generation college students.

Students also care about employment statistics, particularly in this economic climate. Colleges are meant to be drivers of social mobility. What if, in addition to touting the average salary of recent graduates—NYU boasts $50,000—colleges highlighted the ratio of students’ family incomes to their post-graduation incomes?

Finally, if colleges just want to boost applications from strong students and increase their yield, then reaching out to high-achieving, low-income students is a great strategy.

A recent study by Stanford University professor Caroline Hoxby and Harvard University professor Christopher Avery found that most high-achieving students from the bottom income quartile do not apply to a single selective college or university.

But a follow-up study by Hoxby and Sarah Turner of the University of Virginia found that simply mailing customized college information packets (giving the kind of advice that good college counselors provide) boosted application rates among high-achieving, low-income students by almost 50 percent.

If colleges are looking for more qualified students who are not currently applying, the pool of low-income students is the place to look. And if yield is a concern, selective universities should consider aggressive recruiting of low-income students as an alternative to promoting early admissions. Since most high-achieving, low-income students are not currently applying to any selective schools, an offer of admission from a prestigious school with good financial aid might easily climb to the top of their list.

This frenetic episode lasted barely more than a day before my new phone arrived, and was actually improved by my commitment to the iCloud backup. But the experience of losing a handy device that until then I pretty much took for granted felt like a big deal. My intense reaction provided a valuable personal insight into how attached I had become to the phone, even if I am not one of the tens of millions who text, check Twitter, or take pictures all day long—among the many activities on my iPhone 5 I very rarely use. The variety of smartphones—Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android, RIM’s Blackberry OS, Samsung, Microsoft’s Window Phone, among others—and the apps available for them offer what seem almost limitless uses, to the point that the role of mobile devices is a national pastime, with the prospect that virtually the entire population will eventually have them in some form. A Pew Research Center survey in 2012 found that 46 percent of American adults own a smartphone, which was up by 25 percent from 2011. At that rate, the figure must be well over half of Americans now carrying a phone that has as many features as desktop computers and tablets, plus their core function as a telephone. The indicators are also that the age of first-time smartphone users is dropping as low as middle school. A WebMD feature written by Susan Davis quoted Peter DeLisi, academic dean of the information technology leadership program at Santa Clara University in California poses the essential issue: “The amount of time that people are spending with the new technology, the apparent preoccupation, raises the question, ‘why’?”

The best answer I found was in Nicholas Carr’s book: The Shallows: What the Internet Is doing to Our Brains: “The smartphone, through its small size, ease of use, proliferation of free or cheap apps and constant connectivity changes our relationship with computers in a way that goes well beyond what we experienced with laptops . . . the devices provide an almost continuous stream of messages and alerts as well as easy access to a myriad of compelling information sources.” Carr, who does not carry a smartphone, concluded: “I’m sure one of main reasons people tend to be so compulsive in their use of smartphones is that they can’t stand the idea that there may be a new bit of information out there they haven’t seen. I know that I’m not strong enough to resist that temptation. So I’ve decided to shun the device altogether.”

It has probably been true for several years, but I am increasingly aware that in the elevator of my midtown New York office building, on the crowded surrounding streets of Broadway and Eighth Avenue and in the subway and bus, the smartphone is pervasive, particularly among younger adults, whose heads-down focus on the screen, the scrolling motion for the latest message, and their dexterity with keyboards is a dominant image. There is a reflex to check the phone constantly, especially when you are moving from one place to another (hence the streets, the elevator and in transport). A 2011 study, cited on WebMD from the journal Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, described the ways checking becomes habitual to the point where it can be characterized as addictive. “The average user checks his or her smartphone 35 times a day,” the study found, “for about 30 seconds each time,” usually for e-mails, social media connections, and news updates.

As a pre-baby-boomer, I am certainly not of the generations that have grown up in the digital age and yet the extent of my vulnerable response to losing the phone surprised me. A recent Huffington Post piece by Carolyn Gregoire cited a 2011 study which found that “when young people unplugged from technology for just 24 hours, the vast majority reported experiencing physical and mental symptoms of distress.” The consensus of experts is the more attached we become to our smartphones, the more we are displaying what amount to addictive reactions. I am very glad that I have a well-equipped smartphone again, and I am determined to be more careful about where and how I carry it with me. But a phone, ultimately, should be regarded as a useful connector to people we want to reach and information that we rely on to manage our lives.  If you do lose your smartphone, stay calm. There is always another phone—for a fee, of course—to take its place.

Image via Shutterstock

Rothkopf, the CEO of Foreign Policy, begins by noting that Foreign Policy’s own list of the 500 most powerful people on the planet, 90% are male. He goes on to note that on list-after-list, group-after-group, women are massively underrepresented. Indeed, this state of affairs is so taken-for-granted that we celebrate the occasional exception as evidence that we've made more progress than is actually the case. Says Rothkopf:

The systematic, persistent acceptance of women's second-class status is history's greatest shame. And for all our self-congratulations about how far we have come, we live in a world where even in the most advanced countries, deep injustices against women remain. These injustices, of course, have other costs beyond the purely human ones. Nothing would help societies grow more than educating and empowering women economically. Democracy is a sham until the planet's majority population actually achieves equitable representation in deliberative bodies and executive positions of government. And the absence of women in positions of power is also, of course, a guarantee that women's interests will continue to be minimized, ignored, or repressed.

Head over to Foreign Policy to read the rest of “The Balance of Power.”

Our thanks to @JasonRenker for nominating the piece, and to Century Foundation trustee John Podesta (@johnpodesta) for first bringing it to our attention.

Thank you to everyone who sent in nominations this week. If your pick didn’t win, don’t worry. Nominations are now open for next week’s #TCFBest. Submit your nominations in the comments below, on our Facebook page, on Twitter using #TCFBest, or email them to us at chang@tcf.org.

Although few policymakers and wonks are talking about it, a small but growing number of schools are attempting to boost the achievement of low-income students by shifting enrollment to place more low-income students in mixed-income schools. Socioeconomic integration is an effective way to tap into the academic benefits of having high-achieving peers, an engaged community of parents, and high-quality teachers.

In the last decade, the number of public school districts that consider socioeconomic status in student assignment has grown from just a handful to more than 80 (Kahlenberg, 2012). Early adopters included La Crosse, Wisconsin, which created a districtwide plan to balance school enrollment by socioeconomic status in 1979, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, which made socioeconomic status the main factor in its controlled choice program in 2001. Newer additions include Bloomington, Minnesota, and Salina, Kansas, both of which used socioeconomic balance as a factor in redrawing school boundaries in recent years.

Adding to this list, a number of charter schools now actively seek socioeconomically diverse student enrollment as part of their design. They include schools like High Tech High, which began in 2000 as a single charter school and is now a network of 11 schools in San Diego, and Citizens of the World Charter Schools, which opened its first school in 2010 and is striving to create a national network of diverse charter schools.

The power of student diversity is an important theme in the magazine. In addition to my take, Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute outlines policies that have contributed to school segregation (paywall), and Michael Petrilli of the Fordham Institute looks at some of the challenges of serving a diverse student body (paywall).

The issue also provides a broad overview of poverty and education. Stanford University’s Sean Reardon breaks down the trends that are causing the U.S.’s widening income achievement gap. Articles on preschool interventions and classroom engagement look at ways that schools can combat poverty head on. And educators offer first-hand accounts of poverty in their own lives. The full issue is well worth a read.

You can check out the full “Faces of Poverty” issue on Educational Leadership’s website. It is a powerful reminder of the multiple ways that poverty threatens educational opportunity in our country and of the strategies we can use to fight it.

For the American middle class, wage stagnation has been a fact of life for over two decades. Last year, the median household earned just over $50,000—no more, adjusted for inflation, than the median household in 1996 or 1989. That’s in stark contrast to the fortunes of the richest one percent, who saw their annual income rise 50 percent in the same period, from about $592,000 to nearly $879,000.

At the same time, the total compensation received by workers has actually increased over 30 percent since 1980—a statistic frequently cited by conservative economists as proof that income inequality is somehow exaggerated. But the fact is, most middle class families haven’t seen a dollar of that extra compensation. It’s consumed before it ever reaches them by the ever-rising cost of health care—the silent killer of middle class wage growth.

Consider the blue bars in the graph above. The average worker contributed over $3,900 in 2011 towards a family health insurance policy through their employer. That’s about $2,000 more than they would have spent in 1996, adjusted for inflation—a fair price, perhaps, for a decade and a half of medical innovations and slightly longer life expectancy.

But that’s not the total cost. Look at the orange bars. The average employer contribution grew a stunning $6,000 in the same period, doubling from $5,276 in 1996 to just over $11,000 in 2011. Combined with workers’ contributions, that’s an increase of $7,918 in potential annual wages over fifteen years that workers gave up in exchange for moderately improved health care.

Considered another way, the median American household might be earning nearly $58,000 a year, or 16 percent more than they are currently, if the inflation-adjusted cost of health care were frozen at 1996 levels. Median household income would be over $61,000 if workers could simply take their employer’s $11,000 contribution in cash.

For conservative analysts at think tanks like The Heritage Foundation and The Cato Institute, discounting the cash value of employer health benefits is misleading, even deceptive—part of a “declinist” worldview perpetuated by the left to promote redistributionist policies. By this way of thinking, Americans should cheer every time their health premiums increase without a commensurate pay cut, because their “total compensation” has increased.

But this disagreement over how we measure compensation versus take-home pay is about political narratives, not reality. Middle class Americans continue to buy health insurance coverage, year after year, because they would rather pay through the nose than put their family at risk if someone gets sick. As a result, there is little practical difference between a world where workers lose an increasing share of their salaries to ever-costlier health benefits, and one in which workers consistently get raises that go to pay for the same. In either scenario, median post-insurance disposable income is flat or declining.

There are plenty of other reasons why middle class incomes have stagnated over the last two decades. One need only look at the incredible divergence between America’s haves and have-nots to divine the interrelated effects of globalization, disappearing unions, and a tax system that privileges capital over labor. Income inequality would still be rising even if health care premiums weren’t. But as long as middle class Americans—those who aren’t poor enough to receive government-subsidized care and not rich enough to not care—are forced to confront these costs on their own, they’re going to continue getting squeezed. However we choose to define that fact, it’s a crisis hiding in plain sight.

• The Democratic National Convention was held in Charlotte, North Carolina, a so-called right-to-work state.
• Charlotte’s business community includes the headquarters of Bank of America, but does not include a single unionized hotel for workers staying overnight.
• The Democratic platform removed all mentions of God and labor reform. Public pressure restored God. Labor reform remained absent.

Despite these snubs, unions continued to give heavily to Obama’s campaign, and they mobilized members and non-members alike, thanks in part to the new rules of Citizens United.

Now, their faithfulness in the face of these snubs has been rewarded with the nomination of the decidedly union-unfriendly Penny Pritzker for Secretary of Commerce. With this move, President Obama has once again shown unions that he takes their support for granted.

It is no surprise to see Pritzker’s name surface again. President Obama considered her for the same post in 2008. Talk of her nomination fizzled, presumably because the middle of a recession brought about by terrible banking practices was not the right time for a commerce secretary who oversaw a collapsed bank that dealt in subprime mortgage backed securities and was fined nearly a half-billion dollars by the federal government. With the banking crisis (more or less) in the past, Pritzker’s name surfaced again following Obama’s reelection.

Unions objected loudly in the hopes that the president would look elsewhere. However, in what has become a quadrennial tradition, a Democratic Party that relied on unions to win an election made a post-election pivot to corporations and the wealthy for advice on the treatment of workers. Not unsurprisingly, the business class is rather taken with the anti-worker Pritzker.

Some of Pritzker’s problems with unions stem from the treatment of workers at Hyatt Hotels, the hotel chain co-founded by her father where she sits on the board. According to the hospitality workers union, UNITE HERE, the hotels have a long record of labor abuses including wage theft, illegal and unjust firings, wage depression through the aggressive use of subcontractors, unreasonable workloads, and unsafe work conditions.

Pritzker’s issues with unions don’t stop there. As an education ally of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Pritzker has been a strong advocate of charter schools at the expense of existing public schools. She was a member of the Chicago Board of Education during the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) strike last year. In this role, she also helped oversee a massive school closure plan—one of the largest in American history—that would affect 47,000 students, 88 percent of them African American. When Pritzker stepped down from the Board in March, CTU President Karen Lewis released a statement saying that Pritzker

has a long and storied history as being an anti-labor, anti-worker kind of boss. She has supported policies that have had an adverse impact on working-class families and their children.

Much of the attention to Pritzker’s nomination has focused on her role as a long-time Obama supporter and bundler. According to the OpenSecrets, Pritzker raised more than $1 million in 2012, and approximately $250,000 in 2008. Estimates of “bundling” are imprecise, and OpenSecrets acknowledges that there is a reasonable chance that Pritzker raised more than the amount listed.

However, missing from the conversation is how much unions raised for Obama and other Democrats. According to OpenSecrets, the top five union contributors gave more than $55 million in the 2012 election, most of it to Democratic candidates. These figures do not count union super PACs such as Workers Voice, which spent over $20 million in 2012.

In addition to donations to Democratic candidates, unions spent enormous efforts mobilizing voters for Democrats. According to Dave Jamieson at the Huffington Post, union organizing helped raise Obama’s numbers nationally and in battleground states. Unions targeted white working class voters in swing states, and claimed to have provided a 10 percent bump.

Yet union contributions weren’t enough to get a seat at the table: Obama did not respond to union concerns about Pritzker’s past policies towards workers.

Unions and worker advocacy groups are rightfully concerned about Pritzker’s past indifference to mass firings and labor abuses. Their continued organization and support for President Obama gives them a right to expect that their voices will be heard in his cabinet appointments—particularly for appointments that directly impact union interests.

Instead, Obama ignored these concerns, hailing Pritzker’s commitment to three policies he outlined in the State of the Union:

Number one, making sure America is a magnet for good jobs. Number two, helping workers earn the skills they need to get those jobs. And number three, making sure their hard work actually leads to a decent living.

President Obama may be convinced that Pritzker is committed to that last one. But evidence for that belief seems strangely lacking.

• In the 1940s, faced with a highly effective group of economists at the young National Labor Relations Board, Republicans passed a bill banning the agency from hiring economists.
• In the 1990s, faced with high-quality research on gun violence, Republican Congressman Jay Dickey pushed through an amendment that effectively stopped federal funding for gun research.
• In February of this year, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor called for an end to federal funding of social science research.

Now, Republicans are trying to kill high quality data on poverty, unemployment, violent crime, access to education and health care, and a variety of other key economic indicators.

The Census Reform Act, introduced by GOP Representative Jeff Duncan of South Carolina, would bar the U.S. Census Bureau from conducting all of its mandatory surveys except for the decennial population count. Among a variety of areas, that means that there would be no economic census of industries, no census of state and local governments, no census of incarcerated populations, and no census of housing.

If the benign-sounding Census Reform Act passes, the fundamental statistics upon which most others are built will simply disappear. Former director of the U.S. Census, Ken Prewitt, told the Huffington Post that without the Census, “we won’t have an unemployment rate.” Not only will we not be able to accurately address problems, we won’t even know the existence or extent of problems.

Though it’s unlikely that such a bill would pass (in part because businesses need the data collected by the Census), these sorts of attempts to push political programs by killing the data and misinforming the public should be recognized as anti-democratic. People can only make choices if they have access to accurate information concerning society, and the government has a special duty to collect and disseminate this information.

Thomas Jefferson wrote that a well-informed electorate is a prerequisite to democracy.

Republicans put democracy at risk with bills such as the Census Reform Act.   

In April, I wrote a piece for the Guardian arguing that the reaction to the marathon bombing was dramatically at odds with American inertia over arms control. The infographic below illustrates some of my main points. (Click the image to see the full-sized version.)

If only Americans reacted the same way to the actual threats that exist in their country. Last year, 17 Americans died in terrorist attacks; more than 30,000 died by the hands of guns. In fact, the same day of the marathon bombing in Boston, 11 Americans were murdered by guns—a small portion of the more than 3,500 Americans who have died in gun violence since the Newtown massacre. Yet, the same week as the Boston manhunt, the Senate blocked consideration of a gun control bill that would have strengthened background checks for potential buyers. Even though this reform is supported by more than 90 percent of Americans, and even though 56 out of 100 senators voted in favor of it, the Republican minority prevented even a vote from being held on the bill because it would have allegedly violated the second amendment rights of "law-abiding Americans."

So for those of you keeping score at home—locking down an American city: a proper reaction to the threat from one terrorist. A background check to prevent criminals or those with mental illness from purchasing guns: a dastardly attack on civil liberties.

The Census Reform Act, introduced by Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.), is an insulting misnomer and a disturbing reflection of values among the House Republican caucus’s libertarian camp. As Dylan Matthews details, the bill would “reform” the Census Bureau by confining its mission to the decennial population census, in effect eliminating the Current Population Survey (CPS) and the American Community Survey (ACS)—which track the national unemployment rate and poverty rate, respectively, among other stats. All surveys conducted (more efficiently, mind you) by the Census Bureau on the behalf of other agencies would be at least temporarily curtailed—and likely de facto gutted or ended by budgetary and administrative realties—including the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, a panel data goldmine for economists and researchers.

During the Great Depression, U.S. policymakers had contemporaneous data on prices and industrial production (albeit rudimentary by modern standards), but were largely flying blind—in particular, there were no official government statistics tracking unemployment. National income accounting (e.g., the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s National Income and Product Accounts, including GDP data) wasn’t fully developed—widely attributed to Simon Kuznets and Richard Stone—until after the 1936 release of John Maynard Keynes’ General Theory. Late in the Depression, but particularly in the aftermath of World War II, Congress tried to correct this economic policymaking handicap. As such, monthly unemployment surveys began in the 1940s and CPS unemployment data are only publicly available starting in 1948. Deliberately seeking to return toward this data-constrained Dark Age is mind bogglingly ill-advised.

Regrettably, conservative anti-government fervor has already taken a toll on data collection. The Bureau of Labor Statistics eliminated its International Labor Comparison, Mass Layoff Statistics, and Green Job Measures programs because of sequestration—which the GOP extracted by hijacking the debt ceiling and then refused to replace with sensible deficit reduction. And as Matthews’ notes, the ACS came under Republican attack twice last year, as members tried to make the survey voluntary and also eliminate it entirely.

It is often said that conservatives want to reverse the past century’s economic and budgetary policy innovations—exposed by efforts to eliminate the progressive income and estate taxes, social insurance legacies of the New Deal and Great Society, and anti-trust and other regulation. But the GOP’s efforts to castrate economic data collection in deference to some twisted libertarian concept of freedom take this regressing bent to a new extreme, entrenching the GOP as frighteningly anti-empiricist.

This bill would deprive policymakers, researchers, and ultimately the American public of critical information regarding virtually every area of public policy.

• Law enforcement officials would be denied critical information regarding individuals' victimization from crime.
• Public and private sectors would be deprived of critical information regarding local economic activities.
• Health policy makers would be deprived of critical data regarding the ill and the uninsured. 

It is depressing that elected officials would promote such an ill-conceived measure. I take small comfort in the fact that this proposal would so harm American government and American businesses that it has only slim prospects of actual passage.

During the years I spent at FactCheck, I certainly wittnessed my share of politicians trying to make up their own facts. And while I wasn’t allowed to say this at the time, it was always pretty clear (to me, anyway), that one side was making up a lot more facts than the other. Republicans have happily embraced half-truths and outright falsehoods. From “Death Panels” to climate change denialism to the austerity discussion to Paul Ryan’s budget math, the GOP appears to have embraced a policy of Making Stuff Up.

But now it seems that conservatives’ War on Facts has entered a new phase. If the facts are against you, just stop collecting them.

Rep. Jeff Duncan, a South Carolina Republican, has introduced a bill that would prevent the federal government from collecting data about the economy.

That’s right. The bill would require that the Census Bureau stop collecting the information that economists use to calculate (among other things) the unemployment rate, the labor force participation rate, housing construction rates, trade deficits, and much more.

So you might well be saying, “This sounds like a pain for economists, but why should I care if a bunch of stuffy economists are inconvenienced?”

The answer is that without this information, it will be impossible to tell how much any legislation coming out of the Congress costs.

When the Congressional Budget Office calculates the cost of a particular piece of legislation, they have to have something to compare it against. They do this by calculating a budget baseline--that is, they look at how much the federal government will spend and how much revenue it will collect under current law. It’s that last part that’s important here.

To know how much money the government will collect in taxes, you have to know a lot of things about the economy generally. Much of this is incredibly complicated, and a whole lot of extremely smart CBOers spend hundreds of person-hours each year trying to produce an economic forecast. Not being an economist, I can’t tell you exactly what goes into all of those models, but I do know one thing for sure.

If you want to know how much tax revenue you'll collect, you pretty much have to know how many people have jobs.

But, then, if you’re just planning to make up your own numbers anyway, you probably don’t much care whether the CBO has the data it needs to produce accurate estimates.

Friedman energetically presents his usual “world is flat” thesis that Americans must adjust to living in a rewired, more meritocratic, hyper-connected, and competitive world:

We now live in a 401(k) world—a world of defined contributions, not defined benefits—where everyone needs to pass the bar exam and no one can escape the most e-mailed list…

I’m always struck that Facebook, Twitter, 4G, iPhones, iPads, high-speech broadband, ubiquitous wireless and Web-enabled cellphones, the cloud, Big Data, cellphone apps and Skype did not exist or were in their infancy a decade ago. . . . [T]he combination of these tools of connectivity and creativity has created a global education, commercial, communication and innovation platform on which more people can start stuff, collaborate on stuff, learn stuff, make stuff (and destroy stuff) with more other people than ever before.

What’s exciting is that this platform empowers individuals to access learning, retrain, engage in commerce, seek or advertise a job, invent, invest and crowd source—all online. But this huge expansion in an individual’s ability to do all these things comes with one big difference: more now rests on you.

Friedman goes on to write: “We’re entering a world that increasingly rewards individual aspiration and persistence and can measure precisely who is contributing and who is not.” And he gives the usual list of ways this might happen: teachers’ progress teaching students, which Jamba Juice clerk sells the most product, some stuff about Big Data and the Cloud.

If you are self-motivated, wow, this world is tailored for you. The boundaries are all gone. But if you’re not self-motivated, this world will be a challenge because the walls, ceilings and floors that protected people are also disappearing. That is what I mean when I say “it is a 401(k) world.” Government will do less for you. Companies will do less for you. Unions can do less for you. There will be fewer limits, but also fewer guarantees. Your specific contribution will define your specific benefits much more. Just showing up will not cut it.

The policy implications? “Just as having a 401(k) defined contribution plan requires you to learn more about investing in your retirement, a 401(k) world requires you to learn much more about investing in yourself: how do I build my own competencies to be attractive to employers and flourish in this world,” said Byron Auguste, a director at McKinsey and one of the founders of Hope Street Group…

Friedman’s global-technological determinism leaves me scratching my head here. I ask myself: Which of these things is not like the other?

Let’s presume that the world is a more complicated, interconnected place, in which teachers, computer programmers, and Jamba Juice clerks need to raise their game. I get that social media, Big Data, and smart phones are important technological innovations. These hi-tech advances just have nothing whatever to do with 401(k) plans.

Matt Yglesias notes today that our existing 401(k) retirement system is a disastrously inefficient and predatory substitute for a more stable and economical social insurance system. Helaine Olen tells the story in greater detail in her recent book, Pound Foolish (more on that here, here, and here).

There’s nothing particularly high-tech about the CNBC/e-trade baby culture of day trading or the broader investment and mutual-fund world, either. Financial innovations are sometimes useful. These should not be confused with real-economy innovations that produce the next generation of hybrid car or Wi-Fi network, either. Within a well-functioning economy, companies such as General Motors and Ford provide infinitely greater innovations to improve our lives than (say) Citibank or Goldman is going to do.

Our 401(k) world imposes huge risks, costs, and burdens on everyone. One of these costs is that we expect everyone to learn skills they shouldn’t have to master. Another cost is that we expect savvy individual behavior to protect people against broader environmental risks imposed by stagnant wages, global economic instability, accidents, and ill-health.

Friedman’s basic frame seems oddly misplaced. People’s retirement savings weren’t hammered in 2007 and 2008 because they were slacking off or “just showing up.” The macro-economy stumbled badly. Meanwhile, a largely parasitic financial advice and credit industry made things worse rather than better.

I’m all in to support measures that impart greater financial literacy to everyday Americans. I even wrote an advanced treatise on the subject. Given the world we live in, people need these skills.

That’s too bad, because millions of people will exercise these skills badly. Millions of others will simply waste huge amounts of time on this stuff. I want nurses to spend their time and mental energies learning how to care for sick patients. I want computer programmers to learn how to improve Windows. I want Jamba Juice clerks and teachers and cops to spend their time doing real stuff, doing their jobs better. I don't want these people spending time reading mutual fund prospectuses, learning about iShares, or otherwise moonlighting as amateur financial professionals responsible to finance their own retirements.

Given the unstable “world is flat” economy we inhabit, policymakers might have chosen to strengthen Social Security, health care entitlements, and other social insurance structures to avoid shifting greater risks onto individuals. We made different policy choices, with rather predictable results.

We might as well train people to function well in the world we’ve built. Yet, poor individual skills are not the real problem here. Focusing on that piece of the puzzle is a distinctly second-best solution.

In this excerpt from my new e-book, Beyond the Education Wars: Evidence That Collaboration Builds Effective Schools, I look at the case of Springfield, Massachusetts. Its once-struggling public schools have seen modest but significant improvements in its standardized test scores—gains that have come in the wake of a joint labor-management initiative that radically transformed the culture of its teachers and administrators.

Read on for details. You can download the first chapter of Beyond the Education Wars for free, or purchase the full e-book from Amazon or iTunes.

But what is missing in Phillips' post, as in too many articles about student debt, is any acknowledgement of two critical facts. First, three out of four undergraduates in the United States attend a public college or university—only about 15 percent attend the costlier private schools that get so much attention in the press. And second, state funding for those public colleges and universities has collapsed over the last two decades, forcing students and their families to borrow the difference.

These cuts have been particularly severe in the years since the Great Recession. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has reported, every state except for North Dakota and Wyoming is spending less per student on higher education than they did in 2007. As a result, students in nearly every state are paying higher tuition, even as colleges try to lower costs by firing faculty, eliminating course offerings, closing campuses, and reducing library services. In the last five years alone, thirty-six states cut funding for public higher education by more than 20 percent, eleven cut funding by more than a third, and two states—Arizona and New Hampshire—cut their spending per college student in half.

Click here to view the full chart with all 50 states

It wasn't always like this. In the late 1980s, public colleges and universities received more than 75 percent of their total funding from state government, with a small percentage coming from the federal government. But today, that number is closer to 50 percent, with higher student tuition responsible for the other half:

Per-student revenue from state and local governments fell by $2,600, after adjusting for inflation, between 1987 and 2012. During that same period, per-student tuition increased by $2,600. In other words, the entire increase in tuition at public colleges and universities over the last 25 years has gone to make up for declining state and local revenue, leaving no additional funding available to improve programs and services or fund costs that are rising faster than the rate of inflation such as employee health care.

This trend has meant that students have assumed much greater responsibility for paying for public higher education without those institutions receiving more money to fund quality improvements. In 1987, public colleges and universities received 3.3 times as much in revenue from state and local governments as they did from students. They now receive about 1.1 times as much from states and localities as from students.

America's collective divestment in higher education—once considered a public good—has a high social and economic cost. Millions of young people are entering the workforce each year with an average $26,600 in student debt, seriously limiting their disposable income and access to credit. That means they have less money to spend on traditional middle class goods like a car or home, creating a major drag on the housing market and the overall economy.

The whole point of funding public colleges and universities with state tax revenue is that higher education is an investment in the next generation—an investment that pays dividends in rising living standards and incomes for everyone in society. Those who would pull the ladder up behind them by passing the tax burden down to students in the form of higher tuition and debt are shooting themselves in the foot.

Herb’s preference was to stop at the desks of copy editors and the night news editors, just arriving for work, and in a tentative manner, apologizing for the interruption, he would ask their opinion about draft cartoons and among the possible captions. He was invariably deferential, and rarely did he directly disagree with the comments. How Herb decided whose judgment to solicit was a mystery, but to be included among the chosen was an honor that provided a measure of pride regardless of where else you fit into the newsroom’s hierarchy. Herb then went to his office where, as I recall, he often took a short nap and then made up his mind. By deadline, there was a black and white crayon drawing that by their thousands over the years captured with a devastating edge the essence of whatever or whoever was the political focus of the moment. In my time at the Washington Post, which included five years as an editor, I was an occasional stop on Herblock’s forays, and we shared a birthdate, October 13, which earned me an invitation one year as his guest at the annual Gridiron Dinner.

Herblock’s brilliance is captured in a new documentary, Herblock: The Black & The White, which premiered at the Tribeca film festival, executive produced by George Stevens Jr., produced and directed by his son Michael Stevens, and written in collaboration with Sarah Lukinson. The Atlantic.com has already featured “The Lessons of a Cartoonist’s Crusade Against McCarthyism,” an astute assessment of Herblock and the film by Steven Heller, co-chair of the MFA Design Program at the School of Visual Arts, who, according to his biography, has written or edited 140 books on design and popular culture. Herblock’s work also gets significant and deserved attention in Victor S. Navasky’s new book, The Art of Controversy: Political Cartoons and Their Enduring Power (my friend, the esteemed Navasky, is former editor and publisher of The Nation). Lacking the expertise of Heller and Navasky’s historical overview, my particular pleasure from the film is as a reminder of Herblock’s amazing prescience on one great issue after another, particularly from the 1950s onwards, in which he skewered those public figures he abhorred (his Richard Nixon collection alone would have secured his place forever as a definer of the “Tricky Dicky” persona). Within days of the 1972 Watergate break-in, before it began to make the barest dent on public awareness, Herblock’s drawings brought the case right to the White House doors.

As a biography, the film’s surprises have to do with Herb’s private life. He officially listed his address as the Washington Post, and while he was invariably cordial, there was no hint that he spent much time in social settings. It turns out that Herb had a long term relationship—the film says it went on for thirty-five years—with Doree Lovell, a photographer,  and the pair spent every available moment together, especially on weekends at a cottage in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. There are wonderful home movies in color of a beaming Herb cruising through the streets of the town on a large tricycle (he never learned to drive) and watching local parades comfortably ensconced in an aluminum chair. Doree, his friends say, was truly his life’s partner although they never married.

