Posts Tagged ‘ Health care ’

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Mike Konczal versus the Middle Class

Thursday, August 19th, 2010
Scott Winship


Scott Winship is research manager of the Pew Economic Mobility Project and a recent graduate of Harvard's doctoral program in social policy. The views he expresses do not represent those of Pew.

by Scott Winship

Mike Konczal returned from vacation and promptly put up a post criticizing my take-down of Edward Luce’s horrible Financial Times piece on “the crisis of the middle class”.  It’s become apparent to me over the past few years that I’ve been in D.C. that you can’t refute a specific empirical question about the situation of the poor or middle class (e.g., is it in crisis? as in much worse off than in the past?) without being attacked on much broader grounds than you staked out and being called an opponent of these groups or an insensitive jerk. I actually don’t disagree with much that Mike writes “against” my “views”.

What I do disagree with is the contention that the middle class is in crisis.  And I think that it’s bad to believe (and assert for mass audiences) that that’s true because it hurts consumer sentiment, prolonging high unemployment, and diverts attention from the truly disadvantaged who really are in crisis.  Mike can say that that pits me against the middle class (his post was titled, “Scott Winship versus the Middle Class”), but then let me ask Mike and others who would disagree with me a simple question:  Why do you think Americans are deluded about their economic conditions, since in June, 7 in 10 American adults said their “current household financial situation” is better than “most” Americans’ (Q.25, disclosure: the poll was commissioned by my old employer)?  Why are you against the middle class?

Mike says that when I say some problem affects a tiny fraction of the population, that’s like a hit man saying that he doesn’t kill that many people as a fraction of the population – the “Marty Blank gambit” as he calls it.  But look, that’s not an apt analogy.  If I were saying that we shouldn’t give a rat’s ass about the tiny share of the population that experiences a bankruptcy, that would be using the Marty Blank gambit.  I never said that, and I wouldn’t.  But if you convince everyone in the middle class that they are just one bad break away from bankruptcy, then you shouldn’t be surprised when they don’t spend their money and the recovery continues to stall.  It’s important to convey the facts correctly.  Mike is stalling the recovery!  Why are you against the middle class, Mike??

Finally, I think the best chart I’ve seen that puts all of this into perspective (which I made myself) is the following showing health insurance trends:

Anyone who wants the data can email me at scott@scottwinship.com.

And contrary to Mike’s assertion, the fraction of under-insured has not increased.  You can read the conclusion of my dissertation if you want to see what the facts show.

I’ll keep being concerned about the people who are in crisis, but I’m not going to buy in to the conventional wisdom among progressives that the middle class is in crisis.

*added note: Mike informs me that I missed the joke in his title, a Scott-Pilgrim-Versus-The-World nod.  I like to think I’m clever and witty, but clearly my lack of sleep from parenting a newborn has left me not so quick on the uptake…)

This item is cross-posted at ScottWinshipWeb.

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Posted in Daily Fix | 1 Comment »

“We Know the Kids Can Achieve”

Friday, June 18th, 2010
Jared Polis


Rep. Jared Polis represents Colorado’s Second Congressional District and is a member of the House Education and Labor Committee. He is a former chairman of the Colorado State Board of Education who founded and served as the superintendent of charter schools serving at-risk student populations.

by Jared Polis

The following is an excerpt from Rep. Jared Polis’s (D-CO) remarks at the PPI Capital Forum — Turnaround Schools: Rising to the Challenge:

Let me start by thanking the Progressive Policy Institute for their pioneering work, their work that led to the explosion of the charter school movement…as well as the support of PPI for education reform generally, which truly is a civil-rights issue. This is an issue of how does our society achieve equality, equality of opportunity, regardless of your race, your income bracket, your geography. The fact that you should have equality of free public education, regardless of your ZIP code, is the civil-rights issue and challenge for our current generation.

On the current blueprint for the administration: I’d give it an A-minus….If you’re asking me how to get it to an A, I would say, more of a focus on early childhood, as well as a focus on the continuum of early childhood all the way through higher education. And Colorado and other states are doing great things around access to higher education at the high-school level, moving to dual-enrollment options. I would love to see more of a federal emphasis on some of these programs that are successful on a state-by-state basis.