Herblock published about a dozen books, which usually included extensive political observations with insights on a par to match his drawings. In acknowledgments to a book on the Reagan years, published in 1984 (which I found on my shelf at home), he mentions that Doree had helped edit four of his works. Herb’s circle of friends clearly respected his insistence on privacy in personal matters, which in a newspaper culture was exceedingly unusual. Herb’s long tenure at the Washington Post—he worked there for fifty-five years—also had another dimension which was little known. Apparently, the Graham family, owners of the newspaper, regarded Herblock so highly that they awarded him stock in what was a highly profitable enterprise. When his will was probated, his fortune, according to the film, was about $90 million, large enough for a foundation that he left in the hands of a few friends, including his long-time assistant Jean Rickard. The Herb Block Foundation (its website puts its original endowment at $50 million) awards grants in three categories: “Defending Basic Freedoms, Pathways out of Poverty, and Encouraging Citizen Involvement.” 

Now that it has been shown at Tribeca, Herblock: The Black & The White will hopefully find a national distributor for theatrical, on-demand, or cable release. It is a film that shows why journalism in all its forms matters so much in support of our values as a country and it is a worthy tribute to an exceptionally gifted man.

Our 22-member task force has exhaustively combed through the latest and best research on higher education to address whether we should rethink the basic ways in which our nation’s two-year colleges are financed and governed.

Now we want to know how community college changed your life.

Tell us about your experiences in community college. Did it prepare you transfer to a four-year institution? Land you a good job? Allow you to get an education while holding down a job or raising a family?

Or did it not work out for you? If things didn’t go as planned, what could community colleges do better? And what should policymakers do to strengthen community colleges?

Send us the story of your community college experience. Use whatever format you’d like: record a video, write a blog post, or draw us a picture. Whichever you choose, send it to education@tcf.org. We’ll print the best ones here at Blog of the Century.

Shanker, who died in 1997, never saw national standards, as a coalition of testing opponents on the left and opponents of federal leadership on the right stymied advances. National standards also were the victim of poor implementation. An early stab at national history standards, released in October 1994, were widely decried for their political bias, and resulted in a 99–1 vote of condemnation in the U.S. Senate. 

In more recent years, advocates of common standards have been much smarter. The Common Core State Standards grew out of state leadership from the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers. They focused on mathematics and English language arts. And federal Race to the Top dollars helped make the unthinkable possible, encouraging 45 states and the District of Columbia to adopt the Common Core over opposition from elements of the political left and right. The Common Core standards are not perfect—even the Fordham Foundation’s Chester Finn, a strong supporter, says about one-quarter of students in America will be worse off under the Common Core than under current state standards. But the Common Core has been widely seen as an important step in the right direction for most students.

Now, however, the consensus is starting to unravel. On the right, the Republican National Committee recently called the Common Core “a nationwide straightjacket on academic freedom and achievement.” Bills to repeal the common core have been offered in a number of conservative states, according to an article by the Washington Post’s Lyndsey Layton. At the same time, as challenging new tests linked to the Common Core were rolled out in New York, some teachers have begun voicing concern that they and their students are being held accountable without adequate time to prepare. Education historian Diane Ravitch recently declared she could not support the Common Core because it is likely to result in high student failure rates—feeding privatization efforts—and because it has not been properly field-tested. 

Is there a way out for those of us who strongly support high-quality common standards (and don’t want to go back to 50 state standards) yet worry that rushed implementation could lead to a backlash and undermine the entire effort?

Earlier today, AFT president Randi Weingarten’s laid out a thoughtful response to the conundrum in an important speech to the Association for a Better New York, entitled, “Making Common Core Standards Work Before Making Them Count.” Weingarten reiterated her strong support for the Common Core but then gave voice to the concerns of New York City teachers who feel unprepared for a much tougher set of standards and tests. In language reminiscent of that used by Shanker, Weingarten asked, “Can you imagine doctors being expected to perform a new medical procedure without being trained in it or provided the necessary instruments—simply being told there may be some material on a website? Of course not, but that’s what’s happening right now with the Common Core.”

To balance these concerns, she called for “a moratorium on the stakes associated with Common Core assessments.” She continued:  “I am proposing that states and districts work with educators to develop clear tasks and a clear timeline to put in place the crucial elements of Common Core implementation. And until then, the tests should be decoupled from decisions that could unfairly hurt students, schools, and teachers.”

Weingarten’s call for a moratorium on consequences parallels the proposal advanced recently by Joshua Starr, the thoughtful superintendent of Montgomery County, Maryland public schools, for a three-year moratorium on federally-required standardized testing.  Starr suggested, “A moratorium on standardized tests would give our school systems the ability to implement the Common Core with fidelity. It would also give the groups developing assessments aligned to the Common Core the time they need to get it right.”

Importantly, Weingarten and Starr are not saying no to common standards; they are not saying no to all tests, or no to consequences. They are saying teachers and administrators need time to adjust to the new standards.

Some critics will no doubt see these proposals as undermining the Common Core. But the history of the standards movement suggests nothing will undermine it more quickly than getting the implementation wrong. The politics of common standards, going back to Al Shanker, have always been difficult, and the backers of the Common Core have brilliantly navigated this difficult terrain to date. To continue that success, supporters should take a sensible pause to address legitimate concerns about implementation, and then get on with the business of implementing an important educational reform.

Image via Shutterstock

But what’s gone entirely missing, as far as I can tell, and what I struggled to explain in sub-140-character increments, is that R&R’s reported finding—that “median growth rates for countries with public debt over 90 percent of GDP are roughly one percent lower than otherwise; average (mean) growth rates are several percent lower [and slightly negative]”—couldn’t justify austerity even before it was debunked.

Back in early 2010, pundits and policymakers immediately seized on R&R’s now-invalidated results to justify austerity policies, so the paper’s methodological debunking has been correctly interpreted as a major defeat for the austerity movement. But the Beltway interpretation of R&R was based on a false premise from the get-go. Robert Samuelson’s predictably unhelpful addition to the R&R debate—his half-hearted defense of R&R’s “minor mistakes” is scattered with objectively inaccurate revisionist history—perfectly encapsulates this widely propagated false dichotomy: “It’s ‘austerity’ versus ‘stimulus.’ If debt exceeding 90 percent of GDP is hazardous, then the case for austerity seems stronger.” (Emphasis added.)

Rephrased, it seems to Samuelson that austerity should reduce the debt ratio. But public policy is better guided by evidence than gut feelings.

Causality, data and methodological questions aside, the policy relevant takeaway from R&R’s reported debt “tipping point” for growth was that policymakers should prevent debt ratios from rising to 90 percent. So for R&R to be an economic argument for austerity, austerity would have to reduce debt ratios—but austerity has produced the opposite effect throughout Europe. Holland and Portes (2012) concluded that European austerity not only had a larger-than-expected adverse effect on growth but has perversely raised debt ratios: “In both the UK and the Euro Area as a whole, the result of coordinated fiscal consolidation is a rise in the debt-GDP ratio of approximately 5 percentage points.” Of the twelve counties analyzed, Ireland was the only one in which fiscal consolidation over 2011-2013 was not found to be entirely counterproductive with respect to debt ratios.

The debt ratio is simply government debt as a share of GDP, so it rises if: a) GDP falls cet. paribus; b) nominal debt rises cet. paribus; or c) nominal debt rises relatively faster than GDP growth. But when GDP falls, the debt ratio increases through two mechanisms: a decreased denominator and also increased nominal debt through fiscal feedback effects. So a dollar of austerity will reduce GDP by the policy’s associated fiscal multiplier, and a fraction of that austerity-induced reduction in GDP will increase the cyclical portion of the budget deficit by depressing tax receipts and increasing spending on automatic stabilizers (e.g., unemployment benefits). For the United States, every dollar the economy moves away from potential output adds roughly $0.37 to budget deficits—and this effect is leveraged by the policy’s associated fiscal multiplier.

The kicker is that fiscal multipliers are currently elevated because monetary policy cannot be employed to cushion fiscal retrenchment (advanced economies’ central banks have short-term policy rates stuck at or near the zero lower bound of nominal interest rates), and the interest rate “crowd-out” is currently blocked (at full employment, fiscal retrenchment would be partially cushioned by increased private investment as decreased public borrowing lowered interest rates). Blanchard and Leign (2013) (PDF) document that policymakers and fiscal authorities greatly underestimated fiscal multipliers early in the downturn, and identified best estimates (PDF) of the government spending multiplier ranging from 0.9 to 1.7.

For policy savings to lower the U.S. debt ratio from current levels, the associated fiscal multiplier must be under roughly 0.9—below Blanchard and Leigh’s range of estimates—suggesting that any government spending cuts will increase the near-term debt ratio. We estimate that sequestration spending cuts being implemented will push the U.S. debt ratio higher in 2013.

Essentially, austerity policies in Europe and the United States are trading weaker growth and larger cyclical budget deficits for smaller structural budget deficits, to the net effect of worsening relative near-term fiscal positions. R&R’s reported results never provided any economic cover for this trade.

Holland and Portes, let alone a cursory look at the U.K.’s experience with austerity, should have been a nail in the coffin for using R&R as an economic argument justify austerity. Then again, Krugman declared that R&R “has been completely discredited” in July 2010 after Josh and former EPI colleague John Irons (2010) identified serious theoretical and empirical flaws, particularly reverse causation with the contemporaneous correlation between growth and debt.

But R&R’s debt “tipping point” played out as an expedient fig leaf for far too many pundits and policymakers interested in austerity because it seemed like the responsible thing—or worse, the pretense of painful choices seeming necessary advanced ulterior policy agendas—economics be damned. Depressingly, austerity policies are all too likely to continue being implemented on both sides of the Atlantic without any perceived economic justification whatsoever, just as austerity has been escalated without any empirical economic justification for some time.

The 1986 reforms are revered because they succeeded politically, passing a divided Congress and enacted by a lame-duck president. Comprehensive reform today similarly would have to overcome major political hurdles, particularly Republican intransigence over raising revenue. Yet many policymakers today seem unaware that 1986-style reform is no longer viable.

The 1986 model was designed to be both revenue-neutral and distributionally neutral—meaning that average tax rates would remain roughly unchanged across incomes. Replicating these objectives today would imprudently disregard shifts in the economic and budgetary landscape. The Bush-era tax cuts enacted a decade ago violated the spirit of the 1986 reforms by lowering revenue and shifting the burden of taxation further down the income scale. In so doing, they contributed to sizeable structural budget deficits and revenue levels inadequate to support the baby-boomers’ retirement (an outlook essentially unchanged by the lame duck budget deal). And today, rising income inequality—exacerbated by reductions in top tax rates—has surpassed Gilded Age levels.

Rather than addressing our most pressing economic challenges, repeating 1986-style reform today would largely lock in misguided shifts in tax policy since 2001. Comprehensive tax reform must raise more revenue from market-based income that is increasingly skewed to the very top of the income ladder, and use tax policy to deliberately slow inequality growth.

But there is a deeper problem with using the basic contours of the old reforms as a modern template—specifically, the 1986 dual objectives of broadening the tax base (i.e., eliminating or curbing deductions, exclusions, and preferences) and lowering marginal income tax rates.

That approach runs contrary to modern economic theory.

Broadening the tax base today is actually complemented by raising top tax rates. With fewer opportunities for tax avoidance, more income will be subject to taxation at the top of the income distribution—unless rates are simultaneously and regressively lowered.

Critically, recent research suggests that upper-income households exhibit only modest labor supply responses to higher rates (such as working less)—roughly comparable to those of middle-income households. But upper-income households’ reported taxable income is more responsive to marginal tax rate changes than that of moderate-income households because of greater access to tax avoidance and income shifting strategies, as opposed to greater sensitivity of productive economic activity.

For upper-income households, economists Jonathan Gruber and Emmanuel Saez found that taxable income (after deductions) is much more responsive to tax rate changes than broad income (before deductions). This important finding implies that reported taxable income (hence revenue) becomes less responsive to tax rate changes when avoidance strategies are curtailed by increasing tax enforcement or eliminating deductions, exclusions, and preferential treatment of investment income over labor income. Essentially, cleaning the tax code will reduce tax avoidance, thereby increasing revenue collected from existing tax rates and the revenue-maximizing tax rate.

And top tax rates are already well below revenue-maximizing levels. Research by Saez and economist Peter Diamond suggests that revenue maximizing income tax rate is 73 percent (combining federal, state, and local taxes), implying that policymakers could raise the top statutory federal income tax rate to roughly 66 percent—more than 26 percentage points above the prevailing 39.6 percent rate—before maximizing revenue.

This research on behavioral responses is buttressed by time series analyses finding that decreases in top income tax rates have had a statistically insignificant impact on overall economic growth and its driving factors, including labor supply, labor productivity, and savings. Conversely, reductions in the top tax rate since World War II have been found to be a statistically significant driver of the rising income share accruing to the highest income 0.1 percent of households.

Put simply, if the aim of future tax reform is to broaden the tax base and generate revenue, lowering top income tax rates as the 1986 framework did would be a step in precisely the wrong direction. Doing so would also decrease the progressivity of the tax and transfer system, and likely exacerbate market-based income inequality growth.

Short of reneging on the nation’s commitments to ensuring health care for the elderly, poor, and disabled, Congress must realistically raise substantially more revenue than projected under current policy.

To do that, we don’t need a repeat of 1986-style reform any more than we need a reimplementation of Cold War foreign policy. Things have changed.

We need a context-based overhaul that eliminates some of the more regressive tax preferences (particularly the “carried interest” loophole and preferential rates on capital gains and qualified dividends) but also decelerates income inequality growth. We need tax reform that ensures revenue adequacy for the future, restores lost tax progressivity, and treats raising marginal rates and broadening the tax base as complements rather than substitutes.

The substantive rationale for federalizing Medicaid is stronger than ever, given that less than half of the states have agreed to expand the program as Obamacare envisioned to cover a large portion of currently uninsured Americans. By relying on states to administer and partially fund government coverage for low-income citizens, Medicaid has always varied enormously in its reach and effectiveness across the country, compounded by poor administration due to nebulous accountability, fragmented responsibilities, and, at best, political ambivalence. The ongoing recalcitrance of so many states even when the federal government would finance virtually all the costs of the expansion under Obamacare lays bare how deeply dysfunctional our continuing reliance on state governments remains in carrying out services for the poor.

The knottier set of questions relate to aligning the political forces that might push toward ultimate federalization of Medicaid. While that remains a long-term project, the ongoing financial pressures on state governments attributable to rising Medicaid costs make many of them a strong prospect for eventually throwing their support toward a federal takeover. Moreover, politically powerful health care providers and insurers in states resisting Obamacare are recognizing that they are missing out on federal largess that would otherwise be available to them. For now, they are putting their efforts behind pushing recalcitrant state capitals to expand Medicaid, but they may ultimately come to see that cutting the states out of the picture entirely could be more to their benefit. Finally, an organized national effort driven by groups that become disillusioned with Obamacare’s shortcomings could well coalesce around the idea of federalizing Medicaid as a more effective way of coming closer to achieving universal coverage.

There are a lot of interesting and important questions about the idea of federalizing Medicaid, which I try to wrestle with in considerable detail. But in any case it’s not too soon to think about it as part of the next phase of health care reform.

Let me just close the door so the other instructors don’t find out I’m letting you play Halo,” I joked to my Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies 100 class. I knew I was taking a risk on this teaching activity. I was worried that it would come across as a shameless, gimmicky attempt to glam up the difficult topic of intersectional oppression.

My friend and fellow WGSS 100 instructor Lauran planted the seed of the idea for this activity when she, citing my proclivity for video games, recommended that I read John Scalzi’s blog post “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is.” I liked it. The article was clear, accessible and completely on point. Scalzi’s argument is that being a straight white man is like playing a video game on easy mode: some challenges remain but the player is at an automatic advantage.

As I tried to think about how I would incorporate Scalzi’s article into a lesson on feminist theories of intersectionality, however, I realized that it couldn’t do as much work as I would need it to. Scalzi’s article is a fantastic thought experiment revolving around a brilliant metaphor. While I couldn’t fault it for its simplicity, then, I realized that I would need a more complex metaphor that could capture the way in which systems of oppression interlock and compound each other’s effects.

We highly recommend reading the rest of the piece to see how exactly Halo was demonstrated and what her students learned from the experience.

Thank you to Caroline (@dissident1L) for the nomination and pointing out a great and thought-provoking piece we probably would not have come across ourselves. TCF is now taking nominations for next week’s #TCFBest. As always, you can submit your nominations in the comments below, via the Twitter hashtag #TCFBest, on our Facebook page, or by e-mail to chang@tcf.org.

R&R’s 2010 paper, “Growth in a Time of Debt” has served as a kind of intellectual fig leaf for conservatives who proceeded to cut programs for the poor in the name of “austerity.” Their paper famously concluded that when a country’s public debt reaches 90 percent of its Gross Domestic Product, its growth becomes negative. The argument was that once debt reached such levels, governments should cut spending to decrease debt.

That advice ran contrary to perceived wisdom, which says that in times of recession, governments should spend more to stimulate the economy. Nevertheless, conservatives used R&R’s findings as justification for massive spending cuts, both in the United States and in Europe, and liberals politicians have gone along for the ride. After all, R&R had good empirical results. Who can argue with facts?

Only it turns out that the R&R’s results were based on an Excel error.

You read that right. Federal programs like Head Start have been cut and thousands of federal employees are being furloughed because two Harvard economists didn’t add correctly. (There were some other methodological issues that R&R appear to be alone in defending, but even if we grant them those methodological choices, the Excel mistake alone invalidates their findings.)

Now R&R have taken to the pages of the New York Times where they defend themselves while continuing to cling to a belief that austerity is a legitimate reaction to a recession, despite a complete lack of theoretical—and, as it turns out, empirical—evidence for doing so.

Yesterday, Century Foundation fellow Mark Thoma hosted a Twitter conversation with Century fellow and Economic Policy Institute budget analyst Andrew Fieldhouse, and Roosevelt Institute fellow Mike Konczal to explain why it’s time for R&R to stop digging. If you missed the discussion, don’t worry. We’ve collected the highlights below.

By the the way, Thoma, Fieldhouse, and Konczal all turned up on a recent list of the most influential economics bloggers around. If you’re not already following @MarkThoma, @A_Fieldhouse, and @rortybomb on Twitter, you really should be. And be sure to follow @TCFdotorg to keep getting great content from some of the brightest people on the Internet.

Just as hunger strikes at the infamous Maze Prison in Northern Ireland indelibly stained Britain’s human rights record, so Guantánamo stains America’s.”

Yesterday, Charlie Savage of the Times offered a comprehensive overview of the ongoing hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay. Currently, 97 of the 166 prisoners are refusing food, 19 are being force fed, and 5 are hospitalized. The numbers grow daily.

Carol Rosenburg of the Miami Herald offers the most consistent, commendable reporting on the deteriorating situation at Gitmo. An infographic by Rosenburg and Lazaro Gamio illustrates how the number of hunger strikers has grown rapidly since detainees were returned to solitary confinement on April 13. According to military officials, extra medical personnel will be sent to address the situation.

Detainees reportedly have grown despondent and resorted to starving themselves as a result of President Obama’s inability to close the prison. The severity of the situation has prompted Sen. Diane Feinstein (C-CA) to pen a letter to National Security Director Tom Donilon, calling on the Administration to review the status of the 86 detainees cleared for release and to restart the process of transferring them.

As the hunger strike gains more international attention, the importance of resolving this crisis becomes ever clearer. As I wrote for The Atlantic, Guantanamo Bay is often used as a propaganda tool for Al-Qaeda. As recently as April 15, the Taliban released a statement condemning the treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and drawing attention to what appears to be the indefinite detention of men who have already been cleared for release.

Abigail Grimshaw and Hannah Barley of The Century Foundation created this infographic depicting both the moral and the financial costs of Guantanamo. For those unmoved by the human rights and the national security concerns that Gitmo imposes, here is an argument that we literally can’t afford Guantanamo Bay.

Just as Obama has refrained from sending in arms to the Syrian insurgents out of an abundance of caution to make certain that they don’t fall into the hands of extremists, he owes the American people an extra duty to make extra certain that the charges of chemical use are fully proven before he acts. Even then, if it proves accurate that the Syrian regime used chemical weapons, the president has to ask several questions:

• Is it worth the risk for the United States to act in the Syrian civil war given our grave and consequential difficulties in Afghanistan and Iraq?
• Is America ready to be involved in yet another major conflict in the Middle East?
• Would it be better to denounce the use of these malignant devices and demand further UN action?
• Or should the United States (or the UN?) impose more onerous sanctions on Syria?

A president has a right to change his position on a matter like this given the awful consequences of intervention.

It is because of this well documented taboo and the Chemical Weapons Convention that the United States government has said that it “will not tolerate” any deployment of chemical weapons in the Syrian conflict.

But beyond moral revulsion, what will it mean not to tolerate the use of chemical weapons? What if clear and convincing evidence is presented that Bashar al-Assad has used nerve gas or some other chemical weapon against his citizens? What is the White House to do differently—and why, ultimately, should this particular method of mass murder rise to a new level than the workaday means (mortar shells, bullets, rockets, bombs) employed until now to kill upwards of 70,000 people in Syria?

There’s an argument to be made that chemical weapons are potentially so lethal, and so easy to spread, that states must establish a strong deterrent to their use. But that thinking doesn’t really hold up. Iraq used chemical weapons against its own citizens in the 1980s with support from the US government, which tried to blame Iran for the battlefield use of toxins. In that case, chemical weapons were just one atrocity among many in an eight-year conflict, and the world didn’t see a spate of nerve gas attacks by stateless militants.

In Syria today, the White House must decide whether to invest more resources in the conflict. Already, the US is arming and funding the rebel factions that it finds most palatable. It has held back from doing more because of the plethora of Islamist extremists in the opposition and because of the uncertainty of what would follow in the event of a state collapse in Syria. If in fact the Syrian regime is using chemical weapons, there would be more urgency to resolving the question of whether the US should do more.

But the basic calculus won’t change.

The United States wants to see a stable Syria, which is unlikely to happen any time soon, and unlikely to happen at all so long as Bashar al-Assad is in power. So far, there is no clear alternative. On one side, a bankrupt family regime; on the other, a splintered opposition with no unified leadership, no clear plan for after Assad, an Islamist flavor and a major streak of jihadi extremism.

The United States and the other foreign sponsors of the opposition have funneled money and weapons to their preferred groups, hoping that incremental and indirect intervention will mould the opposition into a more coherent structure. This might or might not happen, but until a viable leadership actually controls a sizeable portion of the rebels, outside powers—including the United States—are unlikely to escalate their involvement. This constraint holds whether or not the regime is using chemical weapons (and whether or not, as many allege, some factions of the opposition are also committing war crimes).

Confirmed chemical weapons use will surely create a public outcry and intensify the moral case for intervention, and the ensuing pressure will surely affect the White House calculus. But it’s unlikely on its own to make the United States go to war in Syria, or propel a coalition like the one that intervened in Libya. That kind of game-changing development will require a real shift in the structure of the opposition.

Greater crimes by the regime—be it use of chemical weapons, or ever more prolific massacres—could galvanize such changes. But misbehavior or crimes committed by some rebel factions could well cancel out any momentum to get involved.

The latest evidence is worrisome indeed. But it doesn’t yet open the way for an international intervention.

Century Foundation fellow Thanassis Cambanis writes on foreign policy from Beirut. His recent Boston Globe column suggested that it might be in the best interest of the U.S. to let Syria fight on. Last month, he was part of a Century Foundation-sponsored panel that asked whether the United States was out of options in Syria.

Download the first chapter of Beyond the Education Wars for free.

On April 24, The Century Foundation convened a panel discussion on the book that included AFT President Randi Weingarten, former Massachusetts Education Secretary Paul Reville, NEA Foundation President Harriet Sanford, and New American Foundation fellow and author Dana Goldstein.

Both the book and event focused on mounting research showing that the most successful schools in the United States have pursued intensively collaborative strategies in which:

1. school administrators work closely with teachers to develop curricula, choose instructional and assessment materials, and employ research-supported pedagogical approaches;
2. teachers devote substantial time sharing ideas with each other for continually improving their classroom effectiveness;
3. administrators and teachers closely monitor test results to diagnose difficulties students are having so they can receive additional support; and
4. school personnel engage in extensive outreach with parents and community support groups.

You can view the entire event below.

All of these practices, which have proven to be effective in low-income school districts like Cincinnati and Union City, New Jersey, as well as many schools across the country identified by research, deviate from the norm in U.S. public schools, which still generally adheres to the outdated hierarchical model that has held back American public education. By exacerbating that top-down approach, the kinds of reforms that have dominated in recent years have actually made it more difficult to pursue the collaborative practices that have proven to be more effective.

How can a truce be declared in the unproductive education wars and followed by an entirely new approach drawing from extensive research? My book and the discussion of it provide some ideas.

In 2012, Americans enjoyed the lowest tax burdents as a share of our national economy of any developed country in the world, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (or OECD).

Yet despite our having lower tax burdens than other developed countries, Americans feel considerable tax pain. I explore three reasons for this paradox in my post.

But I’m not here to rehash that argument. Instead, I want to address a criticism that arises in the very first comment to my post. (And, yes, I do realize that as a general rule, reading comments is an excellent way to spoil one’s dinner. But bear with me. This is important.)

Everyone else gets free healthcare. We, as a nation, spend nearly $3 trillion on healthcare, nearly 2/3’s privately. Kind of like comparing apples to rocks.

This comment is interesting because it asserts as an obvious truth a claim that actually is much more complex, in ways that go directly to my points about tax expenditures and our confusion about the goods and services we get from  government.

The first answer, of course, is that this comment is beside the point (or “orthogonal,” in academic speak), since it doesn’t address the tax paradox of why people feel so much tax pain, as opposed to feeling generally budget constrained.

But the more interesting point is that this comment to my mind lies at the heart of President Obama’s original failure in selling the Affordable Care Act to Americans. In fact the federal government spends close to $300 billion/year through tax expenditures alone to subsidize health care costs. (“Tax expenditures” is budget-speak for government spending programs that are baked into the tax code, and are therefore visible only as reduced tax collections.) The biggest tax expenditure is the fact that employees are not required to treat the health insurance premiums that their employers pay on their behalf as taxable income.

Some commenters like to pretend that the concept of a tax expenditure (for example, the deductibility of home mortgage interest expense) is just a rhetorical device, because there somehow is a difference between “keeping what’s mine” and instead paying extra tax and getting an equivalent subsidy. If there is such a difference, it’s not visible in your checkbook balance. More generally, the reason that the tax law allows some taxpayers sometimes to “keep what’s theirs” (through a deduction for a personal expense, for example) is that the tax law requires other taxpayers to fund the missing tax revenues. So if you keep what’s yours, it’s because I am paying for you to be able to do so!

And of course the “keeping what’s mine” meme falls completely on its face when it comes to the fact that the federal government subsidizes every employer sponsored health insurance program in the country.

Imagine a world in which cash salary is taxable income, but free TVs from an employer are tax exempt. Most of us would ask for the biggest TV we could fit into our houses, even if the employer reduced our cash salaries by the cost of the TVs, because there’s no tax cost to us in getting TVs. Meanwhile, those of us not working at employers with free TV bonus programs would be left to pay the bill in the form of more taxes.

That’s what happens with health insurance today. We implicitly demand really big “free” employer sponsored health plans, because in fact that is cheaper after-tax than getting equivalent cash compensation and then going out to buy a policy. Those of us not covered by such programs pay the taxes for those getting the hidden government subsidy.

And of course there’s also plenty of direct government spending on programs like Medicare and Medicaid, which are heavily subsidized. It is well-known, for example, that the average Medicare recipient today will receive benefits that are a multiple of what she could expect were Medicare actually run on an actuarially fair basis. We all subsidize the program through the regular taxes we pay that make up the shortfall.

The result is that, even leaving aside the new programs in the Affordable Care Act, almost every American with health insurance of some kind is receiving either a federal tax subsidy or direct subsidized federal health insurance, yet most Americans have not internalized this fact.

I recently testified before the United States Senate Budget Committee that the United States is the most profligate per capita health care spender in the world, but that our outcomes do not reflect this.

If we in fact reduced our health care spending for each American to what the second-highest country (Norway) spends on each of its citizens (including both public and private spending), we would save $880 billion per year! Even more remarkably, our government spending on health care by itself (including tax expenditure spending) is only slightly below what Norway spends for its entire universal health care system.

There must be a better way. . . . 

[Dube] confirms what seems to be the common ground of everyone in this debate, namely that there's a statistical correlation between high debt:GDP ratios and slow GDP growth. But is that because a high ratio causes a low denominator, or because a low denominator causes a high ratio? The theoretical argument for the latter is strong whereas the former causal interpretation relied on some kind of unknown dark matter.

In the post, Dube says:

While it is difficult to ascertain causality from plots like this, we can leverage the time pattern of changes to gain some insight. Here is a simple question: does a high debt-to-GDP ratio better predict future growth rates, or past ones?  If the former is true, it would be consistent with the argument that higher debt levels cause growth to fall. On the other hand, if higher debt "predicts" past growth, that is a signature of reverse causality.

We encourage you to read the rest of the post here and see the related graphs.  Thank you to Labor Economist Mark Price (@price_laborecon) for the nomination.

TCF is now taking nominations for next week’s #TCFBest. As always, you can submit your nominations in the comments below, via the Twitter hashtag #TCFBest, on our Facebook page, or by email to chang@tcf.org.

The piece, “Another Desperate Attempt to Fix America’s Schools,” by Christina Couch, begins by neutrally describing the efforts of school districts and charter schools to reduce concentrations of school poverty but then quickly morphs into a charged critique of the practice.

I have long been a supporter of economic integration programs, having written a 2001 book for Brookings Press called All Together Now: Creating Middle-Class Schools through Public School Choice, which concluded that the benefits of such programs far outweigh the costs. So I was taken aback when the article implied I was a critic of such plans in Wake County, North Carolina, and La Crosse, Wisconsin.

The article goes downhill from there. In reviewing the research on the effectiveness of efforts to give low-income students a chance to live in middle-class neighborhoods and attend middle-class schools, the article cites powerful studies in support and then balances that with a study of Moving to Opportunity, a federal program which showed few student achievement benefits. To the casual reader, this discussion of conflicting studies looks like a fair review of the research, but the article neglects to note that in the Moving to Opportunity program, the control group attended schools that were 74 percent low-income, but the treatment group attended schools that were 68 percent low-income, not much better.

Worst of all, the article gives the final four paragraphs to conservative critic Abigail Thernstrom, who trots out a series of misleading statements that go completely un-rebutted. Among them,

Thernstrom argues that economic integration policies aren’t possible in areas like Washington D.C. that have high concentrations of high-poverty schools.

This would be a surprise to the many charter schools in Washington, D.C.—such as Capital City and E.L. Haynes—that consciously try to bring together a socioeconomically diverse set of students to enhance the learning of all. It would also be surprising to the Chicago Public Schools, which are 85 percent low-income, yet are integrating a subset of magnet and selective enrollment schools by socioeconomic status. 

“It’s awful to say ‘we don’t know what to do with these kids so we’ve got to move them out of the school they’re in.’ Why can’t they fix the schools? There are plenty of examples of high-poverty schools that are superb.” [Thernstrom] says.

Thernstrom is correct that there are examples of high-poverty schools that produce positive results, but suggesting there are “plenty” of them is pushing it. Many, such as the KIPP charter schools, rely on self-selection and high rates of attrition. (The one time KIPP tried to take over a regular high-poverty public school in Denver, it failed.)  And while there are terrific examples of regular public high-poverty schools that are beating the odds, researcher Douglas Harris of Tulane University has found that middle-class schools are 22 times as likely to be high-performing as high-poverty schools. Middle-class schools typically enjoy more positive peer environments, more actively engaged parental groups, and stronger teachers than high-poverty schools, which is why 80 school districts now try to give low-income students greater access to them. 

Instead of shifting student demographics between schools, Thernstrom says that the education system would benefit far more from policies that help recruit higher equality instructors in high-poverty schools. . . . “Moving kids around has nothing to do with education,” she says, “Good teachers have a lot to do with education.”

Thernstrom is right that teachers are very important, but extensive research finds it is extremely hard to recruit and retain them in high-poverty schools.  Polls find that teachers care less about salary than working conditions—being in places where they can focus on teaching, not discipline issues, and where parents help volunteer in class—so it’s not surprising that efforts to connect great teachers to high-poverty schools through financial incentives often fail. According to a study by Stanford’s Eric Hanushek and colleagues, many teachers would have to be paid a premium on the order of 43 percent to stay in high-poverty schools. (Figure 4).

Socioeconomic integration is proven strategy whose benefits far outweigh the costs. But you wouldn’t know that by reading the article in the Fiscal Times. 

Despite broad support from the American public, the bipartisan Manchin-Toomey amendment to extend background checks died in the Senate yesterday, six 'ayes' short of the 60 votes needed to overcome a Republican filibuster. But party divisions were only one reason why the gun vote failed. More important was the institutional structure of the Senate itself, which by its very design (two senators per state) gives disproportionate representation and political power to small populations in large, rural states.

If you readjust the map of the United States to reflect states' actual populations, it becomes clearer that gun control legislation was defeated not only by a minority of senators, but also by an undemocratic minority of Americans.

"Of the senators from the 25 largest states, the Manchin-Toomey legislation received 33 aye votes and 17 nay votes — an almost 2:1 margin," notes Wonkblog's Ezra Klein. "But of the senators from the 25 smallest states, it received only 21 aye votes and 29 nay votes."

It’s typical to say that this is how the Senate’s always been. It’s also wrong. The filibuster didn’t emerge until decades after the first congress, and its constant use is a thoroughly modern development.

As for the small state bias, that, too, has changed over time. During the first Congress, Virginia, the largest state, was roughly 12 times the size of Delaware, which was, at the time, the smallest state. Today, California is 66 times the size of Wyoming. That makes the Senate five times less proportionate today than it was at the founding.

Jonathan Cohn and Eric Kingsbury, writing at the New Republic, were also struck by how little the Senate vote reflected public polling, which in previous weeks showed as many as 90 percent of Americans support background checks:

If you assume, for sake of argument, each senator represents half of his or her state’s population, then senators voting for the bill represented about 194 million people, while the senators voting against the bill represented about 118 million people. That’s getting close to a two-thirds majority in favor of the measure.

In a legislative body that didn’t give sparsely populated rural states the same representation as densely populated urban ones—and in which a minority of representatives lacked the power to block debate indefinitely—those kinds of numbers would be more than enough to pass something like the background check proposal.

This sort of political calculus is complicated, of course, by the influence of the National Rifle Association, which spent about $7.5 million on outside campaign spending during the 2012 election cycle — 99.6 percent of which went towards either supporting Republican candidates or defeating Democrats. That's in addition to the $3 million the NRA paid to flood Congress with gun rights lobbyists.

Unfortunately, money is speech in Washington as elsewhere in the United States, and the NRA is a particularly loud voice — despite representing only about one percent of Americans. For many of the senators facing tough re-election campaigns in 2014, that alone was enough. 

Unfortunately, a new analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York seems to confirm that rising student debt has already begun to weigh on economic growth, as student borrowing crowds out auto and mortgage lending and delinquency rates rise. 

Here's what's happening. Traditionally, people with a history of student debt have higher rates of homeownership than people without student debt, since student debt holders have, on average, a higher level of both education and income. That trend held among thirty-year-olds (the median age for first-time homeowners) until 2009, when the proportion of borrowers with home-secured debt (a good proxy for homeownership) began to plummet. By 2012, there were fewer homeowners with student loan debt than those without, a major reversal from previous years and clear evidence that, for many would-be homeowners, their student loan burden now outweighs the educational benefits.

The same trend is clear among borrowers with auto debt. Before the recession, 25-year-old car owners with student loans outnumbered those without loans by nearly 15 percent – once again, a reflection of the fact that student debtors tend to be better educated and have higher incomes. But in the aftermath of the financial crisis, car ownership among Millennials with student loans dropped dramatically, falling for the first time below those without loans. 

So what changed in the last few years to cause borrowers with student debt to abandon car purchases and home mortgages? Economists Meta Brown and Sydnee Caldwell, the co-authors of the Fed report, offer two explanations.

First, a weak labor market forced college graduates to lower their expectations for their future incomes. Those with loan payments had to cut back even further, lowering their consumption and debt levels in response to the dismal economy.

Second, banks tightened their lending standards in the wake of the recession, making it particularly difficult for people with outstanding debts to get access to additional credit. At the same time, the number of borrowers behind on their student loan payments increased substantially—from around 8 percent in 2010 to nearly 12 percent last quarter—even as other consumers have found their economic footing. That's a worse repayment rate than credit cards.

The result has been a startling divergence in the credit scores of young people with and without student loans, reflecting lenders' growing suspicion of borrowers' student debt levels since the recession.

"Both these factors—lowered expectations of future earnings and more limited access to credit—may have broad implications for the ongoing recovery of the housing and vehicle markets, and of U.S. consumer spending more generally," Brown and Caldwell write. "While highly skilled young workers have traditionally provided a vital influx of new, affluent consumers to U.S. housing and auto markets, unprecedented student debt may dampen their influence in today’s marketplace."

Conclusions like that should trouble Republicans as much as Democrats. If student loan delinquency grows more common as the rest of the economy recovers, rising student debt levels could presage a broader generational shift in Millennials' consumer behavior, in which later-in-life car purchases and household formation—including delaying marriage and having children—become the norm. 

In a 5–4 opinion, the conservatives on the Court held that a nurse who was required to work through her lunch hour without pay could not continue her case against Genesis Healthcare Corp. The Court’s reasoning is that because the lead plantiff failed to accept—or even respond to—a $7,500 offer from her employer that restored the full amount she was individually owed, she vacated her claim against the company.

Workers’ rights advocates fear that the case, Genesis Healthcare Corp. v. Symczyk, could serve as a roadmap for employers to “pick off” named plaintiffs in wage theft cases and thereby stop collective actions from forming. The Court’s four liberal justices argue in a powerful dissent that the case involves such a remote possibility, readers should “feel free to relegate the majority’s decision to the furthest reaches of your mind.”

The irreconcilable views on the meaning of Genesis Healthcare stem from the fact that the case really had two questions.

1. Was the nurse’s individual case moot when she rejected the offer made by her employer? The Constitution only permits courts to hear a case with a “controversy,” and the employer argued that when the nurse was made an offer for all of her individual damages, the controversy died. Elon University Law professor Eric Fink said this argument is absurd. “If she didn’t accept the offer, then there’s still something for the courts to decide.” Instead, he sees this as the Supreme Court’s growing animosity toward collective and class actions.
2. If the individual’s case is moot, can the collective action proceed according to the court’s “relation back” doctrine? This is the more technical of the two issues. The “relation back” doctrine is a legal fiction that allows a court to pretend that the collective action was brought when the individual action was still alive.

The lower courts in this case said yes to the first question. Circuit courts have split on this question, and presumably the Supreme Court accepted the case to resolve that split. However, in a bizarre move based on hyper-technicalities, the Court decided to accept the answer to the first question (that the individual case was moot) and only answer the second question.

In a dissent that calls to mind Justice Scalia’s most pointed writings, Justice Kagan writing for the four liberal justices, effectively refers to the majority’s opinion as a thought experiment. And there is a nerdy form of irony in the fact that a thought experiment would not be a “controversy” that the court could consider. Furthermore, in the moments when she corrects the majority’s premises by explaining that even a first year law student would not make such basic mistakes, she makes clear that it is not even a well-constructed thought experiment. Therefore, the dissent argues, this issue should not have arisen in this case, and it is impossible that it will ever arise in the future.

Despite these reassurances, workers rights advocates are worried. Professor Fink questioned the dissent’s characterization of this case as “the most one-off of one-offs,” saying that “if you accept the majority’s incorrect premise about mootness, then the rest is logically correct. And a number of circuits accept the court’s premise on mootness.”

The practical effect of Genesis Healthcare is uncertain. Professor Janice Fine of Rutgers fears that the decision will have a significant impact on workers abilities to vindicate their rights. Says Fine:

In a period when collective bargaining is in decline and there is an increase of contingent forms of employment, wage and hour claims have become more important than ever.

Fine, who has written extensively about the growing number of workers centers, refers to wage and hour cases as part of the “bread and butter strategy of workers centers.” Many workers centers follow a unique strategy that uses wage and hour cases as part of pressure campaigns to secure rights and make whole workers who are often low wage and not unionized. Wage and hour cases can be combined with organizing, boycotts, and community action to place pressure on employers to reach a settlement with the workers.

Professor Fine says that Genesis Healthcare may affect what have proven to be successful strategies by many workers centers across the country.

Wage and hour claims are important tools in the toolbox for workers centers. They are an important strategy in winning improvements, making employers accountable, and in showing that workers centers are representatives of many low wage workers . . . kicking out this leg is really problematic.

Business groups are already salivating at what they see as a significant shifting of the balance of power away from workers. As Lyle Denniston noted in SCOTUSblog, the conservative National Federation of Independent Business issued a statement shortly after the decision was released stating that the case

has significant implications for small-business owners, who are disproportionately impacted by costly wage and hour lawsuits. . . . The ruling today is a victory for small businesses because it will make it easier to stop frivolous lawsuits before they become multi-million-dollar affairs.

According to Professor Fink, “this case has created an interesting game of chicken,” where employers may rush to make offers that expire quickly to weed out plaintiffs before they can build out a class. By doing so, individual workers would be in the untenable position of accepting the offer and making their collective action moot or rejecting the offer and making their collective action moot.

Professor Fine said that she’d prefer not to wait to see if Genesis Healthcare has the effects of hurting workers’ collective action, and suggested that Congress act. “There is a Hoffman fix in the Senate immigration bill,” she said referring to Hoffman Plastics, the 2002 Supreme Court case that held that the National Labor Relations Board lacked authority to order back pay to undocumented workers who fired on the basis of union activities. “Perhaps Congress can also fix this case in the immigration bill.”

And during the “fiscal cliff” policy debates, some conservatives (wrongly) warned that full expiration of the Bush tax cuts would push the economy back into recession. Neither event occurred, but enough other fiscal retrenchment is slated for 2013 that the labor market will likely experience renewed deterioration—in large part because the expiring two-percentage-point Social Security payroll tax cut went ignored during the policy debate.

So with tax day upon us, here’s a brief overview of the budgetary and economic impacts of tax changes for 2013. Notably, the relatively well targeted payroll tax cut’s expiration is the tax change overwhelmingly felt by the vast majority of households, whereas other tax changes were rather progressively targeted. Correspondingly, the expiration of the payroll tax cut will exert a fairly sizable drag on economic growth in 2013, whereas tax changes more targeted to upper-income households pose only about one-fifth as much of a drag per dollar.

The American Taxpayer Relief Act (ATRA) ended the Bush-era income tax rate cuts for households with annual taxable income over $400,000 ($450,000 for joint filers), raised the top statutory capital gains and dividends rates to 20 percent for households above this threshold, and reinstated the personal exemption phase-out and the limitation on itemized deductions for households with annual adjusted gross income above $250,000 ($300,000 for joint filers). Below these cutoffs, ATRA permanently extended the Bush-era tax cuts. Additionally, the Alternative Minimum Tax parameters were permanently indexed to inflation and the top estate tax rate was slightly increased from 35 percent to 40 percent. Ignoring estate tax changes, the ATRA ended 73 percent of the “upper-income” Bush tax cuts, as defined by the Obama administration. Overall, the deal raised $617 billion over fiscal 2013-2022 relative to current policy, locking in 83 percent of the $3.7 trillion revenue loss from full continuation of the Bush-era tax cuts and recent estate tax cuts.

So almost every household kept their full benefit from the Bush tax cuts, but many households never received much benefit in the first place, because the Bush tax cuts were heavily skewed toward the very top of the income distribution. The top 1.0 percent of household by income received 38 percent of their total benefit in 2010, more than the lower earning 80 percent of households’ combined share.

Several tax changes targeted toward upper-income households enacted as part of the Affordable Care Act also took effect in 2013. Most notable are a 0.9 percent surcharge on earned income and a 3.8 percent surcharge on investment income for households with taxable income and adjusted gross income, respectively, above $200,000 ($250,000 for joint filers). Additionally, the bill raised the floor deductibility of medical expenses from 7.5 percent to 10 percent of AGI (affecting only the roughly one-third of households itemizing deductions) and limited health flexible spending arrangements in cafeteria plans.

Relative to a baseline of zero tax increases—meaning full continuation of the Bush-era tax cuts, AMT patch, payroll tax cut, and routinely renewed business tax provisions, as well as preventing new taxes from the ACA taking effect—the average household saw a $1,273 (9.5 percent) tax increase in 2013, according to distributional analysis by the Tax Policy Center. Households earning less than $200,000 annually (95.7 percent of households) paid over 50 percent of the share of the net tax increase despite being totally unaffected by the partial expiration of the upper-income Bush tax cuts and largely unaffected by the new ACA taxes.

That’s because roughly 57 percent of the total tax increase was from expiration of the payroll tax cut, which took an average of $721 out of households’ pockets, and decreased overall disposable income by roughly $114 billion. But for households earning under $200,000 annually, the expiration of the payroll tax cut accounted for over 98 percent of reduced disposable income from tax changes taking effect in 2013. As the figure below depicts, tax changes outside the payroll tax cut’s expiration were distributed quite progressively.

Unlike the Bush-era tax cuts, the payroll tax cut was designed as effective fiscal support, meant to boost consumption by households likely to quickly spend, not save, an extra dollar of disposable income. The Social Security payroll tax is a more regressive tax structure than the tiered marginal rates of the progressive individual income tax—hence cutting the payroll tax boosted more disposable income for more low- to moderate-income households than say proportional reduction in income tax rates (e.g., their share of the Bush tax cuts).

During the preceding debate over the “fiscal cliff”—government spending cuts and tax increases collectively threatening to push the economy back into recession—my colleague Josh Bivens and I estimated that the expiration of the payroll tax cut would reduce disposable income by $115 billion, slow real GDP growth by 0.9 percentage points and lower nonfarm payroll employment by nearly 1.1 million jobs. Conversely, at the time we estimated that expiration of the upper-income Bush-era tax cuts—as defined by the Obama administration—would reduce disposable income by $52 billion, but only slow real GDP growth by 0.1 percentage points and reduce employment by roughly 100,000 jobs. We estimated that the upper-income Bush tax cuts were about one-fifth as effective per dollar at supporting jobs as the payroll tax cut.

We subsequently estimated that the partial expiration of the upper-income Bush-era tax cuts will shave less than 0.1 percentage points from real GDP growth and reduce employment by roughly 80,000 jobs, relative to 2012 fiscal policy. Scaling back these tax increases will cost $344 billion over fiscal 2013-2022, relative to the administration’s previous proposal, while supporting only 20,000 jobs in 2013. Of all the policy options for supporting jobs, upper-income tax cuts most starkly fail cost-benefit analysis.

So what changed between 2012 and 2013 for middle class tax filers? Relatively well targeted fiscal stimulus was allowed to expire, while the vast majority of untargeted, regressive Bush-era tax cuts were permanently continued. And for the vast majority of households earning under $200,000 a year, falling disposable income resulting from tax changes almost entirely reflects the payroll tax cuts’ expiration, not tax increases to help finance health care reform or partial expiration of the upper-income Bush tax cuts.

The second, interrelated phenomenon has been the unprecedented surge in long-term unemployment, defined as the number of workers unemployed 27 weeks (about six months) or longer. While that number has fallen by 2 million from its 2010 peak, when 6.7 million Americans counted themselves among the long-term jobless, today's long-term unemployment rate remains higher than at any time in the past 70 years. And because the Bureau of Labor Statistics only counts as unemployed people who have "actively looked for work in the prior 4 weeks," it is safe to assume the effective long-term unemployment rate is in fact much higher, including a sizable number of discouraged workers who regularly move in and out of the statistical labor force.

Economists worry that the unprecedented elevation of the long-term unemployment rate risks becoming a structural, rather than cyclical problem. Put simply, people who are out of work six months or longer may begin to lose skills that would make them attractive to employers. So even if the jobs market improves—as it has in the last year—workers' inability to find work may itself become a factor in their unemployability.

This stigma is real, and severely damaging to the 4.6 million Americans who have been looking for work since at least October, 2012. As Matthew O'Brien reports at The Atlantic, recent research finds that employers appear to be automatically disqualifying applicants who haven't held a job in the last six months. In one study, Rand Ghayad, a visiting scholar at the Boston Federal Reserve Bank, sent out 4,800 fake résumés to 600 job openings, all with similar educational backgrounds and racially ambiguous male names. The only variables he adjusted were how long the applicant had been out of work, how often they had switched jobs, and whether they had any industry experience.

The results, illustrated in the chart below, are profoundly disturbing. Employers preferred to hire an applicant with zero industry knowledge (blue dot), provided they had been unemployed only briefly, rather than a qualified and experienced worker who had been out of work six months or longer (red dot): 

The implication, according to Ghayad's study, is that employers are using long-term unemployment itself as a proxy for employability—presumably using the applicant's previous rejections as a negative signaling mechanism from other prospective employers, or else making some kind of value judgment about their skills or work ethic.

So far, efforts to reverse this trend have yielded mixed results. Several states are considering legislation to protect the long-term unemployed from discriminatory hiring practices, like the New York City bill passed last week over Mayor Michael Bloomberg's veto. But there's little evidence that legislation alone will have much effect: Wonkblog's Brad Plumer points out that New Jersey's own anti-discrimination law has resulted in only one citation and a fine of $1,000 since it was adopted in 2011.

The Obama administration has suggested putting more money into jobs training programs, but it's unclear how effective they would be if employers are already indicating they would rather hire recently-employed but inexperienced workers over the experienced long-term unemployed. A targeted employment tax credit, another administration proposal, may have fared better, but died a quiet legislative death in 2011 as part of President Obama's failed American Jobs Act.

The last time so many Americans were unemployed for so long was the Great Depression, an economic slump that only ended with the United States' entry into WWII—a coordinated effort that included massive government spending, large-scale industrial mobilization, and the removal, through volunteering or conscription, of some 10 million working-age men from the labor force. That's not to say, as economist Paul Krugman has joked, that the U.S. economy would benefit from an intergalactic war. But it does suggest that we need a far more interventionist public policy to help the long-term unemployed find jobs. If the private sector refuses to hire millions of qualified workers, the federal government can and should act as an employer of last resort: ASCE knows we could use a few new bridges.

• Twitter user @dissidentiL submitted Cass Sunstein’s (@CassSunstein) New Republic essay explaining “Why Paternalism Is Your Friend.”  Sunstein argues that in certain kinds of cases, the government can and ought to pass regulations that push individuals to act in their own best interest. 
• WonkBlog's Dylan Matthews (@dylanmatt) asks "Why Do People Hate Deficits?" Matthews examines nine common reasons for objecting to deficits, and concludes that the case for each is probably a bit weaker than it might initially seem.
• Brendan Pastor (@brendanpastor) provides a fascinating analysis of the ways in which organized labor is contributing achieving some of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals.
• Twitter user @mccrthykrr submitted urban planning expert Anne Gadwa Nicodemus’s (@metrisarts) article, “Artists and Gentrification: Sticky Myths, Slippery Realities.” Nicodemus argues against seeing artists as “shock troops” of gentrifications and suggests including artists in more collaborative urban planning projects.

This week’s winner comes to us from Sayu Bhojwani (@SayuBhojwani) also courtesy of @mccrthykrr. Writing in Quartz, Bhojwani reflects on her early days living in New York working as a volunteer stuffing envelopes. Although Bhojwani had a master’s degree from Columbia and two years of teaching experience under her belt, she was living in New York on an expired visa. Her rise from those early days to her appointment in 2002 as New York City’s first commissioner of immigrant affairs offers a glimpse of the squandered opportunities imposed by current U.S. immigration policies.

The floor is now open for nominations for next week’s #TCFBest. As always, you can submit your nominations in the comments below, via the Twitter hashtag #TCFBest, on our Facebook page, or by email to chang@tcf.org.

Yesterday, the New York Times published an op-ed by Samir Naji al-Hasan Moqbel, a Guantanamo detainee who has been on hunger strike since February 10 and is currently being force-fed to keep him alive. As of today, 43 detainees are on hunger strike. The move to place detainees back in single cells makes it easier for guards to force feed the detainees.

Many of these detainees have been cleared for release.

Sunday’s account of al-Hasan Moqbel’s painful ordeal is probably the first many Americans have heard of the ongoing and escalating hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay. While it may be out of the minds of Americans, Gitmo often plays a prominent role in jihadist propaganda and continues to harm our national security.

Our infographic on Guantanamo Bay details the human and the fiscal costs of the facility. Last month, I explored some of the budgetary costs of continuing to run Guantanamo Bay.

Human rights groups have begun to question whether detainees should be allowed to starve themselves, but Army Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale of the Pentagon says that this would run “counter to our responsibilities under the laws of war” and “is anathema to our values as Americans.”

I believe Guantanamo Bay can be closed and that the detainees will be tried or simply released. Therefore, it is imperative that we keep these individuals alive in the most humane way possible. All efforts must be made to convince these detainees their hunger strike is unnecessary and their detention will not be indefinite. The best way to do this is to restart, in earnest, the search for locations to move these detainees. 

Tomorrow at 2 P.M., I will take to Twitter to discuss Guantanamo Bay with Colonel Morris Davis, former Chief Prosecutor at Gitmo. You can follow me (@theresepostel), Colonel Davis (@ColMorrisDavis), and our moderator (@TCFdotorg) as we discuss the ongoing hunger strike at Gitmo, the future of the facility, and the ramifications of our decisions for our national security. Follow along at #Gitmochat at 2 p.m. EDT.

Of these, the pre-compromise on Republicans’ third rail—raising new revenue—is perhaps the most perplexing, because unlike scaling back stimulus or cutting Social Security benefits it works directly against the administration’s prioritization of deficit reduction (a priority regrettably at odds with ensuring faster economic recovery). Remember that the “ten dollars in spending cuts for a dollar in revenue” formulation—an empirical policy slam-dunk for the GOP and twice as conservative as the five-to-one ratio for deficit-reduction measures enacted in the 112^th Congress—was heretical during the GOP presidential primary campaign. The political hurdle on taxes is getting Republicans to accept the first penny of revenue and buck Grover Norquist’s Taxpayer Protection Pledge. Given this, scaling back revenue proposals accomplishes nothing.

At first blush, the president’s budget doesn’t appear to have given away much on the revenue front. The OMB Summary tables show revenue averaging 19.1 percent of GDP over FY2014–2023, seemingly roughly in line with revenues at 19.2 percent of GDP over FY2013-2022 in his previous budget request (and revised to 19.1 percent in the Mid-Session Review). But it’s important to dig deeper and figure out what’s going on here.

Revenue level comparisons between budget proposals must account for shifting the budget window back a year. In the near-term, projected revenue levels will bounce back as a share of GDP with (routinely overly optimistic) projections of the economy recovering. But even at full employment, revenue will gradually rise as a share of GDP; as incomes (especially those of high earners) rise faster than inflation—the parameters of the income tax and alternative minimum tax, among others, are indexed to the consumer price index (CPI)—more taxable income shifts into higher tax brackets, what economists refer to as “bracket creep.”

But something else is at play distorting comparisons between budgets: out-year revenue levels are increasingly propped up by the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) excise tax on so-called “Cadillac” insurance plans, slated to take effect in 2018. The parameters of the excise tax are indexed to CPI + 1 percentage point. But because health care costs and insurance premiums have risen much faster than inflation, this indexation will fall well shy of health insurance premium inflation, meaning that a rapidly rising share of health insurance premiums will be subject to the tax.¹ Consequently, the excise tax is a money machine because of bracket creep on steroids—one of the factors contributing to a dramatic downward revision to public debt projections in the Congressional budget Office’s (CBO) extended current law long-term budget outlook between 2009 and 2010 (–195 percentage points of GDP in 2083). But projected revenue increases from a tax that has yet to take effect should not be used to subsidize less revenue elsewhere.

Consequently, the more informative comparison looks at revenue levels over FY2013–2022; shifting back the budget window just one year drops total revenue in the president’s budget to average 18.9 percent of GDP. My preferred comparison with the president’s fiscal 2013 budget is the CBO’s re-estimate of the president’s budget, adjusted for subsequent economic and technical revisions to revenue projections, which shows revenue averaging 19.3 percent of GDP over FY2013–2022 (down from 19.4 percent in their original March 2012 projections). Relative to this baseline, the president’s fiscal 2014 budget would collect $541 billion less over the same decade.

Much of the revenue loss relative to last year’s budget proposal is attributable to the American Taxpayer Relief Act (ATRA), better known as the lame-duck budget deal. Prior to the ATRA, ending the Bush-era income tax cuts above the Obama administration’s definition of upper-income households would have raised $823 billion over FY2013–2022. Instead of raising the top two income tax rates from 33 percent and 35 percent, ATRA added a top 39.6 percent rate at a higher income threshold, leaving a narrow 35 percent bracket as well as an untouched 33 percent bracket. Additionally, the personal exemption phase-out (PEP) and limitation on itemized deductions (Pease) were reinstated, but also at higher income levels than the Obama administration had proposed in their first four budgets. Consequently, the ATRA raised only $598 billion from raising tax rates and reinstating PEP and Pease, relative to full extension of the Bush-era tax cuts.

The budget again proposes limiting the value of numerous tax preferences for upper-income households to 28 percent, down from a filers’ top marginal tax rate; but this limit on tax expenditures raises less revenue than last year’s request because of interactions with the new ATRA tax rate structure, which is flatter further up the income distribution. The limitation would raise $455 billion over FY2013–2022, down from $574 billion over this period in the fiscal 2013 budget request.² Consequently, the president’s fiscal 2014 budget collects roughly $344 billion less from these proposals over FY2013–2022, or $309 billion less accounting for a one-year implementation delay of the 28 percent limitation.

The budget also dedicates revenue policy savings of $335 billion—mostly from international tax system reforms and business tax preferences, such as repealing fossil fuel preferences and last-in, first-out inventory accounting rules—to lowering the corporate tax rate. Net of $241 billion of new or extended tax preferences, such as extending the research and experimentation credit and increased expensing for small businesses, this would result in $95 billion of revenue diverted to reducing the top tax rate.

There are some sensible revenue increases—notably an increase in tobacco excise taxes that would raise $78 billion to fund early childhood education investments and a millionaire’s minimum tax that serves as a floor to the tax preferences afforded to capital income, better known as the “Buffett Rule.”

The other major departure from last year’s budget is the proposed change of tax code parameters’ indexation using a slower-growing “chained” price index, which will increase revenue by spurring more bracket creep. But this change also involves switching to the slower-rising “Chained CPI” for Social Security cost of living adjustments—which is not a technical improvement, but merely a poorly designed (and poorly rationalized) benefit cut.

If this switch to a chained price index is supposed to represent compromise with the GOP, it’s worth noting that supply-side high priest and GOP tax enforcer Grover Norquist declared that adopting Chained CPI for tax parameter indexation would be a violation of his Taxpayer Protection Pledge.

Bottom line: any apples-to-apples comparison with the fiscal 2013 budget reflects a substantially lower revenue target in the president’s fiscal 2014 budget. Abandoning sensible tax reforms worsens the deficit and impedes restoring revenue adequacy without teasing Republicans any closer to that first penny in revenue and bucking Mr. Norquist’s pledge. That less ambitious revenue targets are coupled with Social Security benefit cuts, deeper discretionary spending cuts, and less fiscal support is all the more troubling.

This political gambit may yet put the squeeze on Republicans to replace sequestration with more sensible deficit reduction, but it’s looking an awful lot more like a botched sac than a skewer.

1. Equivalently, the excise tax may induce workers to keep premiums low by accepting less-generous health plans. This should over time lead to higher wages compensating for lower employer-paid premiums and higher tax collections on wage incomes.

2. A small portion of this $118 billion decrease is attributable to delaying implementation one year. Cumulative revenue from the 28 percent limitation fell 14.6 percent over FY2015-2022 (years unaffected by implementation concerns); applied to FY2013-2014 receipts from the FY2013 budget requests would imply $35 billion of revenue loss from delaying implementation.

I’ve also teamed up with Century Foundation creative associates Abby Grimshaw and Hannah Barley to produce a new infographic detailing the plight of prisoners being held at Guantanamo Bay. Click the image below for the full version.

In March, I argued that given the cost of planned renovations at Guantanamo Bay, continued use of the facility is fiscally irresponsible.

You get something like this:

Harold Pollack of the New York-based Century Foundation is lauding the late British prime minister for her trailblazing response to the arrival of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s

. . . followed almost immediately by:

Of course much of the rest of Pollack’s post is ahistorical drivel in which the writer regurgitates one of the Left’s most successful lies in recent decades, to wit, that the Reagan and Bush 41 administrations did nothing to combat HIV/AIDS.

I actually followed the link. (The things I do for you.) You’ll be surprised to discover that it doesn’t at all address the criticism that Pollack offers, to wit, that Reagan rejected needle-exchange programs that would have slowed the spread of HIV; and that what would have been Reagan’s first public comments on AIDS were redacted by a young John Roberts.