Two, I personally would like to see more explicit preservation and support for what had been done under No Child Left Behind with supplemental services and after-school programs, some of which have been proven effective, some of which haven’t been — but letting the data drive the process, in terms of making sure quality after-school programs are available in schools where the kids need it, be they provided by private providers or the school district itself.

…Personally, I would also like to see as much focus on career readiness as college readiness. I think that the plan gives short shrift to what we traditionally call vocational education in favor of college readiness, which, of course, is critical….But there is the reality that half of our kids or more will not necessarily be matriculating for a four-year university. Let’s look at what real, employable skills they can get from our public education system, even if those services are delivered by community colleges at our high school campuses or the kids are taking college courses while they’re there. Let’s look at that career-readiness piece at the same level as the college-readiness piece.

Kids really need to graduate and a diploma needs to mean both career and college readiness. They always put the career and college readiness piece in the verbiage, but really, everything below it is about college readiness, not career readiness. So that’s a personal issue that I would have….

Clearly, the turnaround area is one of the most topical and important areas. These provide a toolbox approach for capable and competent superintendents to take the reforms that they need at the schools that are persistently failing. Now, first of all, we need to acknowledge there is no excuse for a persistently failing school. People love to make excuses.

They say, well, they’re all – you know, none of them speak English or they’re all from poor communities or none of them have good home lives – and those are all very real challenges, and we all support a holistic approach to public policy. I think our health-care bill that the Congress recently passed will go a long way toward making sure that families from all economic background have the kinds of health care they need.

But again, we have seen models succeed with kids from diverse demographic backgrounds. We have seen schools in my district in Colorado, a charter school, Ricardo Flores Magon Academy, third-grade, 80 percent ESL, 90 percent free and reduced lunch, and yet, they reached 95 percent proficiency on the state test in reading and 100 percent proficiency in math. Again, you look at the demographics and you can say, why is this school succeeding, whereas another school that serves the exact same demographic – low-income, ESL, has almost, you know, the reverse, with only 10 to 15 percent of the kids proficient at grade level?

So no excuses. We know the kids can achieve. Let’s make sure that they have the opportunity to attend a school that allows them to fulfill their potential.

For a full transcript of the event, click here (PDF). For the video, click here.

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Posted in Daily Fix, New Schools for the 21st Century | 1 Comment »

So Much for Market Mechanisms

Friday, June 18th, 2010
Ed Kilgore


Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.

by Ed Kilgore

If, as appears likely, cap-and-trade legislation is not going to be enacted this year or any other time soon, it represents more than a setback for the Obama administration (or for the environment). It’s also another blow to the high concept of using market mechanisms rather than direct government control to address major public policy challenges.

Cap-and-trade was originally designed, after all, as an alternative to command-and-control environmental regulations, which is why it was once championed by Republicans, particularly during and after its successful use in reducing acid rain in the 1990s.

But as the New York Times‘ David Leonhardt (with an exclamation point from Jonathan Chait) explained this week, Republicans have abandoned cap-and-trade just when it might be most useful, with some former advocates, ironically, embracing command-and-control:

[T]he great economic strength of market systems like cap and trade also happens to be their political weakness. They set prices and allow people to react. In the process, market systems acknowledge that reducing pollution may actually cost a little bit of money.Politicians don’t like to admit this, because voters don’t like it. Accepting higher costs is especially hard when the economy is weak. So Congressional Democrats have been repackaging their energy bills to make them look less and less market-oriented. Senator John McCain, who supported a permit system for carbon as the Republican presidential nominee, no longer does. Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, has reversed his position as well.

What does Mr. Graham now favor? A series of command-and-control regulations. He has introduced a bill with Senator Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican, that would mandate specific standards for cars, trucks, homes and offices. It would also give the energy secretary the power to award loans to companies he thought could do a good job of setting up programs to retrofit buildings. State officials would do the same for factories. The bill, in short, puts more faith in government than the market.

Leonhardt clearly believes that the transparency of cap-and-trade when it comes to costs is its major political flaw. That’s definitely a factor, but I’d argue that something more fundamental is going on. Once Democrats embraced cap-and-trade, Republicans began retreating from it as a simple matter of politics. And this distancing effort has been immensely reinforced by the rightward trend in the GOP during the last few years, in which leaders who simply denied there was any climate change problem, and/or that government had any useful role to play on the issue, have been in the ascendancy. So “cap-and-tax” was demonized and essentially placed off-limits for Republican politicians, to the point where those like Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) and Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) who weren’t quite in the “denialist” camp found it easier to just support direct federal regulation.