My favorite part of the piece, though, is the obligatory swipe at one of our trustees, Melissa Harris-Perry, for her suggestion that raising children should be everyone's responsibility. The point there, I gather, is to establish that we really are liberals here at Century, while simultaneously fanning the flames of the latest conservative outrage. It is, however, totally irrelevant to the issue under discussion: namely, whatever her other faults, Thatcher was far better on HIV/AIDS than were her contemporaries in the American conservative movement.

Besides, it’s not like we make a secret that we’re liberals.

Equally troubling are the twenty-eight former Baucus aides currently lobbying on tax issues on Capitol Hill—more than any other current member of Congress, according to a recent New York Times exposé. "K Street is literally littered with former Baucus staffers," brags one executive who retained the services of Mary Burke Baker, a former staffer who helped pave the way for millions in corporate tax perks secured by the Senator as part of the last year's fiscal cliff deal.

"Sean Neary, spokesman for Baucus, does an able job defending his boss, offering examples of times when ex-Baucus aides lobbied for tax changes that Baucus ultimately rejected," writes Ezra Klein in an expert analysis of the ongoing controversy. "And Neary is right: Baucus doubtlessly ignores endless entreaties from former staffers and current contributors. But the point of hiring Baucus’s former aides isn’t that they can seamlessly insert any language they want into the final legislation. It’s that they have a direct line to Baucus, and to the people around Baucus, and that gives them a huge advantage."

The fact is that human beings are more likely to find arguments convincing when they’re coming from friends rather than strangers or enemies. That’s the key to most of the lobbying in Washington. It’s not about leveraging bribes so much as it’s about leveraging relationships—and that makes it harder to stamp out.

In that sense, there's nothing particularly unique about the Baucus affair. Money has always acted as a megaphone in Washington, giving outsized influence to those interests—corporate or otherwise—that can "pay to play." But it does call into question whether Congress is even capable of the real tax reform that would truly benefit the public at the expense of their political patrons.

Davidson’s reporting on Connecticut is consistent with national data. On the fourth grade National Assessment of Educational Progress in Math, low-income students in low-poverty schools are about two years ahead of low-income students stuck in high-poverty schools (see figure 2).

Skeptics point out (correctly) that the low-income children whose parents make special efforts to gain access to strong schools like those in Greenwich may be particularly motivated—a criticism that also applies to parents who apply to charter schools like KIPP. Maybe it’s something about what these parents are providing at home, not what the school is doing, that helps explain the positive results, critics suggest.

As Davidson notes, however, research that seeks to control for “self-selection” bias also finds positive results for students who attend middle-class schools. In 2010, Heather Schwartz, published a report with The Century Foundation (Housing Policy Is School Policy), finding that among low-income families randomly assigned to public housing units in Montgomery County, Maryland, those students in public housing in low-poverty neighborhoods and schools performed far better than those in higher-poverty neighborhoods and schools.

Some might think it’s unsurprising that students perform better in wealthier districts like Greenwich because such districts tend to spend more money per pupil than higher-poverty school districts do. More money, not integration, could be the answer, some might suggest. But in fact, in the Montgomery County study, students in higher poverty schools received about $2,000 more per pupil than those in the wealthier schools, and yet the advantages of middle-class schools proved more important than per-pupil expenditure. Nationally, those advantages include being around classmates who are highly engaged academically, parents who volunteer in class at high rates and excellent teachers, with high expectations. In tight fiscal times, the finding that integration matters even more than money should be something that liberals and conservatives could rally around.

Davidson cites Century Foundation research that 80 school districts pursue socioeconomic integration plans in order to give more low-income students a chance to go to middle-class schools. Moreover, as I argue in my book, All Together Now, while there is strong evidence that low-income students benefit, there is no good evidence that the achievement of middle-class students declines in majority-middle class schools that are socioeconomically integrated. And middle-class peers benefit from economic diversity in important ways that don’t always show up in test scores.

If it is possible to raise the achievement of low-income students, while enhancing the overall educational experience of middle-class pupils, shouldn’t socioeconomic integration be part of our national conversation of school reform?

It is true, by the way, that the 2016 date isn’t a new crisis. Here’s an excerpt from a 2006 report from the Social Security Administration:

This is not the first time the Disability Insurance Trust Fund has faced insolvency. As recently as the early 1990s, the DI trust fund was facing imminent insolvency and, in 1994, Congress enacted a change in the allocation of payroll taxes between the DI and OASI trust funds. The allocation of tax revenue to the DI trust fund was increased from 1.2 percent of taxable payroll to 1.8 percent. The 1995 Trustees Report estimated that, on the basis of the intermediate assumptions, the reallocation of taxes that occurred in 1994 would leave the DI trust fund solvent until 2016.

Do we need to make some changes to our disability insurance programs to guarantee future solvency? Absolutely, just as Pollack says.

Is this an unforeseen crisis driven by fraud and an overly-lax Obama Administration? Of course not.

By 1986 the Scottish Home and Health Department concluded that ‘the gravity of the problem is such that on balance the containment of the spread of the virus is a higher priority in management than the prevention of drug misuse.’ and recommended accordingly that ‘on balance, the prevention of spread should take priority over any perceived risk of increased drug use.’ This approach was strengthened by the influential UK Advisory Committee on the Misuse of Drugs asserting in 1988 that ‘the spread of HIV is a greater danger to individual and public health than drug misuse...accordingly, services that aim to minimize HIV risk behaviour by all available means should take precedence in development plans.’

Thatcher-era British policies provided a damning contrast to the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations, which disfigured their legacies by allowing HIV policy to become yet another front in the culture wars. More than 600,000 Americans have died after being diagnosed with AIDS. An unknowable number of these deaths would not have occurred had our government moved with greater speed, resources, and humanity to contain a deadly epidemic.

The HIV epidemic struck at the weakest points of American society and our political life. The centrality of homosexuality and drug use guaranteed that HIV prevention would spark bitter ideological and moral fights. Within the British system, these fights occurred in a context in which experts at the National Health Service and related public health bodies commanded real legitimacy and respect within the political process.

Things played out rather differently here. In September 1985, President Reagan prepared to make his first, very-late public comments on AIDS. Responding to unfounded fears, health authorities proposed to include the following words in his speech: “As far as our best scientists have been able to determine, AIDS virus is not spread through casual or routine contact.”

These words were never spoken. A young White House aide redacted them. This story is telling, not because that young aide—now Chief Justice of the United States—got the science wrong. It’s telling because the medical and public health consensus was casually over-ruled by a young lawyer who knew little about AIDS. Public policy is not only about making the right decision. It is also about creating the right organizational capacities and the right norms of decision-making so that judicious analysis is performed and is then given a proper hearing. That didn’t happen.

The Reagan presidency ended twenty-five years ago. That was a different time. Public attitudes have changed—not least because of what we all witnessed in the HIV epidemic itself. Maybe it’s unfair to judge American public policy of the 1980s by our values three decades later.

Still, it’s still worth remembering that one of the English-speaking world’s greatest conservative politicians faced the same crisis, at the same moment, just across the Pond. And the Iron Lady did much better.  

On our side of the Atlantic, conservatives eagerly adopted Thatcher’s tax-cutting mania, a policy that contines more than three decades later. Like their British counterparts, American conservatives argued that lower tax rates for the wealthiest will lead to greater prosperity for all.

That just isn’t true.

Enterpreneur Nick Hanauer, a venture capitalist who has founded several successful companies, said as much in a recent TED talk.

Hanauer claims that calling enterpreneurs “‘job creators’ isn’t just inaccurate; it’s disingenuous.” His bottom line: cutting taxes for the rich doesn’t create a boom in jobs, it creates a boom in wealth for the rich.

The data pretty much back up this claim. As these charts from the Congressional Budget Office show, after tax income for the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans has nearly quadrupled since 1979 (slide 5), even as average tax rates for the group have declined (slide 6).

That this tax cut mania has become such an entrenched part of conservative orthodoxy can at least partially be laid at the feet of economist Arthur Laffer.

In the 1970s, Laffer began arguing that it is possible to raise more revenue by lowering tax rates.

This counterintuitive claim grows out of an observation the government will collect no revenue of the tax rate is at either zero or 100 percent. That observation implies that government revenue can be graphed as a curve, with the revenue-maximizing rate lying somewhere upon that curve.

Conservatives have long assumed that current U.S. tax rates are somewhere on the right side of the curve, meaning that cuts in rates would pay for themselves in increased revenues.

But as my colleage Andrew Fieldhouse pointed out recently, modern economic research doesn’t back up that claim. Indeed, Fieldhouse argues in a new paper, the actual revenue-maximing top income rate is roughly 73 percent (including federal, state, and local taxes). 

Interestingly, that number isn't too far below the figure that Thatcher inherited in 1979.

• Spencer Ackerman’s (@attackerman) Wired article on the Newest U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy: Trolling looked at the State Department’s Viral Peace program, which undermines extremists by filling jihadist Internet sites with “logic, humor, satire, [and] religious arguments…to undermine and demoralize” extremists.
• Timothy Noah (@TimothyNoah1) looked at Republican attempts to revive “welfare queen” rhetoric by redefining “welfare” to include every means-tested program on the books at The New Republic.
• Writing in the Washington Post, Roosevelt Institute fellow Mike Konczal (@rortybomb) explores the possibility of a new political alliance that fuses left and right in opposition to those who use monopoly power “to extract excessive tolls, fees, and other recurrent payments from the rest of society.”

But this week’s #TCFBest winner goes to Josh Freedman’s Reuters piece on expanding Social Security coverage. In a new paper from the New America Foundation, Freedman, Michael Lind, Steven Hill, and Robert Hiltonsmith propose “increasing the public portion of the American retirement system.” Specifically, they suggest:

a two-part, or “double-decker,” plan to expand Social Security. In addition to maintaining the current Social Security program, we would add a universal flat benefit for all older Americans. This benefit could be set at a level to meet the goal of replacing 60 percent of income for a middle-income earner in combination with the existing Social Security program.

Century Foundation policy associate Ben Landy took a deeper look at this proposal, urging Democrats to push back on proposed Social Security cuts. Landy's Graph of the Day points out that Social Security is the largest source of income for 80% of retirees. 

We highly recommend reading Freedman’s the entire article.

A big thanks to @DerekTNG and @swmstn2, who both nominated this week’s winner. We want to give an equally big thank you to those of you whose nominees didn’t win this week; once again, we got to read a lot of things that we probably wouldn’t otherwise have seen.

The floor is now open for nominations for next week’s #TCFBest. As always, you can submit your nominations in the comments below, via the Twitter hashtag #TCFBest, on our Facebook page, or by email to chang@tcf.org.

Brad Plumer’s April 4 post in the Washington Post’s WonkBlog correctly points to the lack of meaningful data on the level of methane emissions from natural gas (NG) production and distribution. Methane, as all environmentalists know, while low in CO₂, is itself a powerful greenhouse gas, although a short-lived one, and purified NG is more than 90 percent methane. An academic argument has festered for several years now as to whether methane leakage is such that it undercuts NG’s claim to be a green fossil fuel—some reported levels of leakage are such to make its global warming potential worse than that of coal.

The good news is that the Environmental Defense Fund is coordinating with nine large gas producers, two universities, and two NG-fueled fleet managers to get a statistically valid read on the volume of methane emissions from the wellhead through processing and final customer application. Reports will be forthcoming this year and next. The guess here, especially given the age of much of the transport infrastructure, is that the leakage rates will be at the high end of current estimates. The cooperating companies will get no points for good behavior unless they expeditiously shut down the leaks. That’s not hard to do in principle, but it will take perseverant management, quality control, and continuous monitoring.

But the point goes far beyond methane, for the shale-based energy industry is at a crucial transitional stage. Its growth spurt has been driven primarily by entrepreneurs with limited capital who made up the rules as they went along and raced to generate product as fast as they could. They have been spectacularly successful in producing new energy at very attractive rates, but in an unusually intrusive way. Unlike conventional oil and coal, shale-based product is widely distributed and thinly concentrated. Recovering industrial-scale quantities of shale product requires venturing far beyond the places where extractive industries typically cluster. Drive through Fort Worth and environs west of the DFW airport, and you’ll see literally hundreds of mature shale wells—the rigs are long since gone—inconspicuously pumping oil and gas. One well-pipe reputedly ends underneath the 50-yard line of Texas Christian football stadium.

Continued healthy growth of the shale-based energy industry could have extremely positive economic benefits for the United States, not only shrinking energy trade deficits, but also triggering a boom in energy-intensive manufacturing, like chemicals, steel, fertilizers, and paper. The shale industry itself is a bonanza of middle-class blue-collar jobs, and the prospect of a reindustrializing America promises many more.

But to achieve that promise the industry will have to shift its business model from that of the wildcat exploration and production company to that of the high-quality manufacturer, with comprehensive quality control and reporting systems—not just for leaks, but for surface spills, water management, well casing, pre- and post-environmental status reporting, and much else. The environmental agencies and NGOs monitoring greenhouse gas emissions are just one of the audiences that the industry must come to terms with. Even more important for its continuing flourishing are the states and local communities that the industry impacts, often in quite unpleasant ways.

The best example, perhaps, is the public’s impression of the shale industry’s excessive consumption of water. In fact, a study published by Harvard University’s Kennedy school of government suggests that shale-based energy extraction uses the least water of any of the fossil fuels, and by large margins. Ethanol, a renewable biofuel, uses up to a thousand times as much.

But the industry has only itself to blame. When a new shale region is being opened, dozens of firms rush to cobble together water deals with individuals and townships, and roads soon become clogged with hundreds of 40-ton tanker trucks. Far better would be to create area water acquisition and treatment and disposal plans, with predominately pipeline transport, and a treatment facility under control of the companies, so they can track whether the waste fluids actually get there, instead of being surreptitiously dumped, as often alleged.

The industry is consolidating rapidly, as oil majors, like ExxonMobil, Shell, and Chevron take large positions, and the larger independents rack up billions in annual revenues. To keep their growth on track, they have to adopt business practices consistent with their size and the scale of their collateral social and environmental impact.

“Cultural capital” is something of a loaded term, associated with French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s deterministic view of class inequality as socially inherited and reproducible through educational advantage. But it is hard to know how else to understand the fact that, as Bloomberg’s Evan Soltas points out, a child’s likelihood of attending college today (a practical requirement for entry into the middle class) is determined more by their parents’ education level than family income.

Looking at the diagram above (adapted from Thomas Lumley, who offers a cleaned-up version of Soltas’s data), you can see how this intergenerational effect declines at higher income levels, suggesting that cost remains a major barrier to college access. Yet the difference between the two graphs is startling: poor children with a college-educated father attend college and graduate school at about the same rate as higher-income children with a high school-educated father. The effect is even more pronounced for high school graduation, where the drop-out rate surges for children of non-college-educated parents regardless of income.

This distinction is well-known among educators, who have long observed the influence of students’ family background on their future academic success. While household income is a major factor in college affordability—in particular the opportunity to graduate debt-free—children with college-educated parents are more likely to be told from a young age that higher education is expected as a kind of class imperative, sustaining an educational aristocracy as valuable as inherited wealth.

This inequality of cultural capital cannot be solved by traditional redistribution, posing a unique problem for policymakers. How can government intervene to expand opportunity and promote equal access when the data suggest elusive factors like family connections and expectations are the key to higher education? What legislation can address the fact that, as Caroline Hoxby and Christopher Avery show, talented children from poor socioeconomic backgrounds—often in rural areas where few people go to college—don’t presume to apply to full-scholarship colleges like Harvard or Yale, even when they have excelled academically in high school?

It is easy to look at these problems and write them off as a failure of personal responsibility or a lack of vision—a misconception sustained by the occasional Horatio Alger success story. But in reality, the lack of educational mobility between generations is perpetuated by a de facto policy of “separate but equal” schools for rich and poor students. Better teachers can only do so much to offset the myriad psychological and developmental costs incurred by socioeconomic segregation.  

“Poor children can learn to high levels, but they are much more likely to do so if they are surrounded by peers with big dreams,” writes Richard Kahlenberg, a Senior Fellow at The Century Foundation and an expert on education reform. They need “a community of parents who are in a position to volunteer in class and know how to hold school officials accountable and talented teachers with high expectations”—conditions that are more likely to be found in affluent schools.

As an example, Kahlenberg points to research he supervised in Montgomery County, Maryland, where low-income students and their families were randomly assigned to public housing and schools in affluent neighborhoods, controlling for the issue of self-selection by motivated parents. Surrounded by middle-class peers, the study found the relocated students “performed much higher in math than comparable students assigned to higher-poverty neighborhoods and schools—even though the latter spent $2,000 more per pupil.”
 
Reform-oriented policymakers across the country are taking note: today, 80 school districts educating 4 million students have taken up socioeconomic integration with positive results. These plans “don’t rely on compulsory-style busing like that used in the 1970s but instead on voluntary choice, and incentives like magnet schools,” says Kahlenberg. At the same time, socioeconomic integration—like class-based affirmative action at the college level—avoids the legal challenges associated with racial criteria. 

Perhaps most importantly, public policy that emphasizes educational mobility holds the potential for bipartisan support down the road. Although socioeconomic integration is an approach more commonly associated with progressive politics, social conservatives could find much to like in a policy that promotes school choice and a success-oriented educational environment as the basis for academic achievement. Instead of shaming low-income families into adopting bourgeois educational values, as Ross Douthat and Megan McArdle have suggested, socioeconomic integration would make middle-class cultural capital more widely accessible, leveling the academic playing field for all.

The early days of the Arab uprisings were uncomplicated and inspiring, as they reaffirmed many Westerners’ long-held beliefs regarding universal values, human rights, and democratization. With the fall of long-standing dictators and the spread of unrest and protest, historical parallels were quickly drawn to the transformative events of 1989, which witnessed the fall of the Communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe and the acceleration of events that soon thereafter led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The ultimate success of the Arab uprisings will depend heavily on the development of seven core areas. This post discusses the last of those seven pillars: Conditional Engagement from the U.S. Previously I’ve discussed the first four pillars, Economic Growth and Equality, Education, Security-Sector Reform, Transitional Justice, Decentralization and Regional Norms, Pluralism and provided an an introduction to the series, which offers an overview of the Arab uprising and its recent aftermath, and provides a high-level sketch of the seven pillars.

Lessons for U.S. Policy: Conditional Engagement

As the old colonial-era powers faded from the Arab world, America’s role in the region gradually but steadily increased throughout the second half of the twentieth century. U.S. strategy was driven by the region’s abundant natural resources, a commitment to Israel, and the Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union. With the collapse of communism and the rise of Islamist militancy, recent decades have seen an additional focus on terrorism that has further entangled the United States in the geopolitics of the Middle East, often in disastrous ways. The challenge now for the United States is to adopt a more balanced posture in keeping with its national interests while remaining engaged with a transforming and still-volatile region.

A first step is to properly assess U.S. interests and threats in the region, which are often exaggerated. Protecting the free flow of oil, which is not currently threatened, does not require an imperial footprint or a sprawling U.S.-underwritten regional security architecture. The outdated Carter Doctrine—the 1980 declaration that the free flow of oil from the region was of vital importance to U.S. economic and national-security interests—should be updated to more realistically reflect both interests and strategy. The United States should also be clear that Israel is no longer a besieged state fighting for its existence but the region’s unparalleled military power facing no serious threat from Arab armies. Lastly, the United States should assess accurately the threats it faces from the region. It has nothing remotely resembling a peer competitor, including Iran, a country with limited expeditionary military capacity. The terrorist threat, while persistent, is not existential and cannot serve as the unifying link of American grand strategy.

In light of this reality, the United States should seek to trim its military footprint, thereby limiting its exposure to the repressive actions of nominal allies and aligning its expenditures with actual interests. This is not to say that the United States should liquidate its positions and abandon its allies in the region. In fact, predictions of American decline in the Arab world are often rooted in a misconception of the historical role of the United States. In his description of Arab politics in the era of Gamal Abdel Nasser, Malcolm Kerr, a leading American Arabist of the day, observed, “From 1959 onwards, apart from one or two peripheral exceptions, the crucial decisions governing Arab affairs lay in Arab hands.” The United States remains the most prominent external actor in the Middle East, but it has rarely dictated political outcomes—nor will it now. Accepting these limitations is an appropriate starting point to constructing more effective strategy.

From the perspective of U.S. interests, regional stability will always predominate, and at this juncture, it is unlikely that transitioning states can adopt a retooled model of repressive stability. This narrows the options for prudent U.S. policy. In a changing Arab world, unconditional support of nominal allies will endanger the very stability that the United States prizes. As the necessity for representational politics and good governance grows, the policy dilemmas of old might begin to fade; the outmoded desire for client states might be supplanted by mature relationships with states that share important strategic interests with the United States. In this light, the ideal of democracy will likely come to be seen as a more necessary ingredient to stability and protection of American interests.

The United States must make clear to regimes that its support cannot substitute for the support of a country’s own citizens, and that the judgments of those citizens regarding their regime’s legitimacy must ultimately dictate the position of the United States. This is a critical message for America’s undemocratic allies in the region, and this conditional engagement represents the only plausible path forward for the United States.

The uneven performance of the region’s democratically elected Islamist leaders also suggests a policy approach toward states that have suppressed the forces for change—namely, encouragement of bottom-up democratization. Doing this would include taking steps such as pressing for municipal and provincial elections as a precursor to broader reforms. In pushing such a course on countries that have avoided regime change, the United States can explore anew the feasibility of more gradual reform, which has often been employed rhetorically by authoritarians to avoid actual reform. Further, an approach that seeks to impart governing responsibilities upon opposition groups will ease their potential transition to national leadership.

The United States also should not make assumptions about the inevitable role of Islamists. While they remain the most organized and potent political force in many countries in the region, the United States shouldn’t view the Arab world with an essentialist lens that sees in Islamist rule the natural equilibrium. Such an approach will alienate non-Islamist political forces and encourage the monopolization of power by Islamist groups. The emerging politics of the region are likely to be dynamic and the prevailing political order in transitioning countries will be fluid. Assuming Islamist predominance will also create a misplaced permissiveness with respect to religiously based repression. What might be termed the soft bigotry of Orientalist expectations would undermine notions of universal values and encourage an inherently unstable model of governance that will ill serve U.S. regional interests and undermine the prospects for peaceful and sustainable change.

Finally, any retooled U.S. approach to the region will require a more robust commitment to diplomacy that understands interactions with friend and foe alike less as a conferral of legitimacy and more as a means for furthering U.S. understanding and preparedness.

These course corrections by the United States would represent a welcome shift, but they will not fundamentally determine the trajectory of social and political change in the region. That can be decided only by its citizens. Prior to the uprisings, the Arab world was headed toward further stagnation and malaise. While that grim outcome is no longer certain, the region is now in the midst of a transformation that will likely require a generation’s progress before definitive judgments can be made about its success or the lack thereof.

Although structural changes like the retirement of the baby boomers account for about a third of the decline in the labor force participation rate, most people who left the workforce did so because they could not find a suitable job. In fact, for every American who found a new private sector job since 2011, another stopped looking for work entirely. So while the economy expanded by about 5.2 million jobs in the last two years (not counting the 400,000 public sector jobs that have been eliminated due to government cutbacks), some 4.7 million people left the labor force, joining the large and growing ranks of Americans who have no job but are not counted among the unemployed.

(Click here to open the full-size image in a new tab)

The early days of the Arab uprisings were uncomplicated and inspiring, as they reaffirmed many Westerners’ long-held beliefs regarding universal values, human rights, and democratization. With the fall of long-standing dictators and the spread of unrest and protest, historical parallels were quickly drawn to the transformative events of 1989, which witnessed the fall of the Communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe and the acceleration of events that soon thereafter led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The ultimate success of the Arab uprisings will depend heavily on the development of seven core areas. This post discusses the sixth of those seven pillars: pluralism. Previously I’ve discussed the first four pillars, Economic Growth and Equality, Education, Security-Sector Reform, Transitional Justice, Decentralization and Regional Norms, and provided an an introduction to the series, which offers an overview of the Arab uprising and its recent aftermath, and provides a high-level sketch of the seven pillars.

Pluralism

In an important sense, all the preceding factors depend to varying degrees on these societies becoming more pluralistic—allowing more democracy, more dissent, more breathing room for secularism. The ongoing transitions, however, have made clear that the future of open, pluralistic politics is far from assured. In fact, key political actors in the region have made it their goal to support notions of religious supremacy and to restrict rights and freedoms based on regressive interpretations of Islam and Islamic law. Coupled with the region’s zero-sum politics, the challenge of pluralism can be seen in terms of preserving space for dissenting political opinions and protecting equal citizenship for religious and ethnic minorities.

At root, much of this discussion is grounded in the approach of Islamist political parties to constitutional construction and ideas of citizenship. Tunisia’s Ennahdha party, for example, offers a more minimalist approach to Islam’s role in a constitution. Ennahdha’s leader Rached Ghannouchi has stated that his party is satisfied with the description of Tunisia in Article 1 of its old constitution as a Muslim country. In contrast, Egypt’s new constitution privileges certain forms of specialized religious discourse and establishes a constitutional order bound by religious interpretation. In this regard, religious institutions and clerics will have an active role in legislative matters and affairs of state. The implementation of Islamic law in Egypt represents a critical issue that will extend beyond the drafting and approval of constitutional frameworks. This process will represent the critical step in whether or not Egypt truly remains a “civil state” that embraces an expansive definition of citizenship and anti-majoritarian protections.

The slow glide toward repression is a key concern, as the region’s Islamist parties have a highly majoritarian definition of democratic politics. This emphasis on the mandate of the ballot box at the expense of rights protection is further aggravated by the rightward pull of more rigid Salafi political parties. In both Tunisia and Egypt, Ennahdha and the Muslim Brotherhood have been loath to alienate these actors, seeing them as both allies against non-Islamists and rivals in the electoral setting. The region’s mainline Islamists would also have to make clear that violence has no place in democratic politics. While these groups have long abandoned violence as a tool, cynically allowing other actors to intimidate and coerce political opponents will fuel cycles of violence.

With the radicalizing effects of the civil war, Syria’s post-Assad fate will be heavily influenced by how that country’s Islamists deal with their more radical brethren. If mainline Islamists refuse to distinguish their politics from those of their radical Islamist rivals, the future for pluralism is bleak and, in that postwar context, could lead to mass atrocities and revenge killings. It could also lead to Syrian soil being exploited by transnational jihadi groups with goals that extend far beyond Syria’s borders.

This potentially grim future is not limited to the fate of minority populations, but could also apply to dissent. The region’s lack of experience with practical politics, inclusion, and democratic discourse has led to a zero-sum understanding of political power and an abiding allergy to direct criticism. The difficult art of compromise is not a self-evident practice and will be dependent on robust representation of non-Islamists in elected positions, the rise of effective civil-society groups, and the slow acculturation to a more dynamic political life.

More importantly, the coming years will illustrate whether political movements grounded in Islam can govern effectively and whether their approach to governance will respect the role and rights of non-Islamists within the Arab world. To the extent that the region’s newly empowered Islamists fail at these tasks, they will stigmatize democratic politics in the Arab world and chill support for further democratization. Lastly, if these groups attempt to re-establish a form of repressive stability, the revitalized politics of the region will likely lead to further instability and violence.

Indeed, saner minds among the House Democratic caucus pushed back forcefully in defense of Social Security, including Progressive Caucus co-chair Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), who called chained CPI "a Beltway fig leaf that I will never support." But although the fiscal cliff passed without any agreement on so-called "entitlement reform," neither the president nor the Democratic leadership in Congress have rescinded their chained-CPI offer, preferring to hold the Social Security cut as a bargaining chip for next month's debt ceiling negotiations or an attempt at 1986-style tax reform.

Even as a purely political calculation, this makes no sense, as Ezra Klein and Jonathan Chait have already pointed out. But more importantly, cutting benefits completely ignores the fact that Social Security is the best functioning, lowest cost, and most secure retirement savings vehicle we've ever had. It is better funded than defined benefit pension plans, which rely problematically on either corporate benevolence or government largesse; and it avoids all of the behavioral failures that plague 401(k) plans, such as low participation rates, insufficient contributions, plan leakage, and early withdrawals.

Defined benefit pensions have all but disappeared in the private sector (and, increasingly, in the public sector) because employers don't want the unfunded liability on their books—a problem that defined contribution plans like the 401(k) "solve" by shifting all of the investment risk to the individual. When the market declines, which it inevitably does, the average retiree relies on Social Security—the one retirement vehicle that doesn't attempt to "beat the market" by betting on equities—for about two-thirds of their income. And unlike privately managed plans, which are estimated to cost Americans anywhere from $30 billion to $60 billion a year in fees, Social Security pays out more than 98 percent of its total disbursements in the form of benefit checks.  

The above graph comes from an ambitious new plan issued yesterday by the New America Foundation, which not only refuses to compromise on Social Security but actually proposes adding an additional, universal flat benefit called Social Security B, which would supplement traditional Social Security income to the tune of $11,669 per year for all elderly earners.

The details of the plan are, in a way, unimportant: there is as much chance of expanding Social Security in the current political climate as there is of passing single-payer health care. What is important is that New America is taking a stand against those elements within the Democratic party—including the president and much of the congressional leadership—that would trade Social Security benefit cuts in exchange for fleeting political capital. They join a broad coalition, spanning from the wonkish center-right (see Josh Barro's recent call to expand Social Security) to establishment figures like Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA), whose own plan would strengthen Social Security by lifting the cap on wages subject to the payroll tax, increasing benefits for lower-income households, and moving the cost-of-living adjustment to "CPI-E" (Consumer Price Index for the Elderly) so that benefits keep pace with the rising cost of medical care. 

All of these plans cost money. (NAF's proposal comes to nearly 5 percent of GDP.) But the U.S. economy won't underperform forever, and the largest demographic cohort of baby boomers have yet to pass into retirement. As Americans live longer and income inequality rises, we need to begin making smarter decisions about our social safety net, and how to best protect ourselves from poverty in old age. For voters, journalists, policymakers, and everyone else who recognizes the necessity of preserving and expanding Social Security, the time to start having that conversation is now.

But the Laffer curve is merely an economic model, one originally sketched out on a napkin. The model has zero scope for informing good public policy without rigorous, accompanying empirical research on behavioral responses to tax changes.

And modern economic research isn't on Laffer's side.

Laffer’s proposition is based on the simple observation that the government will collect zero revenue if the tax rate is at either zero or at 100 percent. A revenue maximizing rate must lie between these bounds, and the Laffer curve is typically depicted as a symmetrical, concave function between these revenueless rates (implying a revenue maximizing rate of 50 percent). In practice, invoking the Laffer curve has assumed de facto that U.S. tax rates were so high that they were on the “wrong side” of the revenue maximizing rate.

Symmetric Laffer Curve Image by Vanessaezekowitz at en.wikipedia

But after decades of tax cutting, economic research clearly suggests that top U.S. income tax rates are well shy of revenue-maximization. The top tax rate would be below the revenue maximizing rate if the Laffer curve were symmetrically distributed, but research suggests that the Laffer curve is asymmetrically distributed, with a revenue maximizing rate well above 50 percent.

Asymmetric Laffer Curve Image via Wikimedia Commons

In fact, economists Peter Diamond and Emmanuel Saez estimate that the revenue maximizing income tax rate is actually 73 percent.

Diamond and Saez base their figure on an extensive review of research on the subject, and their estimated rate combines federal, state, and local taxes. As I explain in a new paper, these estimates imply that policymakers could raise the top federal statutory income tax rate from 39.6 percent to roughly 66 percent before reaching revenue-maximization, all without unduly burdening economic growth.

That tax cuts do not pay for themselves may be news to conservative politicians, but this is hardly disputed by credible conservative economists. After Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) baselessly asserted that the Bush-era tax cuts “increased revenue, because of the vibrancy of these tax cuts,” supply-side apostate Bruce Bartlett chronicled numerous Bush administration economists flatly rejecting such “free lunch” arguments.

So policymakers invoking the Laffer curve hypothesis are truly calling for further increases in the top income tax rate—wittingly or unwittingly. There’s no free lunch to be had, but there is substantial scope for further raising top rates to increase revenue without unduly burdening economic growth.  

The early days of the Arab uprisings were uncomplicated and inspiring, as they reaffirmed many Westerners’ long-held beliefs regarding universal values, human rights, and democratization. With the fall of long-standing dictators and the spread of unrest and protest, historical parallels were quickly drawn to the transformative events of 1989, which witnessed the fall of the Communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe and the acceleration of events that soon thereafter led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The ultimate success of the Arab uprisings will depend heavily on the development of seven core areas. This post discusses the second of those seven pillars: Education. Previously I’ve discussed the first four pillars, Economic Growth and Equality, Education, Security-Sector Reform, and Transitional Justice, and provided an an introduction to the series, which offers an overview of the Arab uprising and its recent aftermath, and provides a high-level sketch of the seven pillars.

Decentralization

Autocracies are characterized by centralization—power in the hands of one oligarchy, one group, one junta, sometimes one person. Democracies are characterized by decentralization—power dispersed across different branches and levels of government, intended to give citizens and their elected representatives a bigger say.

The countries of the Middle East and North Africa lag behind the rest of the world with respect to decentralization. There are myriad historical explanations for this state of affairs, and a recent study by the World Bank pointed to the still-potent legacy of the Ottoman Empire, with its centralized approach to tax administration and the experience of decolonization in the region. Throughout the region, deconcentration is the norm, where administrative management and responsibilities are simply redistributed among different levels of the central government and geographically dispersed rather than being shared with autonomous local governments.

Decentralization should be seen as an opportunity to explore and refine development strategies, since local governments often have a clearer understanding of issues that affect them, including transportation and social services. Localized administration also reduces administrative costs and streamlines procedural requirements.

How can top-heavy regimes decentralize? Arab governments have a broad array of potential approaches. Most important are credible municipal and provincial elections, which establish greater political accountability and help to break patterns of regional neglect. True accountability in turn will depend on service provision, and devolution of authority will be necessary to create the basis for such judgments. While this will vary dramatically among and within countries, it will entail some authority to design, finance, and manage the delivery of services to constituents. This will require the delegation of some degree of financial authority to impose taxes and/or borrow funds for development and infrastructure purposes.

Regional Norms

Of course, changes for the better in any single state, no matter how dramatic, will remain precarious without strong regional norms—states adopting generally similar standards of behavior and adhering to them. The strongest states, along with stable regional organizations, must encourage reforms and new standards.

Throughout this period of regional upheaval, it has been evident that revitalized notions of collective identity and transnational ties have spurred widespread activism. Shared media space, including satellite channels and social media, has encouraged these trends and helped to regionalize the politics of protest. It has also made the behavior of autocratic rulers a subject of intense interest for Arab citizens, marking a departure from past attitudes.

This pressure has had an impact on the regional state system, where the Arab League has undertaken nontraditional interventionist steps in response to the crises in Libya and Syria. The Arab League has condemned abuse and repression within targeted member states and advocated for international intervention to precipitate regime change.

The lead role of Saudi Arabia and Qatar on these issues is representative both of the dramatic shift in the regional balance of power and the prioritization of strategic interests. However, while the motivations for regional actions are suspect based on the identity of their sponsors, these interventions nevertheless mark an important departure that will have long-term effects on regional norm-building. For a regional political order that has long been zealous in its defense of sovereignty and indifferent to human rights, these steps will likely have far-reaching unintended consequences.

The emergence of regional norms will also depend heavily on the success of the ongoing transitions and the establishment of a critical mass of democratic countries within the Arab world. It will also depend on the willingness of newly democratic states to champion human rights and encourage democratic reform beyond their borders. The emergence of such a bloc would be a boon to reformers in undemocratic states and would likely accelerate regional democratization. Similarly, it might also provide a vehicle for increased regional friction between transitioning states and states that chose a different path with respect to dissent and regional change.

Before recessing for the Christian holy days, the United Nations Security Council approved, 15-0, a resolution to attach a combat-ready "Intervention Brigade" to the existing 17,000-troop U.N. peacekeeping force in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The brigade has the mission to “carry out targeted offensive operations”—for sixty years a U.N. no-no—"with the responsibility of neutralizing armed groups" that threaten state authority in eastern Congo. The more aggressive military posture is intended to “make space for stabilization activities.”

The reasons the U.N. force has attracted such little notice are (1) this is a long-running conflict in Africa, a continent whose problems of poverty and conflict simply do not interest hard-nosed practitioners of realpolitik; and (2) the United Nations has crossed the threshold into use of force in the past, whether against Iraqi occupiers, Bosnia's Serbs, Somali pirates, Sudanese janjaweed, or Ivoirian factions.

And there is a third reason: It has served the interest of all parties to pretend, as China's ambassador Li Baodong insisted, that “deployment of this intervention brigade doesn't constitute any precedent nor does it affect the United Nations' continued adherence to the peacekeeping principles.”

Yet the addition of an intervention brigade quite clearly has moved the line—or, as British representative Mark Lyall Grant said, put the U.N. security roles into “new territory.” If it succeeds, there will surely be calls for international combat missions to “enforce peace” in other extreme cases in coming years. If the brigade is humiliatingly defeated, or cannot even be assembled, the United Nations will continue the complex peacekeeping roles in which it has specialized for the past few decades, and leave forceful interventions—should they be undertaken at all—to others.

When broad international consensus has gelled on the need to use military force to quell violence that threatens the peace of an entire region, the Security Council has since 1990 typically deputized a sheriff's posse: it authorizes concerned states to lead the charge and work out among themselves the command arrangements. The elder President Bush brilliantly assembled such a coalition to oust Iraqi forces from Kuwait, and his scrupulous adherence to the limited goals of the council authorization served to legitimize what many governments called the “subcontracting” of the Security Council's enforcement power to individual states.

But big powers aren't interested in sending their troops to Congo, and many states have soured on deputizing posses like the one that allied itself with rebels in Libya. Even in places where U.S. political interests loom large, costly quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan have made Americans very leery of unilaterally leading military engagements against purported malefactors.

President Obama drew an apt moral equivalence when he asked, “How do I weigh tens of thousands who've been killed in Syria versus the tens of thousands who are currently being killed in the Congo?” At least for a U.N. intervention brigade in the Congo, Obama was able to muster unanimous support in a Security Council that has been bitterly divided on Syria. It helped that no state, not even Rwanda, today finds any redeeming value in the latest armed groups wreaking havoc in eastern Congo and prolonging the world’s most lethal conflict in decades.

The unanimous U.N. vote masked some very real concerns that the organization will lose its global moral authority if it becomes associated with fighting wars rather than halting them. Guatemala's Gert Rosenthal voiced the worry that the United Nations could forfeit its unique role as “honest broker” between adversaries—especially when domestic armed factions are challenging a government.

Yet this is a risk he and the rest of the council were willing to take, given the fifteen-year deadly record of armed spoilers in eastern Congo. France's ambassador Gérard Araud celebrated their expected neutralization as “a step toward peace enforcement.” Britain’s Lyall Grant predicted that fusing an enforcement brigade with the larger force of lightly armed peacekeepers, together with the U.N.’s large civilian team that is working to bolster the Kinshasa government’s hollow capacities, “is the recipe for success”: “This is one Mission with one mandate, one Special Representative and one Force Commander.”

Lyall Grant’s recipe of unified international authority contrasts vividly with the stove-piped missions under fragmented authority in Bosnia, Kosovo, and (the most expensive of all) Afghanistan. If this latest U.N. mission does succeed at building a nation out of the sprawling fragments of the Congo, it will surely provide a template for dealing with other appallingly violent conflicts in the future—one that reduces dependence on U.S. military power and Washington's will to use it. In that case, we may expect new practices and institutions germinating globally to handle twenty-first century disorder.

The council resolution specifically demands progress on implementing an agreed “peace consolidation program,” as well as the Kinshasa government’s fulfillment of commitments for democratization, police and army reform, and reform of government institutions. This has been hard enough to achieve in Kabul, with vastly greater resources. If some rickety stability can take hold in Congo, it will be a welcome precedent indeed.

Oh—and just in case, the Security Council included a requirement that “the Intervention Brigade will have a clear exit strategy.” Insha'allah.

Those of us here at The Century Foundation have more than an idle interest in following the story of Mr. Selfridge. Although at TCF, we restock our shelves constantly with progressive solutions, rather than consumer goods, we also are a creation of another early twentieth century retailing genius, Edward Filene. Yes, he of the basement.

The early scenes of the PBS show suggest that behind gleaming marble counters of exotic goods customers didn’t know were essential until they laid eyes on them, there is much intrigue, ambition, and desire. Not only does it help PBS underwriters sell soap, it make sense coming from Selfridge, who wrote a book called The Romance of Commerce.

The Romance of Commerce describes what Selfridge and Filene had in common, and where they parted company. Both were scrappy entrepreneurs who had a vision for retailing and a flair for PR. Both were masters of marketing—Selfridge is credited with coining the phrases “Only ___ days until Christmas” and “The customer is always right,” while Filene deployed the talents of Edward Bernays, the so-called father of public relations, to persuade the public to action. Both Wilsonians, Bernays and Filene thought the power of persuasion was the grease of democracy.

Where Selfridge and Filene diverged was in the arena of their innovation. Filene relentlessly used his department store as a laboratory for employee empowerment. While Selfridge put the customer at the center of romantic adventure, Filene took another tack—he thought well-treated employees with a stake in a store’s fortunes were the best advertisement.

Selfridge made shopping a contact sport—for the first time in the UK, customers could examine the merchandise and spend the entire day shopping. His original Oxford Street store had ten acres of merchandise, eleven restaurants, and two exhibition halls—it was shopping as holiday.

Filene, on the other hand, experimented with labor-management cooperation, workplace democracy, the earliest company labor union, employee ownership schemes, credit unions, and paid sick days, and pioneered a system of transparent pricing (unheard of at the time) for ready-made quality women’s apparel and a scheduled series of price markdowns—the bargain basement concept by which he is most remembered today. 

The PBS series promises Jeremy Piven’s character will have his hands full with various business and romantic liaisons; Filene was married to his work. He initiated profit-sharing, health clinics, paid vacations, insurance, minimum wages for female employees, and a five-day, forty-hour work week. Rather than Selfridge’s elevation of the customer at all costs, Filene was known to say that “Good social policies are the surest way for big and continuous profits.”

Filene was disappointed when his employees (and fellow owners) lacked enthusiasm for workers owning a piece of the company. This led to a new phase in his life. Freed of management responsibilities at Filene’s, he eventually became the leading business advocate in support of the New Deal and of FDR’s presidency. A lifelong Republican, Filene established TCF to undertake long form social science research on the problems of democracy and prosperity. A source of ideas that ranged from the brilliant to the highly unconventional, he was notably not the least bit nostalgic about last year’s solution to last year’s problem. His life will probably never be the grist for a public television soap opera, but the ideas he helped underwrite are far more enduring.

Recent trends give us the first part of the explanation. Yes, as Paletta and Porter note, the economy is recovering and the unemployment rate is falling. But, as they recognize, the poverty rate is also rising. And therein lies the rub: people are getting jobs but staying poor. The available jobs are increasingly low-wage and don’t pay enough to live off of. And the big profits in the private sector haven’t led to an increase in wages.

She also cite’s TCF Fellow Harold Pollack who has stated that the NPR piece is misleading. He explains the economic factors that may make disability the only way for some Americans to get compensation:

To qualify for disability, an applicant must have, as Center on Budget and Policy Priorities puts it, “little or no income and few assets”—which means that if unemployment and poverty rise, more people will fit this description. As Harold Pollack points out, “If you have a bad back, and the only jobs available are manual labor, that’s a real limitation. You’re unable to work. So it very much matters that we’re in a deep recession and a lot of the opportunities people faced are limited.”

You can read more of Pollack’s take here.

We highly recommend that you go read the entire piece in The Nation.

Thank you to everyone who sent in nominations.  If your pick didn’t win this week, don’t worry. Nominations are now open for next week’s #TCFBest. Submit your nominations in the comments below, on our Facebook page, email us at chang@tcf.org, or on Twitter using #TCFBest.

One other example that shouldn’t be forgotten is the case of Cleveland, which began implementing a voucher program in 1996. Researchers at Indiana University’s Center for Evaluation and Education Policy tracked the scores of students who began first grade in the 1998–9 school year through their sixth-grade school year in 2003–4, comparing the performance of students who attended private schools using vouchers with students who remained in the public schools.

The study, which was published in 2006, found that by the end of the sixth grade, after controlling for differences in minority status, student mobility, and prior achievement, there were no statistically significant differences in overall achievement scores between students who used a scholarship throughout their academic career (i.e., kindergarten through sixth grade) and students in the two public school comparison groups (one that applied for but did not receive vouchers and another consisting of non-applicants).

Back in 2008, I wrote a Washington Monthly article about school vouchers, “An Idea Whose Time Has Gone,” which focused on the poor performance in practice of vouchers plans and the disillusionment of some formerly supportive conservative education experts. Then, as now, charter schools had evolved into the much more pervasive hobby horse of the right-wing. What I did not anticipate at the time was the subsequent rise of the extreme-right Tea Party movement and its state legislative lobbying machine, ALEC, which has been central to resurrecting the voucher idea. It was clearly naïve of me to think that conservatives would come around to discarding an idea just because it had been decisively proven to be ineffective.   

The cleverly titled story, “Trends with Benefits” is gracefully presented and gets some things right. It depicts with human texture some unpleasant realities facing millions of displaced workers with health difficulties whom our economy has left behind. With the exception of nutrition assistance, our safety-net has failed to keep pace with the Great Recession. Disability assistance has naturally filled the gap. SSI and SSDI expenditures have correspondingly increased. This is an important story.

Still, I fear the misimpressions this piece leaves behind. Particularly in the area of childhood disability, Joffe-Walt presents an awfully incomplete picture. Listeners are invited to conclude that many kids are brought onto SSI who really don’t need the help, that overly lax program requirements and loopholes, exploited by the “disability-industrial complex,” have produced exploding caseloads and an unsustainable budget problem.

Joffe-Walt says little about the mechanics of the eligibility determination process, or how it might be improved. She doesn’t discuss how the administrative capacities of SSI and SSDI might be bolstered to reduce errors in both directions that have large consequences for human lives.

Listeners might be surprised to discover that the final award rate for disability applications has averaged about 45 percent. Moreover, low employment rates among denied applicants suggest that disability assistance is not inducing otherwise-employable people out of the workforce. The misfortunes of people wrongly denied benefits, the problem of sick people bleeding money as the ponderous bureaucratic process moves along, the plight of disabled people stick on the Medicare waiting period—these matters were also left unexplored.

Disability programs face inherent difficulties and tensions. For starters, eligibility is a binary outcome, whereas actual disability reflects a continuous, multi-dimensional range of underlying functional limitations. When disability is the only available gateway to health coverage and needed services, this doesn’t lessen the problem.

The scale and complexity of disability policy presents further problems. With hundreds of thousands of applicants presenting with hundreds of conditions across the country, the Social Security Administration cannot run an OJ trial for every person. Since the inception of SSI and SSDI, many people have expressed precisely the worry Joffe-Walt does: that disability will become a backdoor guaranteed income program to marginally qualified applicants. Jerry Mashaw’s magisterial Bureaucratic Justice describes the rather admirable structure SSA created to address this possibility.

Eligibility determination could be tightened to better-deter fraud and to reduce the number of errors, if Congress appropriated greater funding for continuing disability reviews and other administrative capacities. Still, it’s a pretty stringent system. Despite the ministrations of what Joffe-Walt labels the “disability industrial complex,” the majority of disability applicants are actually denied. SSI and SSDI are not boondoggles.

Joffe-Walt’s depictions of welfare reform and the childhood SSI program were especially incomplete, inviting stereotypes and misinterpretation. Doing poorly in school doesn’t, by itself, get you benefits. Most kids who seek SSI benefits based on primary diagnoses of mental illness or ADHD are denied. 

Child SSI caseloads are not exploding. Nor are large numbers of single moms transitioning from traditional welfare (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, or TANF) to SSI. Planet Money included supplemental materials with additional data. Yet Joffe-Walt’s presentation remains troubling.

For example, Joffe-Walt displays a graph of the rising number of children receiving SSI over time. Out of context, it appears that the child SSI caseload has ballooned. Caseloads were tiny until the 1990 Supreme Court decision Sullivan v. Zebley overturned roadblocks in eligibility. Since then, caseloads have indeed risen.

Yet you can’t see two critical things in Planet Money’s graphs. First, readers of the fine print who click all the way through to a supplemental page will see that post-welfare-reform caseloads look more stable when graphed as a percentage of kids living in low-income families. Rising poverty rates, not lax program rules, is the critical factor.

More important, the rise in the child SSI caseloads is dwarfed by the decline in the number of children receiving cash assistance after the 1996 welfare reform. The trends look rather different when one views SSI caseloads alongside the number of kids on AFDC/TANF.

That’s obvious in the below graph I posted last year depicting the percentage of low-income kids on the two major forms of federal cash aid. Child SSI is simply a small matter when shown alongside one of the tragic policy failures of the Great Recession: TANF’s failure to remotely keep pace with macroeconomic crisis and rising child poverty. 

Joffe-Walt juxtaposes two other graphs in a way that invites trouble:

These graphs just don’t go together. They cover different populations, whose dynamics are influenced by different processes.

One might look at these pictures and conclude that there has been a big migration between the two programs. The radio episode’s account of “the disability industrial complex” was even more explicit. The program’s account of contractors such as Public Consulting Group invites listeners to conclude that states are shifting TANF recipients in large numbers to SSI or SSDI.

Some of that flow has always occurred, for the simple reason that AFDC/TANF has always included some adults who are legitimately disabled. As TANF becomes progressively lousier, states and individual recipients have obvious incentives to make the switch.

Joffe-Walt presents no numbers here. I haven’t seen evidence to support the program’s clear implication.

Between 1997 and 2003, Sheldon Danziger and colleagues tracked a cohort of Michigan welfare recipients in the Women’s Employment Study (WES). WES was designed to disproportionately sample long-term welfare recipients who experienced severe material hardships and a variety of obstacles. These women lived in a chronically-depressed area hammered by a succession of economic blows. By the end of the survey period, 37 out of 532 women ended up on SSI or SSDI. 114 others had applied for disability benefits, but were found ineligible within a supposedly lax disability system.

Especially striking was Joffe-Walt’s interview with ten-year-old SSI recipient Jahleel Duroc. The clear undertone was that this appealing, gap-toothed, and enthusiastic kid has nothing fundamentally wrong with him. I’m not sure what people expect children with serious learning delays to sound like. Many sound, well, like Jahleel Duroc. Kids with daunting mental health, behavioral, or developmental issues are often perfectly terrific and engaging in casual conversation or a short cordial interview.

As in other moments of this sometimes-moving, sometimes-misleading program, the warm humanity of its host in conversation makes it too easy to neglect other matters under the surface, and thus left unexplored. 

Brad Plumer: One of the big themes of the “This American Life” segment was that as the U.S. economy has slumped and jobs have vanished, disability insurance has essentially become the safety-net program of last resort. More people are now qualifying for disability than ever before — it now costs $260 billion per year. Is this really what the program is designed to do?

Harold Pollack: These tensions go back to the very beginning of this program. It has always been a matter of deep controversy and anxiety about how to draw the boundaries between eligibility and non-eligibility. And the worry among fiscal conservatives has always been that it would become a backstop income guarantee for people who couldn’t find a job.

If you go back to 1985 and look at Jerry Mashaw’s book “Bureaucratic Justice,” even then there’s an interesting account of how the agency has tried to deal with these problems, and how one can fairly and accurately make determinations for hundreds of thousands of applicants. It’s not feasible to stage an OJ-style trial for everyone who applies for disability, but you still want real and defensible standards for who qualifies and who doesn’t.

But the program is also a lot more stringent than that “This American Life” piece would have you believe. The fact is, the majority of applicants are denied, and there are qualified diagnoses that are very stringently applied.

BP: One thing we’ve seen is that more and more people have qualified as disabled during the recession. Some of that is simply due to the unavoidable fact that America’s getting older. But some is due to unemployment. If there are strict standards, how can that be?

HP: Disability really does need to be thought about in the context of economic opportunities. If you have a bad back, and the only jobs available are manual labor, that’s a real limitation. You’re unable to work. So it very much matters that we’re in a deep recession, and a lot of the opportunities people faced are limited.

You can’t remove the economic context from the disability conversation. I don’t know about the particular physician they discussed [in Hale Country, where one in four residents qualified for disability], that might not be totally consistent with what the program’s intended to do. But I can certainly see where he’s coming from.

Image via Shutterstock

The early days of the Arab uprisings were uncomplicated and inspiring, as they reaffirmed many Westerners’ long-held beliefs regarding universal values, human rights, and democratization. With the fall of long-standing dictators and the spread of unrest and protest, historical parallels were quickly drawn to the transformative events of 1989, which witnessed the fall of the Communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe and the acceleration of events that soon thereafter led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The ultimate success of the Arab uprisings will depend heavily on the development of seven core areas. This post discusses the second of those seven pillars: Education. Previously I’ve discussed the first three pillars, Economic Growth and Equality, Education, and Security-Sector Reform, and provided an an introduction to the series, which offers an overview of the Arab uprising and its recent aftermath, and provides a high-level sketch of the seven pillars.

Transitional Justice

Transitional justice—commonly defined as the measures employed by post-conflict and post-authoritarian states to cope with legacies of mass abuse and atrocity—has to be an integral part of efforts to consolidate change in the Arab world. Establishing a thorough accounting of past abuses would help lay the foundation for a more accountable political culture and provide a basis for credible national reconciliation.

Transitional or post-conflict justice took form as a discipline in the 1980s and 1990s with several noteworthy efforts, including the truth-and-reconciliation process in South Africa, numerous prosecutorial efforts in Latin America, and the ad hoc international tribunals to address the atrocities in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. These developments produced an emerging consensus that dealing with histories of mass atrocity, abuse, and repression was a necessary prerequisite to creating open and responsive politics and a democratic culture.

What these varied experiences have made clear is that on issues of accountability, there are no rigid formulas for success. National responses to past repression and abuse reflect each country’s particular history and context. Furthermore, the pace of such efforts shows that transitional justice is not solely a concern in the immediate post-authoritarian environment. In fact, prosecutions in Argentina arising from the “dirty war” of the 1970s are still making their way through the criminal-justice system. This stands in contrast to the more immediate nonprosecutorial efforts undertaken by South Africa to address past abuses and repression. And efforts to wholly avoid the past, as in post-Franco Spain, will not necessarily preclude successful democratic transition.

Still, compiling an unimpeachable historical record of abuse, repression, and atrocities is an important step in protecting against authoritarian relapse, particularly during turbulent and inconclusive transition periods when the allure of law and order may propel reactionary politics. These types of initiatives will also play a role in capacity building, since transitional justice involves complex legal and investigatory issues that require the devotion of resources and professionalized attention. Even in instances where transitional justice has fallen short of optimal standards, as was the case with Iraq’s efforts to prosecute Saddam Hussein and key Ba’athist leaders, the effort improved professionalism among investigators, prosecutors, judges, and forensic experts. Finally, such efforts, even if they’re imperfect, can help establish the principle of judicial independence.

Fashioning a political consensus behind transitional justice can be critical for transitioning societies. Relatedly, the facile and cynical use of transitional justice as a means to serve narrow political ends can corrupt the process and further the impression that such efforts are merely an exercise in cementing newly constructed political and social status. While the mix of methods will necessarily vary, prosecutions remain a legitimate and important, if limited, tool for holding accountable high-level actors in positions of responsibility and authority. In light of the inherent limitations of prosecutions, other forms of accountability should be encouraged, including bureaucratic vetting to ensure that those complicit with past abuse can no longer serve in government. Such processes should be tightly focused on past behavior and avoid the temptation of blanket purges based on mere association.

However, prosecutions and vetting alone cannot begin to cope with the extensive histories of abuse and criminality that the societies of the region will be forced to confront. And for this reason, other means will be necessary to establish thorough and rigorous accounts of past crimes and repression. Truth and historical commissions can play an important supplementary role, particularly in establishing the historical record. The distortion of history is an ever-present danger in the transitional setting, and fundamental reconciliation is not possible if the basic facts and history of political repression are unacknowledged by significant sectors of society.

Gellman is a critically honored author, journalist, and blogger. His professional distinctions include two Pulitzer Prizes (individual and team), the George Polk Award, and Harvard's Goldsmith Prize for investigative reporting. His bestselling book, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and was named a New York Times Best Book of 2008. His previous books include Contending with Kennan: Toward a Philosophy of American Power and a history of Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

“Bart Gellman is a respected writer, researcher, and voice on national security and foreign policy, and The Century Foundation is excited to welcome him and support his ongoing work,” said Janice Nittoli, president of The Century Foundation.

After twenty-one years at the Washington Post where he served tours as legal, military, diplomatic, and foreign correspondent, Gellman joined Time magazine in 2010 as contributing editor at large. Since 2011, he has also been a lecturer and author in residence at Princeton and a fellow at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice. Gellman graduated summa cum laude from Princeton and earned a master’s degree in politics at University College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar.

“The Century Foundation has a rich intellectual history, dating back ninety-plus years, and is an ideal home for my work,” Gellman said. “I am honored to join so many great colleagues and I look forward to helping The Century Foundation lead the conversation about our national security policies.”

At The Century Foundation, Gellman will join a distinguished foreign policy team, working alongside fellows Morton Abramowitz, Thanassis Cambanis, Michael Cohen, Michael Wahid Hanna, Patrick Radden Keefe and Stephen Schlesinger. As senior fellow, Gellman will continue work on a new book as well as publish periodic articles on security, surveillance, and civil liberties in an era of increasing monitoring by government and private interests.

Last month, The Century Foundation announced the addition of senior fellow Michael Likosky, an expert on infrastructure investment and public-private partnerships and Joe Miller who will direct digital communications and joined the foundation from a similar position at the Congressional Budget Office. A complete list of Century Foundation experts is online.

Gellman’s work is online at www.bartongellman.com and @bartongellman

The Century Foundation is @TCFdotorg For more information on The Century Foundation, visit our About Us page.

The early days of the Arab uprisings were uncomplicated and inspiring, as they reaffirmed many Westerners’ long-held beliefs regarding universal values, human rights, and democratization. With the fall of long-standing dictators and the spread of unrest and protest, historical parallels were quickly drawn to the transformative events of 1989, which witnessed the fall of the Communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe and the acceleration of events that soon thereafter led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The ultimate success of the Arab uprisings will depend heavily on the development of seven core areas. This post discusses the second of those seven pillars: Education. Previously I’ve discussed the first pillar, Economic Growth and Equality, and the second pillar, Education, and provided an an introduction to the series, which offers an overview of the Arab uprising and its recent aftermath, and provides a high-level sketch of the seven pillars.

Security-Sector Reform

One of the major drivers of popular outrage in the Arab world has been and continues to be the repressive and brutal tactics of the security sector. Yet there is a great deal of variation among the region’s security apparatuses. In Egypt and Tunisia, the armed forces have largely been focused on external security rather than repression, with such duties falling to internal security forces and mukhabarat, as the region’s intelligence services are known. This is in stark contrast to Syria, where the conscript army and elite military forces have been used to violently suppress internal dissent and armed opposition. In Libya, security-sector reform represents a unique challenge due to the proliferation of regional and independent anti-Gadhafi militias that have remained outside the scope of centralized authority. In Yemen, the balkanized security sector and its divided loyalties represent a key impediment to centralizing authority behind a reformist agenda. Other countries in the region that have not experienced regime change or transition, particularly Bahrain, have increased repression in the hopes of smothering any impetus for change.

The security sectors of the region are steeped in a brutal and corrupt culture that privileges confessions and encourages torture in the service of both maintaining regime security and policing minor crime. Those detained for petty crimes often suffer the same coercion and abuse met by citizens arrested on suspicion of oppositional activities or terrorism.

Changing the prevailing cultural norms and professional practices of sprawling security bureaucracies will take many years. The first step for any credible reform effort must be centered on vetting and removing the most corrupt officials from positions of authority. Because such steps can be destabilizing in transitioning societies, reformers may have to take a more cautious approach. In some instances (especially if retaliation is a concern), administrative reassignment might be more prudent than removing a potential offender from a sensitive position. Targeted vetting is absolutely necessary if institutional reform is to take root, as it signals intent and begins the process of establishing working norms of behavior.

Reform will also require that democratization extend to civilian control and oversight. In many countries this will necessarily be a gradual process of normalizing civil-military and civil-police relations. The early stages of transition will be critical in terms of establishing the legal frameworks governing these relationships. While no constitutional or legal order is self-executing, provisions that mandate legal and budgetary transparency are essential even if the record of compliance is incomplete for the region’s emerging democracies. In this sense, Egypt’s new constitution, which enshrines military privilege and autonomy, is a profoundly negative step that effectively places the country’s most important security institution outside civilian purview.

Training programs to increase professionalism and reform institutional culture must also be retooled and implemented, and recruitment should better reflect each society’s ethnic and sectarian composition. Additionally, establishing meritocratic promotional structures will help guard against future politicization of the security sector and decouple it from regime maintenance. Finally, monitoring and advocacy by civil society will provide a key check on abuse, and setting a durable and robust legal framework for such groups will be an important safeguard against repression.