We saw a similar dynamic play out on health reform, where a market-based managed competition model long supported by Republicans, and championed quite recently by Mitt Romney, became toxic the moment it was fully advanced by Barack Obama. And even as they savaged ObamaCare as “socialized medicine,” Republicans saw little irony in posing as last-ditch defenders of Medicare, a relic of an earlier Democratic drive for a government-run single-payer system.

On both health care and climate change, it’s not surprising that many progressives are impatient with Obama’s determination to promote market-based approaches that the supposed party of market-based policy, the GOP, will no longer support. But nobody should for a moment mistake the identity of the prime mover in shifting the political ground away from the once-promising “centrist” convergence on using market mechanisms to address public sector challenges. The GOP could have declared partial victory and celebrated the Democratic Party’s abandonment of big government solutions, and then fought it out over the details. Instead, Republicans have burned down every structure on the potential common ground that Americans seem to crave. They may be able to succeed for a while in opportunistically deploring the inability of Democrats to get anything done. But if and when Republicans regain power, they may well discover that the GOP policy arsenal has been emptied by their own hands.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Photo credit: Magnera

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Posted in Clean Energy and Modern Infrastructure, Daily Fix, Fixing Our Broken Politics | No Comments »

Labor’s Love Lost

Monday, June 7th, 2010
Will Marshall


Will Marshall is the president of the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Will Marshall

Organized labor may be struggling to attract members, but it apparently has abundant cash to spend on a counterproductive campaign to impose ideological conformity on the Democratic Party.

A coalition of unions has targeted Sen. Blanche Lincoln, who stands accused of excessive moderation. Lincoln’s campaign says the unions have spent $10 million to defeat her in tomorrow’s Democratic primary in Arkansas. As Chris Cillizza reports in today’s Washington Post:

Ostensibly, Lincoln’s opponent is Lt. Gov. Bill Halter. But the practical reality is that she is running against a handful of major labor unions — the Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, to name two.

Labor accuses Lincoln of deviating from the party line on two key issues. She opposed the “public option” in health care and doesn’t support the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), labor’s top legislative priority. EFCA, aka “card check,” would make it easier for unions to organize.

It seems odd to make the public option a retroactive litmus test, especially since Lincoln joined with all the Senate Democrats to vote for the landmark health care reform bill. (She was a “no” on the “fixes” to the bill passed via reconciliation, but health reform was by then already law of the land.) And President Obama himself was less than passionate about the public option, making it clear that he wouldn’t let it get in the way of passing the bill.

As for EFCA, unions are incensed that the bill won’t move, despite endorsements from the president and Democratic congressional leaders. But Lincoln is hardly the only moderate Senate Democrat who has qualms about the bill, which is why it remains snagged. If progressives are honest with themselves, they will admit that EFCA’s provisions for card check elections and for binding arbitration will need tweaking to get through the Senate.

The unimpeachably liberal Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) has signaled his willingness to negotiate changes aimed at winning moderates’ support. But so far, labor seems more interested in having an issue than in having a bill.

Fine, but is labor’s pique with Lincoln over the public option and card check really worth the risk of whittling down the Democrats’ majority in the Senate, one likely to become even more precarious after the midterm elections?

According to the Post, some labor officials don’t really care if Lincoln loses – the very threat that she and other moderates can be “primaried” for ideological offenses is sufficient to keep them in line. This flexing of labor’s political muscles to intimidate friends may be gratifying, but it’s politically dumb. It ignores the reality that the progressive coalition needs both liberals and moderates to sustain a governing majority, and that if you target moderate Democrats running in moderate-to-conservative states, you’ll enhance the odds of getting a Republican.

Former President Bill Clinton gets it. He’s made several appearances for Lincoln, urging Arkansas Democrats not to get swept up in crusades by outside pressure groups to purge moderates. The curious role played by Halter in this Razorback saga also deserves attention. A card-carrying centrist who worked in the Clinton administration, Halter is no Joe Hill. In allowing himself to be labor’s instrument for punishing a fellow pragmatist, he’s raised questions about his own authenticity, even as he attacks Lincoln for being a captive of Washington.