Security-sector reform is a difficult task, but precedent for success does exist. A key example is post-apartheid South Africa, which took an ambitious, long-term approach to integrating former adversaries into the government and shrinking the size of the security sector. Similarly, the experience of post-Communist Eastern European countries is largely positive; a relapse into security-sector repression is no longer a possibility in many of these societies. The impediments to effective security-sector reform in the Arab world are numerous, but the conditions for it do exist—even, surprisingly, within the security institutions themselves, thanks to a small number of internal stakeholders who support reform as part of their efforts to professionalize their services.

The Murray budget proposes to raise an additional $923 billion in revenue over the next decade relative to current law. It also assumes that temporary tax provisions that would cost $954 billion to continue over the decade will either expire or be paid for—so against a current policy baseline in which these “tax extenders” are continued, the budget would raise $1.9 trillion.¹ Revenue increases exert an economic drag, particularly while the economy remains weak, but are much less damaging per dollar than spending cuts. The Murray budget would use these revenue increases to partially replace the front-loaded, poorly designed sequester; in that context, the tax increases would help avert near-term austerity that is much more damaging. The budget would also slightly increase government spending in 2013 and 2014 relative to current policy—which assumes the sequester is repealed—and raise tax revenues in 2014.²

On net, the Murray budget would boost GDP growth by 0.1 percent and increase employment by roughly 100,000 jobs in 2013 relative to current policy, largely on account of its replacement of the sequester and its up-front infrastructure investment. But the economic impact would flip to a net drag of 0.2 percent of GDP in 2014 and roughly 250,000 job losses would be expected relative to current policy. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) forecasts employment rising by 1.5 million jobs in 2014, so these estimates suggest that employment would rise faster in 2013 and slower in 2014 than otherwise projected over the next two years.

Critically, the Murray budget repeals sequestration, which is presupposed in the current policy baseline, but which is by no means certain. We previously estimated that sequestration would reduce growth by 0.6 percentage points and employment by 660,000 jobs in 2013, with the drag growing to 0.8 percent and 910,000 fewer jobs in 2014. So relative to a world in which sequestration remains in effect, the Murray budget would boost employment by roughly 760,000 jobs in 2013 and over 660,000 jobs in 2014.

Unsurprisingly, the Murray budget stacks up even better against the Ryan budget’s deep spending cuts. We previously estimated that the Ryan budget would decrease employment by 750,000 jobs in 2013, which is largely a consequence of Ryan’s refusal to avoid the sequestration spending cuts. As the drag from sequestration increased and more austerity was layered on top of sequestration, the drag from the Ryan budget was projected to rise above 2.0 million jobs lost in 2014. Consequently, the Murray budget would boost GDP growth by 0.7 percentage points and increase employment by 840,000 jobs in 2013 relative to the Ryan budget. In 2014, the Murray budget would boost growth by 1.5 percentage points and increase employment by nearly 1.8 million jobs relative to the Ryan budget.

There are undoubtedly positive aspects to the Murray budget, notably its replacement of sequestration with more sensible, less economically damaging policies and its reliance on tax revenue for a substantial share of its total deficit reduction. But the Murray budget would pursue additional austerity—on top of drags from the payroll tax cut’s expiration, the BCA caps, and prior discretionary spending cuts—well before the relatively optimistic projections from the CBO show the U.S. economy returning to full health. This underscores one of the main risks posed by fixation with ten-year deficit reduction targets: prudent timing of deficit reduction measures will likely take a back seat to hitting the target.

¹ Note that the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ analysis of the Murray budget is measured relative to a baseline that assumes that recent expansions of the EITC, CTC, and AOTC will be continued beyond 2017 (without being paid for) but any other continuations of the “tax extenders” will be paid for. Like CBO’s alternative fiscal scenario (AFS) current policy baseline, EPI’s current policy baseline assumes that the tax extenders are continued without being paid for.

² As in our analysis of the Ryan budget, Van Hollen budget, and CPC budget alternative, the Murray budget has been adjusted to exclude funding levels for overseas contingency operations (OCO). The current policy baseline used is CBO’s AFS baseline adjusted to exclude both OCO funding and the inflation-adjusted continuation of emergency disaster relief for Hurricane Sandy appropriated for fiscal 2013. Macroeconomic impacts from policy changes exclude associated net interest effects, and spending changes are measured in outlays as opposed to budget authority.

Our unwillingness to intervene effectively in Syria is a casualty of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For understandable (if not necessarily persuasive) reasons the Obama administration has refused to again get directly involved in a terrible conflict or even to supply arms to the opposition to hasten Assad’s departure (but rather contradictorily encourage and facilitate regional countries doing so). Regrettably, for the first time in dealing with a truly major humanitarian disaster, the U.S. is not doing much. It is not even leading from behind.

The Syrian humanitarian situation worsens daily. It is also gradually destabilizing the region. The total displaced Syrian population, internally and externally, now exceeds the numbers in Darfur, where the displaced two million or so were at least in much warmer weather and more easily managed by the foreign humanitarian community.

While making such a comparison is painful, the more than two million displaced within Syria are all over the country, often in terrible circumstances, particularly with the present cold weather. They eke out survival with limited help from foreign humanitarian agencies. Their future looks abysmal.

Another group of more than one million has been successful in getting out, mostly to neighboring Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan, as well as to Egypt, Iraq and places that are even more distant. The refugees are not only Syrians of all stripes, but also thousands of Iraqis, whose lot seems to be constant displacement. Displaced for even longer are many thousands of Palestinians who had lived in Syria for decades.

The vast Syrian humanitarian debacle has spread its tentacles across the region. Turkey has handled Syrian refugees very well indeed. It is very costly—an estimated six hundred million dollars so far—but the Turkish government has the resources and manpower to manage the increasing flow. (But much greater numbers will be both politically and economically costly for the Erdogan government.) The refugee situation is more difficult in the other major receiving countries (Jordan and Lebanon) and they need far more funds to manage the continuing exodus. The stability of these two countries is now under even greater strain, although other factors also contribute.

The most immediate problem is money—lots more to care for the increasing flow of internally displaced and refugees. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees told me he needs another $300 million to take care of the expected problem through June. But other UN humanitarian agencies dealing with the Syrian problem also need significant amounts of money to continue their activities. At a rather underreported international pledging conference in Kuwait in January, with few very high-level participants from any country, the promises were prominent—over one billion dollars—but the follow-through, not surprisingly, has been very limited. The rich Gulf states, with the exception of Kuwait, are more interested in supplying arms to the rebels than fulfilling their pledges—although it seems that most have the capability to do both. The United States ponied up $155 million.

Finding money for all the displaced is now an increasingly difficult structural problem. The most recent U.S. contribution to the UN and the two hundred million dollars President Obama announced in Jordan are of course helpful, but hardly sufficient to meet the growing magnitude of the problem. Indeed the failure to move decisively on Assad has cost the world perhaps two billion dollars in ever-growing needs for humanitarian assistance.

In previous massive human disasters, the United States has always aggressively taken the lead—for Indochinese refugees, Iraqi Kurds, Bosnians, Kosovars, Iraqis displaced from our second Gulf War and many others. We made things happen very impressively, preserving first asylum, resettling millions of refugees in this country, or providing the oomph and money to get nations to do some of the same. The voice of the United States now seems muted. Even many American humanitarian agencies are unduly quiet, perhaps afraid to bite the hands that feed them.

You would think that given our decision not to arm the rebels, we would be at least be aggressive in getting humanitarian help for a dying country and the humanitarian agencies would be out there urging the same. I can attest to the dedication and perseverance of those actually managing our humanitarian-emergency programs, but the voices of our high-level officials, public and private, are more quiet than usual. None even saw fit to attend the worldwide Kuwait pledging conference.

I am aware that the United States is now poor and finds it hard to do much more. Congressional interest seems to be focused less on providing money for Syrian humanitarian purposes and more on food aid to the opposition. Yet it is more than appropriate for the President to ask the Congress for special funds, not only to keep his Jordan promise but also for more help to the growing numbers of Syrian refugees. Washington might also be more active in pushing our Gulf friends and other allies for more humanitarian aid—perhaps even, perish the thought, taking some funds destined for our rich ally Israel.

If we are not going to save Syria, we can do much better to save a dying people.

The early days of the Arab uprisings were uncomplicated and inspiring, as they reaffirmed many Westerners’ long-held beliefs regarding universal values, human rights, and democratization. With the fall of long-standing dictators and the spread of unrest and protest, historical parallels were quickly drawn to the transformative events of 1989, which witnessed the fall of the Communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe and the acceleration of events that soon thereafter led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The ultimate success of the Arab uprisings will depend heavily on the development of seven core areas. This post discusses the second of those seven pillars: Education. Previous posts discussed the first pillar, Economic Growth and Equality, and provided an an introduction to the series, which offers an overview of the Arab uprising and its recent aftermath, and provides a high-level sketch of the seven pillars.

Second Pillar: Education

What is the state of education in the Arab world? The UN Human Development Index offers the following statistics: In Libya, students have 7.3 years of schooling on average; Tunisia, 6.5 years; Egypt, 6.4 years; Syria, 5.7 years; Yemen, a sobering 2.5 years (for the United States, it’s 12.4 years).

A March 2011 UNESCO report found that while the region has made progress on elementary and secondary education in the last decade, it still lags behind most of the world. Over six million primary school-aged children—the vast majority of them girls—do not attend school. Enrollment in post-secondary education is 21 percent, below the worldwide average of 26 percent. Teacher salaries are often abysmal—in Egypt, for example, the starting salary is $20 a month, rising to $70 a month after five years. This has led to perverse practices, such as teachers withholding information in the classroom to encourage participation in private tutoring sessions for those few students whose parents can pay for the extra time.

Another problem is the rigid and outmoded pedagogy that is practiced in the region’s schools. There is a heavy emphasis throughout secondary education on rote memorization and a lack of focus on analytical and creative thinking, which are essential to advanced learning. This approach has limited the capacity of students to translate their education to the labor market.

Educational participation also reflects clear patterns of inequality. A 2007 World Bank study focusing on economic performance in the Middle East and North Africa noted that “[p]overty and level of education are strongly and consistently correlated in populations in the region, meaning that programs targeting secondary and higher education will reach few if any poor children.”

Aside from poor investment and outcomes, education in the region faces an additional problem: The educational systems of the region have been corrupted by the imperatives of regime survival. Among their primary functions, schools have been a means of maintaining order and control. This has led to censorship and limitations on research deemed threatening to the state. Today, Islamist regimes pose another threat. Mohammed Faour of the Carnegie Middle East Center predicts that “the Islamists of Egypt and Tunisia will target education reform to ensure more Islamic content is included in all students’ schooling.” This will create new barriers to inquiry and research.

To the extent that the educational sectors of transitioning societies have seen reforms, they have largely centered on political activism and expression. State interference in political life in Egyptian universities, for example, has declined since the fall of Hosni Mubarak. Similarly, university administrations have been shielded from direct political intervention, with Cairo University and other campuses holding internal elections for administrative leadership positions.

What needs to be done? The most urgent priority must be dealing with the mismatch between educational attainment and the requirements of the labor market. Closing this gap will require investment in advanced research and scientific institutions. It will also require greater coordination with the private sector to better tailor educational programs to labor demands, as well as pedagogy reform that begins a shift toward critical thinking and analysis and away from the more traditional and outmoded forms of learning. Vocational training and technical schools should also be encouraged as practical alternatives to university education and contributors to the production of skilled labor. Finally, it is critical that reformers protect inquiry, creativity, and expression against the potentially stifling imperatives of ruling Islamist political parties.

The financial strains on educational systems will be difficult to ameliorate at a time when resources are stretched. The youth bulge has put further pressure on the education sector. The countries of the region must reassess their budgetary priorities and consider options once thought politically untenable. For example, national universities in Egypt are currently free. Ursula Lindsey, The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Middle East correspondent, argues that some students should be charged fees in light of current budgetary realities.

The pressures on public education have also encouraged private institutions of higher learning to proliferate in some Arab countries. While some have adopted higher standards (exacerbating social divisions in the process), others are nakedly opportunistic enterprises responding to market demand and often do a poor job of preparing students. As such, the establishment of accreditation bodies is absolutely necessary to ensure baseline metrics for the approval of new institutions of higher learning.

The early days of the Arab uprisings were uncomplicated and inspiring, as they reaffirmed many Westerners’ long-held beliefs regarding universal values, human rights, and democratization. With the fall of long-standing dictators and the spread of unrest and protest, historical parallels were quickly drawn to the transformative events of 1989, which witnessed the fall of the Communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe and the acceleration of events that soon thereafter led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The ultimate success of the Arab uprisings will depend heavily on the development of seven core areas. This post discusses the first of those seven pillars: Economic Growth and Equality. Last week, I provided an introduction to the series, which offers an overview of the Arab uprising and its recent aftermath, and provides a high-level sketch of the seven pillars.

First Pillar: Economic Growth and Equality

If transitioning states fail in retooling their economies, the prospects for reform in other areas are dim. Virtually all the nations of the region have a long, long way to go. With the exceptions of the petro-rich Gulf states, which post impressive economic numbers for obvious and anomalous reasons, the region is in terrible economic shape.

Per capita GDPs are low. According to the CIA World Factbook, the highest per capita GDP in the region (outside of the petro-monarchies) is Lebanon’s $15,500 per year, which ranks it just 78th in the world. Egypt, at $6,500, comes in at number 137. Syria, at $5,100, is 152nd. GDP growth is also meager. According to World Bank data for 2011, Jordan’s GDP grew at 2.6 percent, Egypt’s at 1.8 percent; Tunisia’s “grew” at -1.8 percent; Libya’s was not even calculated. In terms of income inequality, the region has just one country in the world’s top 50 least unequal countries, as measured by the Gini coefficient: Egypt sneaks in at number 50. (The United States has nothing to boast about here, ranking 97th.)

These lagging indicators are exacerbated by the region’s demographic youth bulge and, according to the World Bank, the highest levels of youth unemployment on earth. Youth under age 25 represent 60 percent of the region’s population. The 2009 Arab Human Development Report, one of a series of controversial reports sponsored by the United Nations Development Programme and independently authored by intellectuals and scholars from Arab countries (and attacked by nationalists and Islamists alike as serving Western interests), estimated that the region would need to create approximately 51 million jobs by 2020 to keep pace with new entrants; some more current estimates for needed employment gains range as high as 80 million new jobs in the coming decade.

Unemployment is also high among the most educated of the region. The 2011-2012 Arab World Competitiveness Report notes that among those with a college education in states for which statistics were available, 43 percent are unemployed in Saudi Arabia, 22 percent in Morocco and the United Arab Emirates, and 14 percent in Tunisia.

Of course, the economic challenges vary from country to country. The World Bank recently described the region as having a “two-track growth path” between nations that export oil and gas and those that either import or produce small quantities (which include Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, and Tunisia). This divergence is illustrated succinctly by a comparison of the 2010 per capita GDP of two Gulf countries: Qatar, which is one of the world’s fastest-growing economies and registered at $72,398, and Yemen, which reached a paltry $1,291. The bank’s current forecast for economic growth in oil and gas exporting countries is 4.8 percent in 2012, and just 2.2 percent for importing countries.

Such disparities and stagnation have meant the basic economic questions that have been largely resolved in the West are now once again a feature of open political discourse, particularly in the region’s transitioning states. These questions tap into long-dormant notions of social justice rooted in the region’s twentieth-century history, when Arab nationalism was often coupled with a state-dominated economic model. However, expectations for economic change are incredibly high, bordering on the fantastical, and managing them will be essential for the region’s leaders. It is nearly inevitable that they will be judged harshly if they fail to improve the material conditions of citizens. A lack of progress runs a real risk of sparking popular backlash against the uprisings, alienating people from the electoral process, and raising the specter of authoritarian relapse.

In light of these expectations and the current economic dilemmas, five priorities emerge. First, governments must recognize that the main prerequisite for economic reform in transitioning countries is a firm political foundation upon which they can make difficult decisions that might entail some degree of social dislocation. Western policy-makers and local technocrats have often disaggregated economic reform from the politics that undergird it. But that’s a grave error. The importance of some semblance of consensus politics is heightened by the current polarization in the region’s transitioning countries, most notably Egypt, where the botched transition and disastrous constitutional drafting process have created the prospect of institutionalized crisis and political dysfunction.

Second, the region’s leaders must deal with their citizens transparently. Economic decision-making has often been opaque. This has led to the belief, heightened by recent history, that reforms will inevitably entail distortion and corruption.

Third, regional governments will have to work to ensure that macroeconomic gains have a tangible impact on unemployment and social mobility. The gap between GDP growth and per capita GDP growth for the region is among the world’s highest (meaning that population growth has outstripped economic growth). The disconnect represented by long-term structural unemployment is at the root of disenchantment, particularly among the young; coupled with the flagrant corruption associated with crony capitalism, past performance has hindered current efforts and tarnished perceptions of economic policy.

Growth will inevitably require some level of fiscal discipline to manage debt. However, austerity cannot form the crux of economic policy or provide the roadmap toward inclusive growth. As such, more progressive taxation to create a broader revenue base is essential, as is support for small and medium enterprises, including assistance to bring many of these businesses out of the underground economy. This will necessitate reforms to ensure greater transparency, reduced bureaucracy, and a predictable legal framework. It will also require that the international community eschew ideology and lend its support for big public-works projects that can employ large numbers in the near term and improve dilapidated infrastructure.

Fourth, economic policy will also face challenges with respect to gender. According to the Global Gender Gap Report 2011, in Egypt and Yemen, for example, the labor force participation for women is a meager 24 percent and 21 percent respectively. Remedying such gender gaps and providing expanded opportunities would enhance productivity and increase economic security.

Finally, regional economies will have to implement economic-diversification and investment policies focused on high-growth and labor-intensive economic sectors, such as clothing and textiles. This type of diversification can contribute to more stable, higher rates of growth. For non-oil-producing countries, this will require investments in infrastructure and technology.

Among the highlights for the week:

• Brendan Pastor’s (@brendanspastor) look at the impact of Fairtrade on the sugar industry in sub-Saharan Africa. Pastor writes that as consumers begin thinking more seriously about where all their agricultural products come from, the Fairtrade program has considerable potential to raise living standards for workers in the sugar industry.
• The New York Times’ revelation that in some states, gun rights trump protective orders. Twitter user @dissident1L nominated this piece, which outlines reasons for requiring that individuals subject to restraining orders be required to surrender their firearms.
• Several readers suggested Tova Wang’s (@tovawang) examination of voting patterns for naturalized U.S. citizens. Wang’s piece laments that native citizens are 10 percentage points more likely to vote than are naturalized citizens, and suggests several strategies for closing the gap.

But this week’s winning piece—and the winner of the inaugural #TCFBest award—goes to Marc Lynch’s (@abuaardvark) piece, “What’s Missing From the Iraq Debate” (free registration required). Lynch looks at recent 10-year retrospectives on Iraq and finds that almost none of them include any Iraqis in the conversation. This myopia, Lynch says, has consequences:

Failing to listen to those Iraqi voices meant getting important things badly wrong. Most profoundly, the American filter tends to minimize the human costs and existential realities of military occupation and a brutal, nasty war. The savage civil war caused mass displacement and sectarian slaughter that will be remembered for generations.

We highly recommend that you go read the entire piece.

Thank you for all of the wonderful recommendations for our first week. If your favorite didn’t win this week, don’t despair. Nominations are now open for next week’s #TCFBest. Submit your nominations in the comments below, on our Facebook page, email us at chang@tcf.org, or on Twitter using #TCFBest.

This week, reports surfaced that as many as 25 of the 166 inmates still at Guantanamo Bay are engaging in a hunger strike to draw attention to their continued confinement.

At the same time, the Pentagon revealed plans for $195.7 million worth of renovations at Guantanamo Bay. These plans include $99 million for new barracks, $12 million for a mess hall for our personnel, $11.2 million for a hospital and medical care for inmates, $9.9 million for a legal building for inmates and their lawyers, and $10.8 million for improved communications. Last but not least, $49 million has been proposed to build a new prison to house “high-value” inmates that may remain at Guantanamo Bay.

Obviously, this once “temporary” facility needs renovations after twelve years of continuous operation with no end in sight. In this budgetary climate, $195.7 million for renovations to a prison that President Obama promised to close multiple times is outrageous. Placing aside the ongoing plight of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, which should not go without recognition, these renovations do not fit into our economic calculus. It is even more startling when you look closer at the costs per inmate at Guantanamo. According to Reuters:

The United States spends $114 million a year to run the Guantanamo prison, or about $687,747 per prisoner, according to the Government Accountability Office. That is about 20 times what the U.S. Bureau of Prisons spends per inmate to run its high-security prisons.

It costs approximately $35,000 per inmate, according to the above calculation, to hold inmates at high-security prisons in the United States. The 2013 budget for Guantanamo Bay is reportedly $177 million, meaning it will cost an exorbitant $1,066,265 to house a prisoner in Guantanamo for a year in 2013. That is approximately 30 times what the Bureau of Prisons spends per inmate at high-security United States prisons. Provided nothing changes, over the next decade we will spend a minimum of $1.7 billion to imprison 166 men.

Given the contentious arguments surrounding our budget, shouldn’t we be able to reach consensus on moving these prisoners to a more cost effective facility?

According to President Obama, Guantanamo Bay “weakens our national security by wasting resources, damaging our relationships with key allies, and strengthening our enemies.” Given human rights concerns, and now budgetary largesse, isn’t it time to release the prisoners we can, try the ones we haven’t, and move those we find guilty to a location in line with international law that would save us money over the long term?

It seems he overlooked a little something called infrastructure investment—done by either public or private entities.

Modernizing America's infrastructure is a bipartisan preference in Congress, with governors and mayors, and among global businesses. Just this week, a Gallup poll found that 77 percent of Americans support more infrastructure expenditures. That 77 percent includes majorities of both parties and Independents.

President Obama made clear in his State of the Union Address that infrastructure is a centerpiece of his economic plan going forward. In his 2013 budget, Obama mentioned infrastructure 108 times within a 256-page budget. The idea is often to fuel greater private investment.

Representative Ryan is, by comparison, less supportive.

In his 91-page plan, The Path to Prosperity: Blueprint for American Renewal, Ryan fails to mention infrastructure investment at all. This is down from his 98-page 2013 budget, which mentioned infrastructure all of twice. And infrastructure did get one mention in the Ryan-inspired budget plan which the House of Representatives approved this week.

The Ryan Plan appears out of step not only with the broader citizenry, but also his own party—which has largely recognized the need for and benefits of infrastructure investments. It seems everyone, perhaps with the exception of Ryan and some who supported his budget, realizes that few things help business and grow our economy more than investing in infrastructure.

It worth at least noting that the “renewal” Ryan writes about in his budget does not appear to include the arteries of commerce—our ports, rail lines, roads, bridges, or waterways.   

For example, David Brooks criticized the BTWB on the (incorrect) grounds that the economy “is finally beginning to take off…[as there is no longer] a large and growing gap between the economy’s current output and what it is capable of producing.” And a recent column by Ezra Klein contained concerns from Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi that the BTWB  targets job growth too aggressively, meaning that: (a) the overall economy has recovered enough (or surely will) that it doesn’t need this boost; and (b) that recovery has been and will be sufficiently fast that even the estimates of how much fiscal support will boost jobs and growth are overstated.

We strongly disagree. The economy remains deeply depressed, and the coming year will see a significant drag on already inadequate growth from further fiscal contraction (sequestration on top of deepening discretionary spending cuts and expiration of the payroll tax cut). Given this, there’s no reason at all to think that fiscal expansion would be less effective than in the past 3-4 years, and there is certainly no reason to gamble on a robust recovery without policy help.

On the first point, the economy’s improvement since the Great Recession’s freefall ended has been extraordinarily modest, and the pace of recovery has actually decelerated in the past year. Concretely, the output gap—the difference between actual GDP and what the economy could be producing with higher, non-inflationary resource utilization—grew from zero in 2007 to 7.5 percent of potential GDP by late 2009, and then shrank slightly to 6.0 percent in late 2010 (thanks largely to the Recovery Act). Since then, it has hardly budged and stands at 5.9 percent of GDP today. In short, if you thought the economy needed more support at the end of 2010, there is very little reason to have changed your mind since then.

On the second point, the effectiveness of fiscal expansion depends simply on the fact that the economy is stuck in a “liquidity trap”—the Federal Reserve has completely run out of room to cut the short-term policy interest rates that they control. This was true in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, and it remains true today. This really ends the argument – the only thing that reduces these large liquidity trap multipliers are countervailing effects stemming from interest rate increases (due to countervailing monetary policy and/or larger deficits) that “crowd-out” private investment and consumption. If no interest rate increases happen as deficits rise, there is no crowd-out and hence multipliers are not reduced.

On specific criticisms about multipliers used in developing the BTWB being too large, there is no reason to think either that they should be marked down, or that even a generalized marking-down of multipliers (presumably because of the economy’s “improved” health) should lead to markdowns of the GDP and job-creation estimates associated with the BTWB.

On the first issue (no reason for lower multipliers), estimated multipliers get lowered when expectations that rising interest rates generated by larger deficits will “crowd out” private activity rise. But to the degree that there is any empirical link between rising deficits and higher interest rates, it is future projected deficits that spur these increases. The BTWB would reduce deficits by FY15 and reduce public borrowing by at least $4.4 trillion over the decade relative to current policy. (“Fiscal clawback” effects from near-term job creation measures would likely save an additional $1 trillion.) Further, in the very near-term, deficit-financed stimulus would actually reduce the debt-GDP ratio. So, there’s little reason to expect crowd-out from this budget.

On the second issue (smaller multipliers won’t substantially hurt the BTWB estimates), our estimate of the BTWB’s economic boost is driven by increased government spending net of a drag from higher taxes. By 2015, the CPC budget would increase revenue by $617 billion and increase spending by $524 billion. Any across-the-board reductions in economic multipliers would mean that the smaller boost from spending would also face less of a headwind from tax increases.

Lastly, one should think about the real economic risk of the BWTB doing “too much” fiscal expansion. Let’s say the economy does indeed bounce back much faster than expected and the substantial public investment in the BTWB does, in the next couple of years, actually push up interest rates and crowd-out some private capital formation. Is that really such a disaster? Sure, private capital formation is valuable—but so is public capital formation. And research indicates that for the U.S., the rates of return on public investment are almost certainly above those for private investment. And we all know about the warnings of the infrastructure deficit. So, the worst-case scenario is that instead of a net addition to the nation’s overall (private plus public) capital stock, we instead get a swap that leaves it roughly unchanged (but like with higher rates of return) relative to the scenario where we’re complacent about the jobs crisis. This should be awfully hard to get scared about.

On the flip side, the downside risk of assuming a recovery that doesn’t materialize is enormous: sustained large output gaps, anemic growth, large cyclical budget deficits, high unemployment, and gradually squandered long-run potential—in the ballpark of another $8.3 trillion in forgone output and $3.1 trillion added to cyclical budget deficits over the next decade, both relative to Congressional Budget Office forecasts.

The economy clearly needs more help, and the risky move is to ignore these clear signals.

The early days of the Arab uprisings were uncomplicated and inspiring, as they reaffirmed many Westerners’ long-held beliefs regarding universal values, human rights, and democratization. With the fall of long-standing dictators and the spread of unrest and protest, historical parallels were quickly drawn to the transformative events of 1989, which witnessed the fall of the Communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe and the acceleration of events that soon thereafter led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

But as violence assumed a more prominent role in Libya, Syria, and elsewhere, the straightforward and attractive image of organic protest against authoritarian rule became muddied. The uprisings and their consequences—the murders in Libya of U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others, the democratic enfranchisement of illiberal factions, the Mali unrest, the ongoing crises in Egypt—have forced Western liberals to grapple with their fears regarding both regional instability and Islamists and their attempts to insert religion more prominently into governance and the public square.

So what does the future hold? As we watch these riveting, often exhilarating, and sometimes horrifying events, the bottom-line questions in all our minds are simple. Can democracy take root in the Arab world? How long will it take? Ten years, 20…50? We all hope for a great transformation, in which Egypt, Syria, Yemen, and their neighbors embrace democracy and pluralism and cast off autocracy and extremism. But is there reason to be optimistic?

While we cannot make specific predictions, we can say broadly that the ultimate success of the Arab uprisings will depend heavily on the development of seven core areas.

1. Economic growth and equality
2. Education policy
3. Security-sector reform
4. Transitional justice
5. Decentralization
6. The development of regional norms on democratization
7. The flourishing of a more pluralistic politics, which in many ways is the linchpin for the other six pillars

These are the seven pillars of the Arab Future. They are the yardsticks by which we can measure progress in the region in the coming years.

The United States has not played a central role in this story. Nor should it be expected to. Change must be initiated organically and in accordance with the perceived interests of local actors. The United States, along with the international community, cannot dictate change, but it can guide and encourage it. Despite debates about American decline and diminishing leverage, the United States remains the most potent outside actor in the region and will, with its allies, have a role to play in supporting regional change.

In the coming days, I will have posts examining each of the seven pillars. I will then explore some lessons for U.S. policy in light of these seven pillars.

Tuition increases have made up only part of the revenue loss resulting from state funding cuts. Public colleges and universities also have cut faculty positions, eliminated course offerings, closed campuses, shut down computer labs, and reduced library services, among other cuts.

Some states have cut deeper than others. Between 2008 and 2013, thirty-six states cut funding for public higher education by more than 20 percent, eleven cut funding by more than a third, and two states—Arizona and New Hampshire—cut their spending per college student in half.  

Small increases in federal funding have helped to make up some of the difference, but state funding still provides 53 percent of the revenue used to keep higher education affordable for the three in four undergraduates attending public schools. Nearly every dollar that states cut gets passed on to their students, who have to make up the difference by borrowing thousands in private and federal loans.  

According to the CBPP report, this has been the trend for at least the last quarter-century: Since 1987, inflation-adjusted state revenue has fallen $2,600 per student, while per-student tuition has risen by the same amount. "In other words, the entire increase in tuition at public colleges and universities over the last 25 year has gone to make up for declining state and local revenue, leaving no additional funding available to improve programs and services." 

For whatever reason, this trend appears to have accelerated during the Great Recession, and shows no sign of reversing. Until state taxpayers are willing to pay a little more to maintain our investment in affordable higher education—historically considered a public good—college tuition costs and student debt will continue to rise.