Even if Halter wins and goes to the Senate, the public option will still be history, EFCA will still be stalled and Democrats will still need moderates from red states to hold onto a majority. Labor also has to operate within the broader progressive coalition, and it can surely find better ways to invest its money than in fomenting dissension within the ranks.

Photo credit: USDAgov’s Photostream

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Posted in Daily Fix, Fixing Our Broken Politics | 2 Comments »

Prices, Wages, Food and Inequality

Friday, June 4th, 2010
Scott Winship


Scott Winship is research manager of the Pew Economic Mobility Project and a recent graduate of Harvard's doctoral program in social policy. The views he expresses do not represent those of Pew.

by Scott Winship

Mike Konczal’s inequality post as a guest blogger for Ezra is getting a bit of attention in the blogosphere. Konczal jumps off of an interesting post by Jamelle Bouie to argue that contrary to those who argue that “inequality isn’t so bad,” the unhealthy nature of the cheaper food that is purchased by the poor negates the fact that the poor face a lower inflation rate. Since he suggests I (and Will Wilkinson) think that “inequality isn’t so bad,” I wanted to correct a misconception that Konczal has about the argument of economist Christian Broda that he is responding to. Broda’s actual argument really doesn’t have anything to do with how healthy the things purchased by the poor are.

Here’s Konczal:

One argument that has become popular recently is that the increase in income inequality isn’t quite as bad because both the rich and the poor have different ‘inflation’ rates — the prices at which goods increase for the rich have been increasing much faster than the prices at which goods have been increasing for the poor. So even though the poor or median person hasn’t had any wage growth, he has much more purchasing power because of this effect.

This isn’t quite the argument that has become popular recently. What fans of the Broda research argue (i.e., what Broda and his colleagues argue) is that the apparent increase in income inequality may overstate the actual increase in inequality because the poor appear to have a lower inflation rate than the rich. If true, then it’s not that “the poor or median person hasn’t had any wage growth,” it’s that they have had wage growth because of their lower inflation rate — and the wage growth has been big enough that it has kept the ratio of rich-to-poor incomes roughly constant.

Think of it this way. Broda and his colleagues find that the prices of what the poor buy (that is, “price” when the satisfaction derived, or utility, is held constant) have risen less than the prices of what the rich buy. That’s because when prices of related goods change, the poor are more likely to switch to cheaper goods, all the while maintaining their overall level of satisfaction with their purchases. If it becomes cheaper to maintain a constant level of satisfaction, then one’s wages have effectively grown. So poor consumers may switch from Green Giant frozen veggies to generics when the latter go on sale, or they might buy their frozen veggies at the chain a couple of neighborhoods over rather than the local grocery store when the latter’s prices go up. Rich consumers, on the other hand, may be relatively unlikely to stop buying Whole Foods vegetables when the plebian chain’s prices are cut. They may not switch to generics as those products become cheaper relative to those on offer at the farmer’s market.

It’s not that we should be excited about how great the generic frozen veggies bought by the poor are compared with the Whole Foods produce. It’s that we should be excited that the poor are either more willing or more able to economize to maintain a constant lifestyle than the rich are, and so inflation eats into their quality of life to a lesser extent than it does among the rich, holding in check other forces that would increase inequality.

Now, Broda’s research is based on purchases of a limited number of commodities and over a limited number of years, but if his findings extend to other goods and services and to earlier periods (which he believes they do), then the implication is that inequality between the poor and the well-off — though not necessarily the richest of the rich — has not grown. We can still worry about the quality of the food purchased by the poor and their health outcomes, but that’s a story about poverty and deprivation, not about inequality or growth in inequality.

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Posted in A New Framework for Growth and Equity, Daily Fix | 5 Comments »

Gates and Fiscal Responsibility (Again)

Thursday, May 13th, 2010
Jim Arkedis


Jim Arkedis is the director of PPI's National Security Project.

by Jim Arkedis

This past weekend Secretary of Defense Bob Gates continued to talk his Kansas brand of sense about Pentagon spending. After a lecture on shipbuilding last week at the Navy League teed up tough questions to the Navy — like whether we can continue to afford $7 billion submarines — Gates took to the Eisenhower Library in his home state to expand that theme across his entire department. I’d bet you a crisp $20 bill that this is the line that caused an audible gasp in Reston and on the Hill:

The Defense Department must take a hard look at every aspect of how it is organized, staffed, and operated – indeed, every aspect of how it does business. In each instance we must ask: First, is this respectful of the American taxpayer at a time of economic and fiscal duress? And second, is this activity or arrangement the best use of limited dollars, given the pressing needs to take care of our people, win the wars we are in, and invest in the capabilities necessary to deal with the most likely and lethal future threats?

As a starting point, no real progress toward savings will be possible without reforming our budgeting practices and assumptions. Too often budgets are divied up and doled out every year as a straight line projection of what was spent the year before. Very rarely is the activity funded in these areas ever fundamentally re-examined – either in terms of quantity, type, or whether it should be conducted at all. That needs to change.

But then again, maybe the shock value has worn off — fiscal responsibility has been such a theme under Gates’ leadership that perhaps tough-minded rhetoric on defense spending now comes with little surprise.

Then Gates delved into specifics. And now it was the soldiers’, sailors’, airmen’s, and marines’ turn to get nervous:

[H]ealth-care costs are eating the Defense Department alive, rising from $19 billion a decade ago to roughly $50 billion – roughly the entire foreign affairs and assistance budget of the State Department. The premiums for TRICARE, the military health insurance program, have not risen since the program was founded more than a decade ago. Many working age military retirees – who are earning full-time salaries on top of their full military pensions – are opting for TRICARE even though they could get health coverage through their employer, with the taxpayer picking up most of the tab. In recent years the Department has attempted modest increases in premiums and co-pays to help bring costs under control, but has been met with a furious response from the Congress and veterans groups. The proposals routinely die an ignominious death on Capitol Hill.

The resistance to dealing with TRICARE stems from an admirable sentiment: to take good care of our troops, their families, and veterans – especially those who have sacrificed and suffered on the battlefield. This same sentiment motivates the Congress routinely to add an extra half percent to the pay raise that the Department requests each year. Furthermore, the all-volunteer force, which has been a brilliant success in terms of performance, is a group that is older, more likely to have spouses and children, and thus far costlier to recruit, retain, house, and care for than the Eisenhower-era military that relied on the draft of young single men to fill out its ranks.

Those are the political and demographic realities we face. To a certain extent they limit what can be saved and where. But as a matter of principle and political reality, the Department of Defense cannot go to the America’s elected representatives and ask for increases each year unless we have done everything possible to make every dollar count. Unless there is real reform in the way this department does its business and spends taxpayer dollars.

Two quick points here.

First, America’s armed personnel and their families represent an important political constituency. No administration wants the baggage that comes with reducing benefits for America’s fighting men and women. For the time being, that includes this one. If a serious restructuring of military pay and benefits ever occurs, it would likely be in about year six or seven of the Obama administration, safely after reelection.

Even then, it might prove impossible as Congress continues to feed the beast of fiscal irresponsibility. News broke just today that the Hill is about to vote on a 1.9 percent military pay raise. Guess what? That’s a half-percent more than the Pentagon recommended.

Second, in my mind, the structure of the benefits isn’t the problem. It’s the amount of care. I wrote a paper last year called “The Pentagon’s Most Expensive Weapon,” and I concluded that once you add up all outlays — including costs associated with the Department of Veterans Affairs — for military personnel, DoD spends not the $136 billion it tells you, but more than $300 billion.

Why are these costs skyrocketing? It’s a simple function of our foreign policy — America’s service members may be getting older and costlier, but since Afghanistan and Iraq, they’re also getting injured more frequently and in greater numbers.  Here’s my conclusion:

The problem of rising personnel costs can only be addressed from higher up the chain. Extended deployments overseas invariably increase costs because of the strain they place on the force — in casualties, logistics, sustainability, and recruiting and retention costs. Once the force has recovered from Iraq and Afghanistan, it is incumbent on America’s civilian leadership to carefully weigh the extended cost burden placed on the Pentagon’s personnel account when plotting our global security strategy. In short, America must choose its wars and deployments carefully, as exploding personnel costs are the untold story of Pentagon spending in 2010 and beyond.

In other words, you can talk about trimming benefits and reducing the ever illusive “waste, fraud, and abuse,” and that is no doubt a good thing. And so is eliminating unneeded weapons systems.