The policy blogosphere has spent much of the past week engaging in public mea culpas from those who supported the war back in 2003, and some gloating from those who spoke out against it at the time. The National Memo has a nice rundown of who got it right and who got it wrong.

I have two small things I’d like to add to the conversation.

I Got It Right

Okay, so I’m not beyond a bit of gloating. Back in 2004, I published an article arguing that the war in Iraq was illegal and that military officers were morally obligated to refuse to go ($). I argued that officers are morally accountable for decisions about whether they fight, and not just about how they fight, and that the Bush Doctrine’s embrace of pre-emptive war was both unjust and illegal.

That argument was not particularly well-received when I first began articulating it in March 2003. West Point cadets do not take kindly to the suggestion that they have a moral obligation to refuse direct orders, even when that suggestion is coming from the philosopher charged with teaching their just war theory course. Neither do their commanding officers, some of whom contacted me to “express concerns” about our class discussions.

My argument did not turn on the question of whether Iraq actually possessed any weapons of mass destruction, though my skepticism on that front turned out to be justified. Too many others were taken in by a combination of flimsy evidence and jingoism. My friend and colleague paid dearly for our collective gullibility, as did thousands of others with equally valuable and unique and wonderful lives.

Nearly All the Commentary You’ll See Will Miss the Point

Look through the very many Iraq retrospectives, and you’ll see all kinds of conversations about lessons to be learned.

• Why we all were taken in by nonexistent Weapons of Mass Destruction.
• How our eagerness to exact revenge on someone for 9/11 led us to war with the wrong people.
• Why we fell for the crazy belief that Gen. David Petraeus and his counter-insurgency (COIN) doctrine could make military occupation work.
• How failing to prepare for the peace hopelessly poisoned the well for post-invasion success.

The lists of Why We Fell For It and What We Learned all miss one simple truth.

The Second Gulf War was an unjust war.

Wars are truly terrible things. Philosophers and theologians have argued about when a nation is justified in going to war ever since Augustine first wrote about the topic in the early days of the 5th century. As you might expect from a question that philosophers and theologians are allowed to get their hands on, there’s some disagreement. But there is pretty broad agreement on one basic principle.

Wars are justified when they are in self-defense.

That means you have to be under attack. Or you have to be coming to the aid of someone else who is under attack. Iraq didn’t attack anyone. Iraq Wasn’t really even capable of attacking anyone, but even if they had been, they had not actually done so. That made our invasion of Iraq unjust.

Had Iraq possessed WMDs, the war would still have been unjust.

Had we planned adequately for the peace, the war would still have been unjust.

Had Gen. Petraeus and COIN rescued the occupation and turned Iraq around, the war would still have been unjust.

Had the occupation turned Iraq into a shining example of a wealthy liberal democracy, the war would still have been unjust.

Tomorrow I’ll go back to talking about progressive policy. But today, just for a moment, I want to recognize that the real lesson of Iraq isn’t about policy at all. It’s about ethics.

We chose to wage an unjust war. As a nation, we have to learn to live with that fact.

And we have to mourn those who won’t get that chance.

Joe Miller is The Century Foundation’s director of digital communications. From 2001 – 2003, he was an assistant professor of philosophy at the United States Military Academy where he taught classes in ethics, just war theory, and logic. He holds a PhD in political philosophy from the University of Virginia.

The mission of the Catholic Scholars for Worker Justice is “to promote Catholic Social Teaching on the rights of workers and the indispensable role that unions play in securing justice (1) for workers and their families, (2) in the workplace, and (3) for the universal common good.” Their steering committee is comprised of some of the most prolific and committed Catholic scholars in America. In the past they have issued formal Statements of Support for organizing campaigns across the country, as well as for legislation such as the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA).

In endorsing the proposal, the organization states:

Catholic Scholars for Worker Justice is pleased to issue a Statement of Support that would make labor organizing a right that is protected by the United States Civil Rights Act (1964). While it is illegal under the National Labor Relations Act (1935) to fire workers for exercising their right to join together to pursue fair wages and a voice in the workplace, the penalties are so weak that employers openly violate the law by engaging in union busting practices that include firing the organizers and intimidating their employees. Indeed some employers go through a great deal of trouble and wasteful financial expense by bringing in outside “union avoidance” experts who specialize in union busting activities.

Catholic Social Doctrine holds that this behavior violates the natural right of free association that is rooted in the divine law and, therefore, constitutes a grave violation of the moral law. This violation of the moral law cannot stand! Catholic Scholars for Worker Justice strongly supports amending the Civil Rights Act to ban discrimination against workers who attempt to form labor unions. It is time in the United States to recognize labor organizing as a civil right that enjoys the same legal protection as discrimination based on race, sex, and national origin.

The Statement of Support further describes some of the important Catholic social teachings that support this position, from the 1891 Rerum Novarum to the 2004 Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church. In 1986, the Catholic Bishops of the United States wrote, “The Church fully supports the right of workers to form unions or other associations to secure their rights to fair wages and working conditions…No one may deny the right to organize without attacking human dignity itself.” The Bishops also called for “labor law reform” in order to “provide more timely and effective remedies for unfair labor practices.” Hopefully this strong Statement of Support will help further that reality.

With her health restored and her financial future on firm ground, the next big question for Clinton will be the great political conundrum: the decision whether to take another run at the Presidency. The first possible hint of her intentions came this week when she endorsed same-sex marriage, a major shift from her 2008 position which endorsed civil unions, but asserted that the legality of marriage should be left to the states. In 2016, she will be 69, the same age Ronald Reagan was in his first successful bid for the office, and the oldest man ever elected. Clinton knows as well as anyone possibly could just how hard the campaign would be: a relentless contest (once she sails through the primaries) against a Republican opponent like Florida’s Sen. Marco Rubio or Rep. Paul Ryan, two early front-runners who will be barely in their mid-40s. For all her formidable network and fundraising skills, Clinton faces the prospect of a minimum of two years of relentless glad-handing to raise or exceed the billion dollars that Barack Obama gathered in 2012.

Should she choose not to take the daunting plunge for the Presidency, Hillary Rodham Clinton will nonetheless have amassed as extraordinary an array of accomplishments as anyone of our time. As a First Lady of influence and stature, it is largely forgotten now how close she came to an indictment for fraud in the wildly exaggerated claims of nefarious Arkansas land deals and related mishaps known as Whitewater. History will inevitably relate that her tenure was blighted by her husband’s ignominious impeachment. Any of those experiences taken on its own might have persuaded a less resilient personality to find comfort in philanthropic or educational pursuits away from public scrutiny.

Instead, Clinton ran for the Senate and in her years representing New York established herself as a skilled politician and strategist all the way from the rural upstate counties to the inner cities. The energy and integrity she displayed were the basis for her presidential aspirations. Based on her victories head-to-head with Obama and the enthusiasm she aroused, never again will there be any doubt about the possibility of a woman running for president. Whether it is Clinton’s triumph in the offing or a candidate yet to be identified, a woman president in the coming decades is a certainty.

The three women who have served as secretaries of state—Madeline Albright, Condoleezza Rice, and Clinton—prove conclusively that they can take on any of the world’s most intractable problems as well or better than their male counterparts, even if they ultimately find them just as hard to resolve. The first account of Clinton’s four years in office has now arrived in The Secretary: A Journey with Hillary Clinton from Beirut to the Heart of American Power, by Kim Ghattas, the BBC’s State Department correspondent. Ghattas, who grew up in Lebanon during that country’s civil war, travelled extensively with Clinton, whose total time-in-transit pursuing diplomacy was said to exceed one million miles. Given her Middle-Eastern background, Ghattas is especially attentive to Clinton’s efforts to bring constructive influence to the turbulent arc of war in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. For all Clinton’s indefatigable efforts, diplomatic progress in the region was overwhelmed by the uprisings spreading from Tunisia to Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria. Wherever she took her entourage, Ghattas included, it seemed that the obstacles somehow managed to surpass the progress. Known for her outspoken advocacy of “smart power” as a strategic policy and her longstanding commitment to women’s issues, Clinton was nonetheless stymied by the complexities of human rights in China, the failure to make headway in Israel and Palestine, and the nuclear standoff with Iran and North Korea. Despite the frustrations that they must have felt in tackling so many global issues without being able to resolve most of them, Clinton eventually did succeed in bonding with Obama and showed she herself to be a shrewd team player.

The Hillary Clinton of the Obama years proved to be a highly effective envoy for the United States, able to engage (often with hardly any sleep) on a vast canvas with characters across the spectrum of interests and ideologies. She was not a secretary of state who will be remembered for the breakthroughs of diplomacy. But as Steven Weisman, formerly a New York Times correspondent, wisely wrote of The Secretary in the Washington Post: Clinton “comes across in this book as unflagging, appealing and unflappable, bringing ebullient energy and a sense of humor to the most banal or grueling schedule. . . .”

While that may not be comparable to the legends of the best of what her predecessors were able to do, Clinton did much to restore America’s good name in very hard times—a considerable task, and she did it very well.

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Even though we are proud of our history, our founder Edward Filene was not nostalgic. He was always looking for today’s best idea. We’ve tried to keep his outlook in mind and we think our forward-looking work is among the best in the county.

But we’re not alone in offering thoughtful policy proposals. Filene created this foundation “pledged to disinterested effort in furthering progressive measures for the public good.” In that spirit, we want to recognize the best ideas regardless of where they start.

That’s why we’re introducing Best Reads.

Every Monday, The Century Foundation will showcase the best piece of progressive policy writing from the previous week.

What’s the best work of the week? That’s up to you.

We want your suggestions. What did you read this week that made you think? Where did you find the best research? Who is raising and answering the important policy questions?

Let us know.

To suggest a research paper, article or blog post that is the best of the week, you can leave a comment at the end of this post or on our Facebook page, email us at chang@tcf.org or tweet your find to #tcfbest

We will feature the #tcfbest of the week that was on the Blog of the Century. Be sure to check back to see if your selection made it.

The report points to promising results from the global South, noting a significant drop in the proportion of the global population living in extreme income poverty: from 43 percent in 1990 to 22 percent in 2008 (see the highlights in this Al-Jazeera infographic). Incredibly, as UNDP Administrator Helen Clark noted in introducing the report, not a single country had a lower composite score in 2012 than it did in 2000. The international community was able to meet one of its Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), reducing the proportion of people living on less than $1.25 a day by 50 percent, thanks to large reductions in income from rapidly developing countries, including China, Brazil, and India (where 32.7 percent of the population live below the MDG threshold, down from 49.4 percent). The report’s authors credit much of this success to expanded trade and technological progress within the South itself, combined with specific policy decisions that reinvested economic gains into human capital (including education and social welfare). “The critical combination of external openness with internal preparedness allowed countries to prosper in the global marketplace, with positive human development outcomes for the population at large.”

The report is instructive for those concerned with furthering the economic and personal security of civilian populations in South Asia in South Asia (the countries of the region are ranked from highest to lowest: Sri Lanka [92]; Maldives [104]; India [136]; Bhutan [140]; Bangladesh and Pakistan [tied for 146]; Nepal [157]; and Afghanistan [175]). It is clear from the policies UNDP identifies that human development progress in South Asia is being critically delayed by political tensions between its two largest countries, India and Pakistan. While it is certain that internal policies are to blame (UNDP specifically calls out austerity measures that target the social safety net), lack of bilateral trade and accelerating defense spending are also dragging down economic potential. Trade benefits are increasingly accruing to countries within the global South in general: “The share of South-South trade in world commerce has more than tripled over the past three decades to 25%; South-South foreign investment now accounts for 30-60% of all outside investment in the least developed countries.” Foreign direct investment has expanded similarly, especially within regions of the global South. For South Asia, however, those potential benefits have suffered at the hands of India-Pakistan tensions. According to research published by the New America Foundation, bilateral trade has the potential to grow to ten times its much-restricted current level. The UNDP report correctly notes the continuing drag of non-tariff barriers, which the New America research clearly demonstrates is pervasive in the India-Pakistan bilateral context. Unfortunately for the region, the normalization process has suffered since the beginning of the year after killings of military personnel along the Line-of-Control dividing Pakistan from Indian-administered Kashmir, leading to delays in the implementation of relaxed visa restrictions and a general sense that the process had stalled.

The disparity within South Asia, according to UNDP, is principally concentrated on per capita income and mean years of schooling. While incomes may be rising in general, multidimensional poverty, a broader poverty measure that focuses on health, education, and living standards, shows continuing challenges, with what the UNDP calls high-intensity deprivation in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal. Gender disparities also continue to plague South Asia. Despite a history of female leadership at the highest political levels, the region suffers from low female participation rates in legislative bodies (18.5 percent). This exists alongside traditional deficiencies in female education (only 28 of women have completed secondary schooling) and low labor force participation (31 percent). Countries like India are in some ways victims of their prosperity, as access to medical technologies, such as ultrasound has increased the propensity for sex-selective abortions. South Asia has most unequal distribution of education access. This, in addition to governmental policy and social reform, has a knock-on effect of reducing gender inequality, as education allows many women to have better health outcomes, more autonomy, and decision-making authority within their households.

UNDP also identifies the potential for climate-related externalities to slow and even reverse economic growth in the developing world: “The number of people in extreme poverty could increase by up to three billion by 2050 unless environmental disasters are averted by coordinated global action.” This warning is particularly apt for South Asia as a whole. One of the biggest issues in the acute environmental crisis facing South Asia is access to clean water. The Asian Development Bank, in its report on water security published earlier in the week, found that South Asian nations score very poorly on sanitation, urban water security, environmental water security, and resilience to water related-disasters (including drought and monsoon season). Further progress also needs to be made in securing clean energy resources. Far too much power generation still relies on coal, which, while fueling economic growth, contributes to the very human development deficiencies that continue to hold back millions on the Subcontinent. Unfortunately, critical joint energy projects are held hostage to security and political concerns.

A further drag on human development, according to UNDP, is accelerating defense spending, especially in the developing world. South Asia, East Asia and the Pacific, and the Arab States in particular have seen spending rise. According to the Stockholm International Peace Institute’s Military Expenditure Database, India increased its defense spending from $25.8 billion in 2000 to $44.2 billion in 2011 (in constant 2010 U.S. dollars); Pakistan saw an increase from $4.1 billion to $5.6 billion. As the UNDP report underscored, however, this spending increase, mostly directed to threats by other states, is occurring during a period when intrastate conflict is arguably a more pressing threat: “In South Asia, for example, all nine countries have experienced internal conflict in the last two decades, and the resulting casualties have outnumbered those from interstate conflicts.” The report further argues that internal threats are less amenable to a strictly military solution. In India’s struggle against its Maoist insurgency, for example, policing and economic redistribution schemes, especially for the scheduled tribes, so far have been effective in containing the threat. While a robust normalization process between India and Pakistan would only slow defense spending in the long-term, any slowdown, especially in the nuclear arena, would be a welcome step not only for international peace and security, but for the economic well-being of both countries’ citizens.

In sum, the UNDP’s Human Development Report gives credit where it is due for progress to-date, while laying out an ambitious agenda for further reform. Governments throughout the region face long-term pressure to deliver growth and services to their rapidly growing populations, but with economic and social development currently being held hostage to political and security considerations, achieving further development will be difficult.

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The Van Hollen budget adopts job creation proposals from the president’s jobs package (in his fiscal 2013 budget request), financing $174 billion in stimulus spending over fiscal 2013–2015.¹ These stimulus provisions include $55 billion for rehiring teachers and modernizing K–12 schools, $37 billion in infrastructure investments, and $19 billion for a targeted tax credit for businesses that increase payroll, among other policies. Relative to current budget policy (which assumes the sequester is repealed), the Van Hollen budget would increase government spending in fiscal 2013 and 2014, as well as cut taxes in 2013.²

On net, we estimate that the Van Hollen budget would boost GDP growth by 0.4 percent and increase employment by roughly 450,000 jobs in 2013, relative to current policy. A smaller economic boost of 0.1 percent of GDP and roughly 110,000 jobs would be expected in 2014. Note that CBO’s baseline forecast shows employment rising by 1.5 million jobs between the fourth quarter of 2013 and the fourth quarter of 2014; these estimates do not suggest that 340,000 jobs would be lost between 2013 and 2014, simply that employment would rise faster and higher than otherwise projected over the next two years.

The Van Hollen budget also replaces sequestration, whereas the current policy baseline presupposes the repeal of sequestration—in keeping with budgetary scorekeeping conventions of the past two years—but which is by no means certain. We previously estimated that sequestration would reduce growth by 0.6 percent and employment by 660,000 jobs in 2013, with the drag growing to 0.8 percent and 910,000 fewer jobs in 2014. So relative to a world in which sequestration remains in effect, the Van Hollen budget would boost employment by more than 1.1 million jobs in 2013 and just over 1.0 million jobs in 2014.

Indeed, the economic drag from sequestration comprises a substantial share of the near-term job losses projected under the Ryan budget. We previously estimated that the Ryan budget would decrease employment by 750,000 jobs in 2013—the combination of sequestration and additional fiscal year 2014 spending cuts, some of which would take effect in the fourth quarter of 2013. As the drag from sequestration increased and more austerity was layered on top of sequestration, the drag was projected to rise above 2.0 million jobs lost in 2014.

Consequently, we estimate the Van Hollen budget would boost GDP by 1.0 percent and increase employment by 1.2 million jobs in 2013 relative to the Ryan budget. And by 2014, the Van Hollen budget would boost GDP by 1.8 percent and increase employment by more than 2.1 million jobs relative to the Ryan budget.

The Van Hollen budget would be a net positive for the labor market over the next two years, relative to current budget policy, current law, or the Ryan budget. It’s encouraging to see a mainstream budget proposal grounded in the evidence-based outlook that near-term austerity—including sequestration—should be avoided while the U.S. economy remains depressed, and near-term deficits should instead be increased to boost employment. Sizeable renewed fiscal expansion seems unlikely to materialize given House Republicans’ demands for more austerity coupled with repeated obstruction of faster recovery, so it could be tempting to ignore the economic need for stimulus and instead focus solely on ten-year deficit reduction targets. Commendably, the House Democratic budget takes a more principled, economically grounded position on the need for accelerating job creation and actually budgets for some additional fiscal support instead of just offering platitudes and austerity for the unemployed.

¹ The Van Hollen budget proposes the remaining job creation provisions that were not acted upon by the 112^th Congress, meaning that it does not include the enacted continuation of the payroll tax cut and emergency unemployment compensation program for 2012. With the exception of proposed increased SNAP funding, the remaining job creation measures proposed have been delayed one year from in the president’s fiscal 2013 budget request.

² As in our analysis of the Ryan budget and the CPC budget alternative, the Van Hollen budget has been adjusted to exclude funding levels for overseas contingency operations (OCO). The current policy baseline used is CBO’s alternative fiscal scenarios baseline adjusted to exclude both OCO funding and the inflation-adjusted continuation of emergency disaster relief for Hurricane Sandy appropriated for fiscal 2013 (which is continued in both CBO’s current law and AFS baselines).

On Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid released a video highlighting Fieldhouse’s findings about Ryan’s budget.

According to Fieldhouse, Ryan’s economics “don’t make any sense.” We couldn’t have said it any better than that.

Student loans remain the glaring exception, soaring to $966 billion last quarter as college costs—and applications—continued to rise unabated. That’s nearly triple the debt that students held in 2004, thanks to a 70 percent increase in the number of borrowers and an average loan balance among indebted graduates that passed $26,600 in 2011.

Student debt would not be such a problem if borrowers were finding jobs and paying their bills. But the number of former students behind on their payments has increased substantially in the past year, even as other consumers have been finding their economic footing. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the share of student loan balances 90 or more days delinquent surged to 11.7 percent in the last two quarters—three percentage points higher than the same time last year—elevating student loans, for the first time, to the ignominious distinction of having a worse repayment rate than credit cards.

Yet even that figure underestimates the severity of the delinquency crisis. Among borrowers who have already entered repayment—excluding those in their post-graduation grace period, or in deferral or forbearance for economic reasons—the delinquency rate is roughly twice as high.

It’s hard to know what to make of this unexpected downturn among college graduates.

The first impulse is to blame the economy—specifically high unemployment—for borrowers’ sudden inability to manage their debts. But the unemployment rate for people over age 25 with a bachelor’s degree or higher was just 4.2 percent last month, far below the 9.2 percent rate for those with only a high-school education. And while the numbers are less clear for recent graduates (one widely circulated story reported half are jobless or underemployed, but did not differentiate between the two), there is nothing to suggest that their job prospects worsened considerably in the last year as the broader economy recovered.

Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of FinAid.org and an expert on student loans, told me he thinks the beleaguered college graduate narrative is overplayed. “When you look at the data and you see unemployment rates for those with bachelor’s degrees or associate’s degrees, they’re much lower than the figures pushed by people who are trying to claim that there is a bubble,” Kantrowitz says. “A lot of people seem to have a vested interest in [that story], so they either misinterpret the data because they aren’t familiar with it or they deliberately mischaracterize the data to push their point.”

At the same time, he admits, default rates tend to be a lagging indicator of unemployment. The ability to apply for an economic hardship deferment or forbearance means an unexpected job loss may not turn up in the delinquency data for months or even years after the borrower begins to struggle.

As a result, the recent delinquency trend may be driven by borrowers who graduated or entered the job market at the height of the recession and have now reached the end of the maximum three-year deferral period allowed under the federal loan program. The large spike in delinquencies in the second half of 2012 appears to support this theory, as large numbers of students who left school in 2008 and 2009 would have had to enter repayment this year. If that were the case, we might expect delinquency rates to get worse before they get better.

Kantrowitz thinks there is more to it than that. He suggests that the delinquency data are distorted in part by an unintended loophole that allowed borrowers before 2006 to consolidate federal student loans while still in college, locking in lower in-school interest rates. The early repayment status loophole was closed by the Higher Education Reconciliation Act of 2005, but not before the savviest borrowers entered early repayment at the lower rate.

“Every 1 percent increase on the interest rate on a federal student loan is, on average, a 5 percent increase on the monthly payment of a 10-year term, and 9 percent on a 20-year term.” Fast-forward a few years, and the remaining borrowers from the 2005-2006 cohort who weren’t paying attention to the loophole opportunity are now the most likely to be in default.

Still, seven years have passed since the Department of Education closed the loophole, and unsubsidized federal interest rates have been locked at 6.8 percent since 2010. Even if the early repayment status loophole caused some of the increase in the delinquency rate, its effect should be largely dissipated at this point.

Perhaps indebted college students have simply reached a breaking point, as the combination of rising college tuition, growing loan burdens, underemployment and falling wages becomes unsustainable – call it student financial fatigue.

According to a recent TransUnion study, more than half of student loan accounts are in deferred status, as more borrowers attempt to avoid their loan balances until the economy improves or they are forced into repayment. Some return to school for a graduate degree, amassing more debt in exchange for a competitive advantage in the job market, while others manage their debts by retreating from the middle class consumer economy—delaying homeownership, marriage and children until their loans are paid.

But if the souring delinquency data are any indication, none of these strategies are working particularly well. Until policymakers find a way to address the underlying problem of soaring college costs, or design a better structure for the federal loan program, the bills will keep coming.

Catholic evangelization in China dates back to the end of the thirteenth century, when Saint John of Montecorvino became the first Catholic missionary to reach Beijing. He later became Beijing’s first bishop. Catholicism in China did not begin to flourish, however, until the Treaty of Tientsin was signed in 1858, signaling the end of the Second Opium War. This treaty opened all of China to Christian missionaries and granted religious liberty to all Christians. For the next ninety years, the Catholic Church grew rapidly in China, until the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) under Mao Zedong in 1949.

In 1951, the Communist Party cut ties with the Vatican, initiating serious persecution of all religious life in China. In response, Chinese Catholics established “underground” churches—loyal to the Holy See—that have persisted despite many years of persecution.

In 1957, the government established “patriotic churches” that operate under the jurisdiction of the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association (CCPA), not the Vatican. If they wish to worship publically, Catholics must be a member of a CCPA-sanctioned church. The membership of these churches is estimated to be 12-15 million, but most observers believe that the membership of the underground Catholic churches vastly outnumbers that of the CCPA. Life for these Catholics in China has remained difficult, despite platitudes of “freedom of religious belief” enshrined in the constitution.

In June 2007, Pope Benedict reached out via pastoral letter to both the “underground” and the “official” Catholic communities in China. He said that an “underground” church was not sustainable, and that Bishops appointed by the Holy See should come out of anonymity. Still, the Pope recognized that Chinese officials naturally “would be attentive” to Bishops that were chosen by the Holy See, striking a somewhat conciliatory tone. He reiterated, however, that state control over the church was unacceptable, and a church independent from the Holy See was incompatible with Catholic teaching. The Pope called for further dialogue to iron out the issues between the Communist Party and the Holy See, but was staunch in his belief that the state should relieve its control over the CCPA. Surprisingly, for a few years, Pope Benedict’s letter to all Chinese Catholics improved dialogue between the Chinese government and the Vatican; relations seemed to be moving in the right direction.

There were a few years of “quiet negotiation and tacit agreement” in appointing bishops in China under Pope Benedict. This honeymoon did not last long, however. Since 2010, the CCPA has consecrated four bishops without the Vatican’s input. These bishops were automatically excommunicated by the Holy See.

On July 7, 2012 Rev. Thaddeus Ma Daqin was named Bishop of Shanghai by the CCPA, but at his inaugural mass, he announced his resignation from the association. Bishop Ma has been under house arrest since then, and the CCPA stripped him of his title in December 2012. Bishop Ma’s resignation highlighted the dangerous schism that still exists between the churches faithful to the Holy See and those loyal to the Communist Party. Observers agree that tensions are at their highest point in fifty years and many fear retribution against those who practice the Catholic faith in China.

Pope Benedict placed repaired relations with China and Chinese Catholics at the top of his agenda. He did not succeed in his efforts, perhaps because diplomacy languished under his tenure as scandals mounted within the Church. However, Pope Francis I would do well to rekindle relations with China and attempt to improve the lives of all people seeking to worship freely in China, not only Catholics.

China already has laid out its terms for renewed dialogue with the Holy See after the election of the next pope. Beijing has demanded it will not work with the Holy See unless the Vatican “severs diplomatic ties with Taiwan” and “refrains from interfering with China’s internal affairs.” Managing this relationship represents a real challenge for the new Pope, one that will take significant time and effort. One avenue would be for Pope [name] to renew high-level engagement with the CCPA and attempt to restart the informal dialogue that had succeeded to a degree before 2010.

The new pontiff must be firm yet cautious in his attempts to bring Chinese Catholics back to the Holy See. One does not have to look very far into history to be reminded that missteps could trigger the resurgence of the type of Chinese repression that the world witnessed the 1990s. The Communist Party imprisoned tens of thousands, and over 2,000 died, during the crackdown on the Falun Gong, a meditation group that protested against the government. Members of the Falun Gong still languish in forced labor camps, known as laogai, throughout China, where they receive the “longest sentences and worst treatment,” according to Human Rights Watch.

The new Pope should tread cautiously along an extremely thin line in making his case. Overtures to Chinese Catholics that are construed as stirring dissent may be met with an iron fist. Yet, the Pope’s efforts to heal the divisions among Chinese Catholics are a step forward, and have strong implications for human rights in China. The United States should support the Vatican in these endeavors. 

The tiny island kingdom has been beset by increasingly-violent protests since February 2011. During that period, protestors have called for democratic reforms and equal rights under the law, with some going so far as to demand the dissolution of the monarchy. Those protests have been met with force by the regime, aided by a symbolic deployment of Saudi and UAE security forces.

My full argument offerng one way to stop the brutal repression in Bahrain is available at The Atlantic. Below is a bit more background about the conflict in Bahrain.

Bahrain in Context

The island kingdom of Bahrain is wedged between three much larger neighbors—Iran to the north, Saudi Arabia to the south and west, and UAE to the east.

Bahrain's geographical location also puts its squarely in the center of a major cultural divide in the Arab world. Like Iran to its north, Bahrain's citizens are mostly Shia. But Bahrain's government is mostly Sunni, much like Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The video below provides a bit more detail on the Sunni-Shia divide in Bahrain.

A Brief History of the Conflict

For over two years, the Al-Khalifa monarchy in Bahrain has attempted to quell serious political and social upheaval within the tiny island nation. All signs point to continued, if not intensified, violence between the Sunni regime and the protesting Shia majority. Prior to the two-year anniversary of protests on February 14, 2013, the Al-Khalifa government reconvened a national dialogue, bringing together both pro-government Sunni groups and anti-regime Shia groups.

The latest round of talks were derailed when regime forces shot and killed a protester on the anniversary of the uprising. Violent protests resulted in the death of a police officer less than a day later.

These deaths continue to fuel sectarian strife. In March of 2011, Saudi troops intervened in Bahrain to secure critical infrastructure and to support government troops, while police from the UAE aided in the crackdown. That Sunni troops Saudi Arabia and the UAE have supported Bahraini security forces—a force which also actively recruits Sunni foreign nationals—further entrenched the sectarian divide between the regime and the mostly Shia protestors.

My piece in The Atlantic has a more detailed timeline of the conflict.

Arms Sales to Bahrain

The Fifth Fleet’s presence isn’t the only U.S. military involvement in Bahrain. United States’ weapons sales to Bahrain have totalled $1.4 billion since 2000. Historically, the United States and other Western nations have had close ties to the Al-Khalifa regime. According to Amnesty International, eight European countries and the United States have given significant amounts of arms and other tools to the regime since 2007.

Arms Transfers to Bahrain 2005-2012

* Mark Bromley and Pieter Wezeman, Policies on exports of arms to states affected by the Arab Spring, International Arms Transfers, SIPRI Yearbook 2012.

What alternatives to race-based affirmative action are available to colleges? Since students of color are disproportionately low-income, programs that consider students’ socioeconomic backgrounds have the power to increase both economic and racial/ethnic diversity. Kahlenberg and I explored some of these options last fall in a Century Foundation report, A Better Affirmative Action.

I’d like to call attention to three areas for reform where public flagship universities have successfully implemented race-neutral programs that promote diversity.

Make changes to admissions to increase low-income students’ access.

Programs like the Texas Top Ten Percent Plan increase representation of low-income students and students of color indirectly; Texas’ plan guarantees admission to public universities in the state for all Texas high school seniors in the top 10 percent of their graduating class (a group that includes wealthy suburban valedictorians as well as top graduates from under-resourced inner-city schools). But colleges can also ask direct questions about students’ socioeconomic backgrounds and use that information to give low-income students a leg up, considering their achievements in light of obstacles overcome. The statewide ApplyTexas application, for example, asks “Do you have family obligations that keep you from participating in extracurricular activities?”

Boost financial aid.

Changes to financial aid can serve as a way of attracting and retaining low-income students. The Collegebound Nebraska program, for example, offers free in-state tuition for Nebraska residents who are Pell Grant recipients and maintain minimum credit-hour and GPA requirements.

Develop recruitment and support programs for low-income students.

At Florida State University, the Center for Academic Retention and Enhancement recruits first-generation and economically disadvantaged students through outreach in high schools and supports these students once enrolled with programs such as summer orientation and extra academic services.

Our report examined ten public flagship universities that eliminated the use of race in admissions at some point in the past two decades. At seven of them, the race-neutral admissions policies adopted to replace affirmative action either maintained or increased representation of African American and Latino students on campus.

If Kahlenberg is right, Fisher v. Texas might mean the end of affirmative action as we know it in higher education. But if college presidents embrace race-neutral alternatives, the end of affirmative action could open the way for greater student diversity.

Ryan’s budget would reduce near-term primary spending (excluding net interest) by $42 billion in fiscal 2013, $121 billion in fiscal 2014, and $343 billion in fiscal 2015, all relative to CBO’s alternative fiscal scenario (AFS) current policy baseline.¹ The fiscal 2013 spending cut represents the remainder of sequestration cuts scheduled for this year. Additionally, the Ryan budget would increase revenue by $58 billion in fiscal 2014 and $98 billion in fiscal 2015 by allowing the “business tax extenders” to expire. While tax increases have a much smaller drag per dollar than government spending cuts, this still contributes to the economic drag from the Ryan budget.

On net, we estimate that the Ryan budget would decrease gross domestic product (GDP) by 1.7 percent and decrease nonfarm payroll employment by 2.0 million jobs in calendar year 2014 relative to current policy. We estimate that the Ryan budget would increase the unemployment rate by between 0.6 percentage points and 0.8 percentage points. The Ryan budget would push the output gap—the difference between actual output and non-inflationary potential output, which registered $985 billion (5.9 percent of potential) as of the fourth quarter of 2012—from 4.4 percent under the AFS baseline back to 5.9 percent. By proposing a budget that would leave the output gap unchanged from 5.9 percent of potential GDP by the end of 2014, Ryan has essentially proposed that for at least two years the U.S. economy make zero relative progress in emerging from the current adverse economic equilibrium of depressed economic output, slow growth, high unemployment, and large cyclical budget deficits.

While the full brunt of Ryan’s austerity would not not take effect until 2014, it’s worth noting that his budget would also lower economic growth by 0.6 percentage points, and employment would fall by 750,000 jobs in calendar year 2013—mostly due to sequestration taking effect for the remainder of the year (and consistent with CBO’s estimate that sequestration will reduce employment by 750,000 jobs this year). Job losses would then rise to a total of 2.0 million in 2014, as new austerity measures kick in and the economic drag from sequestration increases.

CBO’s economic projections show real GDP growth accelerating to 4.0 percent in 2014, the beginning of the economy’s rapid return to full employment that has routinely been projected four to five years from CBO’s forecast issuances. The Ryan budget would guarantee that growth rates in this range do not materialize in 2014 or 2015, and likely would take even longer than that to show up. As a result, the U.S. economy would remain depressed for longer than forecast, cyclical budget deficits would be larger than forecast, and additional economic scarring from productive resources atrophying would further decrease long-run potential output. Higher unemployment would also compound the decade-long trend of falling real income for median working age households and the three-decade long trend of widening income inequality. In short, the Ryan budget would reduce middle-class living standards, both present and future.

This approach to fiscal policy ignores a plethora of historical and international evidence and a wide consensus among economists that austerity measures—particularly spending cuts—wreak havoc on depressed economies, to the point of being fiscally counterproductive: primary spending cuts are simply replaced with bigger cyclical budget deficits as depressed economic activity reduces tax receipts and increases automatic spending (e.g., unemployment benefits), and a poorer nation will have a harder time sustaining its debt.

Empirical evidence and economic research over the last two years confirms the substantial danger that austerity presents to depressed economies’ output and fiscal health. We see this not only in comprehensive cross-country comparisons, but with individual countries. The United Kingdom was pushed back into recession by Prime Minister David Cameron’s austerity budget, and many other European countries have short-circuited their recoveries with austerity measures.

It is unfortunate that Chairman Ryan has again failed to heed mounting evidence counseling against near-term budget austerity. Instead, his fiscal 2014 budget—like the two preceding it—has proposed deep and premature austerity that would unequivocally delay return to full employment and cost millions of American jobs relative to current budget policy.

________________________________________________________________________

¹The Ryan budget has been adjusted to exclude funding levels for overseas contingency operations (OCO). CBO’s AFS baseline has been adjusted to exclude both OCO funding and the inflation-adjusted continuation of emergency disaster relief for Hurricane Sandy appropriated for fiscal 2013 (which is continued in both CBO’s current law and AFS baselines, but is not continued in the Ryan budget).

Complicated it was. For his host, Afghan president Hamid Karzai, upended all of Washington's ingrained assumptions about who its Afghan allies are, and even suggested the Americans are now in cahoots with the Taliban.

"I was once a politician," Hagel redundantly observed. No need to be indignant: Karzai's drumbeat of criticism is part of the normal posturing of practitioners of the trade. "So I can understand the kind of pressures [politicians]—especially leaders of countries—are always under."

Hagel has it right. An astute political animal, Karzai recognizes that the Afghan public long ago soured on the American military presence. He doesn't believe his republic needs the foreign troops to survive past next year.

And he calculates that assailing the foreigners—and insinuating they're conspiring with the Taliban to double-cross him—is his best ticket to shoring up the legitimacy of his regime as it takes charge of facing down the insurgency on its own.

Ironically, many of Karzai's critics in Afghanistan accuse him of conspiring with the Taliban—or at least trying desperately to court them, since the Taliban continue to rebuff his overtures. And the debate crystallized around the issue of Bagram prison just as Hagel was arriving in Kabul.

The Americans inflamed Karzai's bile by abruptly canceling the long-delayed final handover of Bagram prison and its last inmates to the Afghan government, which had at last been scheduled for March 9. But U.S. officials had not retreated from their demand that Karzai commit to keeping behind bars these last prisoners, whom they deem too dangerous for release.

In Washington, President Obama's conservative critics have pressed him hard. House Armed Services Committee Chairman Howard "Buck" McKeon warned Obama these detainees—who Karzai says include "many innocent people"—"represent an enduring and continuous threat both to our U.S. forces on the ground in Afghanistan as well as to U.S. national security."

For Afghans, though, it's Afghan national forces on the ground, and Afghan national security, that are most immediately at stake. And Karzai insists that Afghans, not foreigners, will decide who must stay in detention. This is a test of Afghan sovereignty, he argues—and if there are suspects against whom even a complaisant Afghan court cannot find convincing evidence, he will not be the Americans' jailer.

More to the point, Karzai wants the flexibility to use prisoner releases as bargaining chips for dealing with the Taliban. The fiercest enemies of the Taliban in Kabul are already up in arms (perhaps literally, some fear) about Karzai's supposedly chasing after them to give them a share of power. "One of Karzai's goals is to have no Taliban in prisons and have them released," one opposition leader complained to Afghan journalists.

The trick for Karzai is to keep the Kabul coalition together even as he reaches out to the insurgency in hopes of cutting a deal. So far, despite his seeming paranoia about secret dealings, it appears that the Obama administration has been above board with him in deflecting Taliban approaches for bilateral talks, even over hostage releases. The United States has insisted that in any talks it has with the insurgency, Karzai have someone at the table.

To date, the strongly anti-Taliban factions in Afghan politics have been playing by the constitutionally prescribed rules of the game, in part thanks to the foreigners on whose military and financial largess they all have relied. But they, like Karzai, see the inevitable withdrawal of Western troops as a game-changer, particularly if the electoral game for awarding power is rigged.

Karzai and his inner circle have calculated that Afghanistan's vastly expanded armed forces can hold the line against the insurgency—so long as the international community keeps the funding spigot open to pay army salaries, and keeps the development funding in the pipeline. Ideally sooner, but ultimately later, they believe a frustrated insurgency will either negotiate a settlement with Kabul or run out of steam, having lost the hated alien forces as its prime recruiting tool. (The palace seems to assume Afghans are inured to corruption and kleptocracy.)

In this respect, Karzai's demand for ousting U.S. special forces from Wardak province, just east of Kabul, makes Afghan political sense if not U.S. military sense. They're going to be gone sooner or later, and if they're gone sooner, seemingly at his command, he will show Afghans that he, not the foreigners, is in control of Afghanistan. Karzai, of course, is assuming major risks, since Wardak is the gateway to Kabul.

Amid all the political posturing and positioning as the pace of American and European troop withdrawal accelerates, the United Nations Security Council is hammering out the mandate for the one international presence that is slated to continue in Afghanistan past 2014. The U.N. mission in Afghanistan is due for renewal next week, with responsibility for assisting with the integrity of next year's national elections, protecting the gains in education and human rights, and reducing illicit drug production, insha'allah.

On so thin a reed do the slender hopes of Afghan civil society for the country's long-term future ultimately rest.

I'd love to see more labor organizing in the South. There are SO many low-income workers that we can organize around here. #u1nation

—
Douglas Williams (@DougWilliams85) February 21, 2013

Now, I know that there are campaigns going on down here; I am not so foolish as to think that organized labor is completely absent in the South. But the struggle for collective bargaining down here is largely invisible, outside of stories about foreign automakers locating here because of the lower union density here. To that end, the folks at The Rick Smith Show, which is a pro-worker radio show in central Pennsylvania, responded with this:

@dougwilliams85 (as you know) There's organizing in the south. It's often not reported to the north-based media or across the south #u1nation

—
Rick Smith (@RickSmithShow) February 21, 2013

The rest of the conversation goes as follows:

@RickSmithShow But that invisibility gives the sense that labor isn't active down here. We have to do what we can to combat that. #u1nation

—
Douglas Williams (@DougWilliams85) February 21, 2013

@dougwilliams85 I agree.That means creating more worker media in the south, getting better communications in the south (1/2) #u1nation

—
Rick Smith (@RickSmithShow) February 21, 2013

@dougwilliams85 and having the north based media cover it. if I show up at a conference I want your organizing stories over policy #u1nation

—
Rick Smith (@RickSmithShow) February 21, 2013

That last response floored me. I had never considered what the lack of a pro-worker media infrastructure was doing to perceptions of union activity here in the South. I decided to go look up whether there were blogs that focused on the labor movement in the South. I found . . . this and this. That was it. I looked for labor news here in Alabama, and this was the only recent thing that I could find. In other states, the news has centered around policies and legislation, but nothing about the actual labor movement. It starts to make you wonder . . . who is telling the story of labor unions in the South? You hear a lot from people like Gov. Nikki Haley (R-SC), who said in her State of the State address from 2012:

Finally, I love that we are one of the least unionized states in the country. It is an economic development tool unlike any other. Our companies in South Carolina understand that they are only as good as those who work for them, and they take care of their employees. The people of South Carolina have a strong work ethic, they value loyalty, and they take tremendous pride in the quality of their work. We don’t have unions in South Carolina because we don’t need unions in South Carolina.

But it seems that you do not hear much from the workers. You do not hear from the unions that are working to organize people. You do not hear from the activists on the ground, and what they are up against when they seek to lift up workers in areas that are very hostile to that sort of activity. When the pain and struggle of grinding poverty is so clear and present in the South, why is the one movement that could have a direct impact on that so invisible?

We need more pro-worker media here in the South. Whether it is blog posts like this, or newsletters, or radio shows like Rick Smith’s in Pennsylvania or Workers Independent News, or e-mail listservs, or activists’ conferences, we need to be more visible to working people. Hell, I would be fine if there were lists like this one that told people where they could shop and support their local unionized businesses. The benefits of creating a pro-worker media source in the South are evident: coverage that escapes the framing of a corporate media more interested in kowtowing to sponsors than providing information, giving voice to activists and the challenges that they face in organizing workers, and, most importantly, giving voice to those workers who recognize the benefits of collective bargaining and want a piece of that for themselves, their families, and their communities.

I come from a family of labor and community organizers. My father has been a member of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers since 1983, when he started working at Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Virginia. He would tell me stories growing up about the importance of labor and the need for solidarity amongst workers from all background. Even after he was laid off from the Shipyard in 1993, he continued to be an advocate as he moved through a private sector that did not feature the same protections for workers that he once enjoyed. The stories that he has told me have stayed with me all my life, particularly as I have honed my research focus on public policies that affect pro-labor organizing.

Storytelling has been an important tradition in labor organizing. I came of age in my late teens reading books such as From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend and Strike! and visiting places such as the Union Miners’ Cemetery in Mount Olive, Illinois, where labor organizer Mary Harris “Mother” Jones is buried. My father took me on his trainings throughout the Midwest when he became a labor educator for the IAMAW, and I heard the stories of those people who were on the ground, representing workers in disciplinary hearings and grievances on the shop floor. The labor movement was made real for me by hearing these people talk about how they were fighting a system that seemed to place productivity and profit over people more and more everyday.

The debate over collective bargaining in the South has been very one-sided. That has to end if we are ever going to see any progress towards better working conditions and a more humane standard of living for working people down here.

If the couple succeeds at forcing the Lebanese government to officially recognize their marriage, the state will have to draft a whole raft of new laws to deal with everything from inheritance and custody to voting rights, since the couple has removed religious sect from their identity cards. It’s a long-overdue initiative from the embattled secularists of the Middle East. All over, clerics have had the momentum. In the Arab world, almost all states leave personal matters for the majority to Islamic law and for minorities to their own sectarian courts. Secular Jews in Israel have long bristled that marriage and conversion solely fall under the authority of the ultra-Orthodox sect, and there is no secular civil marriage. Especially since the Arab uprisings, religious forces have had the momentum. But there’s a secular response, and it hopefully will play a bigger part than it has until now, with secular activists so off balance that they’ve even stopped calling themselves “secular,” preferring the less incendiary term “civil.”

As I report in The Boston Globe Ideas section this week:

BEIRUT — Kholoud Sukkarieh and Nidal Darwish weren’t interested in making legal history when they got engaged last year. She’s a Sunni Muslim and he is Shia, and like many interfaith couples in this part of the world who don’t want to convert, they planned to get married outside their home country. Then, at a photography workshop, Sukkarieh met a lawyer with a cause and an intriguing proposal: Would she and her fiancé be interested in using their wedding to do something radical?

Last November, they tied the knot before a willing notary, becoming the first couple in the history of Lebanon to marry in a nonreligious ceremony. In January they embarked on what promises to be a long, fraught challenge to the legal status quo, using an obscure provision of old colonial law to demand that the Lebanese government officially recognize their marriage.

What sounds like a simple thing in the West—a civil marriage with a judge or a notary presiding, and no religious contract—is a near-impossibility in the Middle East. Their marriage, and the controversy it has triggered here, shines a light on a crucial but unappreciated way in which this region differs from much of the rest of the world. Lebanon, like almost all the Arab states, most Islamic countries, and Israel, simply doesn’t have civil laws for matters of personal status.

In the Middle East the laws governing marriage, inheritance, and sometimes even citizenship move only when religious authorities allow, which means they’ve remained almost entirely static during the last century. They stifle identity and cause countless problems for families whose members might include different faiths or different nationalities; for couples that want to divorce; for women, who often have far fewer rights than men under religious codes; and for people who want to equitably share their inheritance with their daughters.

Kholoud and Nidal are part of a wider movement fighting for a shared vision of citizenship independent of religion and ethnicity; rule of law unencumbered by the interpretations and distortions of clerics. Activists for women’s equality, due process, anti-corruption, immigration reform, and all manner of human rights and legal causes have found themselves butting heads against clerical dominion, from Morocco to Iran and farther afield. Not all of them openly wish for a fully secular state (and even some who do are careful not to say so in public), but they make up a serious movement. As Islamists gain strength, so too will the backlash against them.

“Only a secular regime guarantees freedom, even freedom of religion,” says Lina Abou-Habib, who runs a Beirut-based NGO that pushes for women’s rights around the region. One of their many campaigns hopes to force Arab governments to allow women to pass citizenship to their children—a right currently reserved, in most places, for men alone. Abou-Habib says the hegemony of clerics has led to absurdity. She’s a Greek Orthodox Christian married to a Sunni Muslim; under the prevailing legal code, since she hasn’t converted, if she were to die now her daughter wouldn’t even be able to inherit her car.

For Sukkarieh and Darwish, getting their marriage registered with the state has become a consuming second career. So far the government has withheld legal recognition of their marriage contract, but courts have recognized it—which, in Lebanon’s complicated bureaucracy, is looking like a victory for the couple. And the larger argument appears just to be beginning. Lebanon’s president came out on Twitter in favor of civil marriage; the billionaire prime minister opposed it. At the end of January, the top Sunni cleric threatened to excommunicate anyone who supported civil marriage, but the richest and most powerful Sunni politician said he supported civil marriage and opposed the mufti.

Meanwhile, other couples say they intend to follow their lead as soon as the issue is resolved. A Lebanese journalist has tentatively scheduled a group civil wedding for more couples in April, assuming the pathbreaking marriage successfully wins formal recognition this month.

It’s been 70 years since some Lebanese started talking about civil marriage, and no couple has gotten as far as Sukkarieh and Darwish. At a time when the future of the Arab state is being vigorously contested by empowered citizens around the region, secular activists have been buoyed by the unexpected landmark in Lebanon. It’s premature to read too much into it; after all, Islamists are sweeping to power in elections all over, and it could take decades for their own internal schisms and inconsistencies to create openings for a strong secular alternative. But the civil marriage faction hopes to build that, one family at a time. “We didn’t expect it,” Sukkarieh said, “but we’ve rejuvenated civil society.”

The couple is expecting a baby in the fall. The justice minister said this month that there is no legal barrier to registering their marriage, but the interior minister hasn’t actually done so. At the glacial pace at which politics and bureaucracy move here, Kholoud Sukkarieh and Nidal Darwish could have a baby before they have a civil marriage legally recognized in Lebanon. And it’s quite likely that a baby born to the couple this year would be out of diapers and probably talking before the state has figured out what body of law to apply to the first civil, secular child of the first civil marriage.

Read all of The Middle East’s fight for civil marriage at The Boston Globe.

Filibusters have become increasingly common. As my colleague Ben Landy shows, filibuster use has increased dramatically during periods of Republican minorities in the Senate.

The past three years have seen an average of a filibuster per day. Given these figures, it's not so hard to see why the nation continues to lurch from one crisis to the next.

The Senate was never intended to act as a body that required 60 votes for conducting any routine business. It's time to reform the filibuster and get the Senate back to the business of voting on laws.

There is little argument that the results of the Head Start Impact Study, which began collecting data on children in 2002 and followed them through third grade, were underwhelming. Children were randomly assigned to Head Start, while others were not (and presumably enrolled in some other type of child care or preschool). Although Head Start modestly improved children’s preschool outcomes when compared to children who did “something else,” none of the benefits were detectable by the time the children reached third grade. This “fade-out,” or perhaps “catching up” of other children, has generated derision from Head Start’s opponents and consternation among its supporters.

While state pre-K programs have not been subject to such extensive scrutiny, several short-term studies suggest that they produce positive outcomes that are two or more times greater than those from Head Start. One possible reason is that the state programs are quite different from Head Start. Since its birth in 1965, Head Start has tried to boost the school readiness of low-income children by providing comprehensive services that include health and social services, as well as preschool education. Head Start tries to engage parents in their children’s development and devotes particular attention to children with special needs. In contrast to the “whole child” model of Head Start, state pre-K programs focus more narrowly on providing preschool education, with some states hiring only highly-educated teachers. In addition, several states have expanded program eligibility to families whose incomes are too high for Head Start, while other states allow children living in poverty to enroll in programs that also serve privately funded children. The two models, in many ways, are fundamentally different.

Knowing all this, Obama’s policy team wants to direct federal dollars to state pre-K programs, and encourage Head Start to concentrate its efforts more on serving families with younger children up to age three. Federal support for state-level pre-K programs would foster the experimentation required to determine which program components are critical elements of “quality,” and could help states build the systemic supports, such as early learning standards, data collection, and the use of assessments to improve instruction, for quality programs that the field has historically lacked.

Yet by expanding preschool access to families with moderate incomes, the Obama initiative also creates an historic opportunity to sharpen the policy focus on what constitutes high-quality preschool and to rethink Head Start. State pre-K programs have already been remarkably successful at offering access to economically diverse preschool classrooms, which Head Start, serving mostly families below the poverty line, cannot do. My own research, using data from 11 state pre-K programs, indicates that children who attend diverse pre-K classrooms learn more language and math skills than children in homogenous classrooms. On some outcomes, the benefit was comparable in size to the advantage of having a good (vs. average) teacher, and even rivaled the effect of children’s family background on how much they learned during a preschool year.

One might think the reason for this boost is that more diverse classrooms have better teachers than those serving high-poverty classrooms. But the data indicate that this was not the case, which suggests that what is really happening relates to positive peer effects. While the study was not randomized and therefore subject to the possibility that families in diverse programs nurtured their children’s learning in unmeasured ways, it is consistent with other research that has found benefits for children who attend preschool with peers who have more cognitive skills, at least as measured on assessments, which often correlates with higher income.

How could peers affect each other’s learning? In the best preschool programs, children engage in play that is rich in learning opportunities. They collaborate on projects and pretend together, often chatting expressively while constructing elaborate schemes and solving problems. In short, early learning occurs in a uniquely social context, which means children learn a lot from each other. In my own study and others on peer effects, no “harm” is done to higher skilled children, and they may benefit in unseen and even profound ways by forging friendships with children who are different from them.

To be fair, the founders of Head Start wanted an economically diverse program, but advocates for low- income families wanted to keep the programs focused on the least advantaged children. The President’s initiative creates an opportunity to revisit this question. It’s time to think about combining Head Start and pre-K programs that enroll four-year-olds, drawing on the strengths of both, to weave a seamless early education system. By offering preschool to more children who are living well above the poverty line, we could expand the number of economically diverse classrooms, and perhaps nurture more learning by children. That would be a better outcome for everyone.

The traditional path for such well-intentioned films has been limited theatrical distribution, possibly followed by a run on cable, and then on-demand video and DVDs. As with all films, the makers’ goals are accolades from festivals and admiring reviews, a distribution deal that helps to cover costs and provide promotion, and an audience that comes away moved or impressed with the film’s purpose.

Now, however, filmmakers with determination to affect people beyond the screen can achieve so much more: Each film has an extensive presence on the Internet, with social media being used to spread the word and share accumulated viewers’ experience. The filmmakers’ objective is to turn the movie into a catalyst for action. (Perhaps the leading example of this phenomenon is still Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, an Oscar-winner in 2006 that brought climate change to the forefront of public concern and activities.)

I should acknowledge that I am especially aware of these movies and their accompanying campaigns because of connections to each of the filmmakers and producers. So decide for yourselves their ultimate worth and impact. But each one, I’d argue, is a powerful case showing how films can galvanize public awareness of problems and become instrumental in building movements to confront them.

Girl Rising, which premieres this week, is the work of 10X10, a group founded by journalists at The Documentary Group and Vulcan Productions, and with strategic backing from the Intel Corporation (girlrising.com is the place to start for a comprehensive account of all that is happening in the project). The film, directed by Richard Robbins, tells in both a documentary format and narratives the stories of girls from among the world’s poorest peoples, whose lives are transformed by enrolling in school. Each girl from Haiti, Peru, Egypt, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, India, Nepal, and Cambodia is paired with a celebrated writer from their country. Narrators include Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, and Cate Blanchett. The goal of the film is to show what education could do for the 66 million girls around the world currently denied access to school. The 10X10 organization has brought together a formidable array of partners from a cross-section of NGOs and corporations to drive the social action plan, with funds raised for that purpose. The innovative distribution strategy is a partnership with a service called Gathr Films that will bring the movie to any community that can put together enough of an audience to justify the screening. At last count, 10X10 was well along on the goal of 1,000 screenings after the film’s official release. Girl Rising will also be shown on CNN in prime-time in June.

A Place at The Table is a Participant Media film directed by Lori Silverbush and Kristi Jacobson about the enormous number of Americans—49 million people, according to current estimates—considered “food insecure,” meaning that their next meal is not assured. It had its theatrical opening on March 1, and is also available on iTunes and on-demand. The notion of such widespread hunger in the world’s wealthiest nation is stunning. The film makes the case—both through narration by experts and personal stories—that the scale of the problem is not exaggerated. (PublicAffairs is publisher of a companion book to the film that is a part of the outreach program that Participant Media uses to further its social-advocacy objectives.) The comprehensive website is takepart.com/place-at-the-table.

Escape Fire: The Fight to Rescue American Health Care, by Matthew Heineman and Susan Froemke, has already received significant recognition. It was a selection of the 2012 Sundance Festival and was released to theaters last fall by Roadside Productions. It also was available on-demand, and a DVD with additional features has just been released. On March 10, it will be shown as a CNN documentary feature at 8:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. EST (escapefiremovie.com is the place to find a complete rundown of how to follow up on the issues in the film). A central part of the innovative advocacy strategy was screenings at scores of medical schools and military installations, where audiences are acutely aware of how serious the problems in America’s health-care system continue to be. A summary of the film on its website asserts that “Escape Fire examines the powerful forces maintaining the status quo, a medical industry designed for quick fixes rather than prevention, for profit-driven care rather than patient-driven care. After decades of resistance, a movement to bring innovative high-touch, low-cost methods of prevention and healing into our high-tech costly system is finally gaining ground.”

Raising the funds to make these films is a formidable challenge and a long-term undertaking that only a truly determined filmmaker—and the supporters they attract—should even consider. The prospects for a significant commercial return are negligible. But the potential audience for these films is now substantially greater than ever before because of the many ways and places they can be viewed. In addition, they have the developing tools of social media to mobilize an effective, widespread public response for dealing with what were considered seemingly intractable problems. All this, by any measurement, justifies whatever efforts it takes to get them made.

To a surprising extent, our adverse budget deficit picture over the next decade is the result of forgone tax revenues. As a result of the Great Recession, we lost about $2 trillion in revenue over the last few years, relative to our historic rate of tax collections as a percentage of GDP. Looking ahead, the fiscal cliff tax deal will reduce future tax revenues by $4 trillion, relative to what CBO had projected under its 2012 baseline. Together, these past and future forgone revenues amount to a roughly $7 trillion contribution to our deficits from 2008 – 2023 (including interest costs on increased borrowings). To a large extent, both sequestration and the budget caps of the 2011 Budget Control Act are efforts to recoup on the spending side monies that were forgone from the revenue side.

There is no short-term crisis in financing the national debt; Treasury borrowing rates are at near-record lows. Nor is there a general crisis in the availability or cost of capital for the private sector. The short-term crisis is about jobs; the CBO projects that 2014 will be the first time since the Great Depression that unemployment remains over 7.5 percent for six consecutive years. But deficit reduction through eliminating wasteful tax expenditures can offer little short-term help here.

The long-term problem is entitlements spending, particularly spending on healthcare. For that matter, healthcare is our biggest immediate spending problem as well. The United States today spends much more on healthcare (public and private) per capita than does any other developed economy in the world. If the United States were to expend per capita what Norway (the second place country) does on healthcare, our aggregate healthcare spending (public and private) would immediately decline by some $880 billion/year.

While long-term entitlement spending reform is critical, we must “boil the frog slowly,” to borrow a phrase from Senate Finance Committee Chairman Baucus. Both our citizens’ expectations and our healthcare delivery institutions are built around current policies. Change must follow a predictable path that starts in the near future, phases in slowly, and comes to rest with new institutions that will serve the needs of Americans for decades to come. The requirement that we boil the frog slowly in turn has important implications for tax revenues over the medium term.

Defense discretionary spending is the other great outlier in U.S. government spending policies. By one estimate, the United States spends as much on its military as do the next 14 countries combined – 41 percent of the entire world’s military expenditures.

Current levels of nondefense discretionary spending are modest by world norms. This “spending” includes some items, like infrastructure, that are bona fide investments with long-term economic benefits. And both defense and nondefense discretionary spending already are on downward paths to reach their lowest levels in 50 years. This unrealistically aggressive assumption is baked into the CBO’s 2013 deficit projections.

The number of Americans age 65 or older will increase by more than 1/3 over the next 10 years. This has obvious implications for healthcare, social security and other government spending programs.

All these points imply that spending cuts cannot by themselves fund all of our deficit reduction requirements in the medium term. Whatever the long-term world we transition to, we will need to finance the costs of getting there, and that in turns means higher tax revenues than those we currently collect.

The United States is an extraordinarily low-taxed country by world norms – in fact, in 2012 we were the lowest taxed country in the OECD, as a percentage of GDP. And even by our own standards we have been collecting historically low levels of tax. This level of revenues cannot be reconciled with our outsized spending on healthcare and defense, and our rapidly aging population.

By all measures, the United States can afford to increase the total taxes it collects as a fraction of GDP. Just a decade ago, the country ran budget surpluses and enjoyed both a robust economy and job growth, while tax collections exceeded 20 percent of GDP.

We therefore have no practical choice but to raise the level of tax collections in the medium term to the range of 21 percent of GDP, rather than the 19 percent figure projected by the 2013 CBO baseline.

Economists prefer to raise additional tax revenues, when necessary, through broadening the tax base, rather than raising marginal rates. Unlike 1986, when the tax system overflowed with unintended tax shelters that could be cleaned up and traded off against lower rates, this means directly tackling some of the deliberate Congressional subsidy programs baked into the tax code, which is to say, tax expenditures.

Of all current law’s tax expenditures, the most important to address in tax reform are the personal itemized deductions, such as the deductions for home mortgage interest, charitable contributions and state and local taxes. They are extraordinarily costly subsidies – about $250 billion/year in forgone tax revenues. They are inefficient, in that they lead to major misallocations of economic resources, particularly with respect to housing. They are poorly targeted, in that the government subsidies go to individuals who would have behaved the same without the subsidies. And they are unfair, in that they are “upside down” subsidies – they subsidize high-income Americans more than low-income ones.

I recommend that we replace the personal itemized deductions (and the standard deduction) with 15 percent tax credits. My preliminary estimate is that doing so will raise about $1.5 trillion in revenues over the next 10 years (without taking into account any transition relief).

My suggestion would still preserve about one-half the aggregate current economic value of personal itemized deductions, but would do so in a way that adds to the progressivity of the tax code. Nonetheless, the scale-back in the value of the personal itemized deductions should be phased in over several years.

I fully recognize that the home mortgage interest deduction and other personal itemized deductions invariably are described as “sacred cows.” But they are sacred cows that we can no longer afford to maintain. Either we corral these sacred cows, or we allow them to stampede over us.