But if we’re going inject real savings on personnel into the system, we can’t just talk about TRICARE, we have to stop fighting dumb wars. And ultimately, that decision is above Gates’ pay grade.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eschipul/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

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Posted in A Progressive Security Strategy, Daily Fix, Fiscal Responsibility | No Comments »

Defense News: Senior DoD Leaders Warn of Rising Personnel Costs

Sunday, May 9th, 2010
Steven Chlapecka


Steven K. Chlapecka is the director of public affairs for the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Steven Chlapecka

PPI National Security Director Jim Arkedis argues that selective cuts on military benefits will not solve the defense personnel cost:

A November report prepared by Jim Arkedis of the Washington-based Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) put projected 2010 costs at $59.7 billion: defense health program ($28 billion); military health care ($21 billion); and retiree health benefits ($10.7 billion).

Arkedis of the PPI said the recent wars have helped push costs skyward.

“You can’t nit-pick the problem away through selective cuts to benefit programs because, first, there’s a core constituency of hard-working military members, families and retirees who depend on them,” he said. “And second, frankly, it wouldn’t solve enough of the problem anyway. The key cost drivers are large-scale military deployments abroad.”

To Arkedis, “The moral of the story is that if you want to control personnel costs, you have to be really careful about which wars you fight – they better be the right ones.”

Read the entire article.

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Posted in PPI in the News | No Comments »

PPI Special Event: Good Food, Good Jobs with Tom Colicchio

Friday, April 30th, 2010
Steven Chlapecka


Steven K. Chlapecka is the director of public affairs for the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Steven Chlapecka

Join the Progressive Policy Institute

as we present

Good Food, Good Jobs: Turning Food Deserts Into Jobs Oases

featuring Tom Colicchio

DATE:
Wednesday, May 5
5 p.m.
LOCATION:
Foggy Bottom FreshFarm Market
2301 I St. NW
(Near 24th St. and New Hampshire Ave.)
Washington, DC

RSVP to attend the event

Space is limited.
Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis and not guaranteed.

Tom Colicchio – Chef and Head Judge of Bravo’s “Top Chef”

Joel Berg – Executive Director, New York City Coalition Against Hunger, author of All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America? and former Coordinator of Community Food Security at USDA in the Clinton Administration

Ann Yonkers – Co-Director, FreshFarm Markets

RSVP to attend the event

Related Posts:

New Report Charts Food Hardship in Every District

Food as a Centerpiece of Public Policy

The Problem of Food Deserts

Facing the Hunger Problem

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Posted in Daily Fix | 1 Comment »

Growing Food, Creating Jobs, Improving Health: Tom Colicchio to promote “Good Food, Good Jobs” initiative

Friday, April 30th, 2010
Steven Chlapecka


Steven K. Chlapecka is the director of public affairs for the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Steven Chlapecka

MEDIA ADVISORY
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 30, 2010

Register for the event.

CONTACT:
Steven Chlapecka – schlapecka@ppionline.org, T: 202.525.3931

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Tom Colicchio will join the Progressive Policy Institute and FreshFarm Market on Wednesday, May 5 to promote a “Good Food, Good Jobs” initiative—a food jobs program—to fight hunger, foster economic growth and bolster employment.

With almost 49 million Americans living in households that can’t afford enough food, high food prices and skyrocketing unemployment have forced millions of families to choose less healthy, less expensive food. Affordable, nutritious food is key to fighting the chronic problems of hunger, malnutrition and obesity that face many communities throughout the United States. And innovative employment ideas are needed to get the nation back to work.  Joel Berg’s report for PPI on this topic argues that, just as the Obama Administration and Congress have supported  “green jobs,” they should launch a “Good Food, Good Jobs” initiative, quickly creating food jobs to boost the economy and improve public health.

WHO:               Tom Colicchio – Chef and Head Judge of Bravo’s Top Chef

Joel Berg – Executive Director, New York City Coalition Against Hunger, author of All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America? and former Coordinator of Community Food Security under the Clinton Administration at USDA

Ann Yonkers – Co-Director, FreshFarm Markets

WHAT:            Public event to promote policy proposal outlined in the Progressive Policy Institute report “Good Food, Good Jobs: Turning Food Deserts Into Jobs Oases” written by Berg.

WHEN:           5 p.m. Wednesday, May 5

WHERE:        Foggy Bottom FreshFarm Market, 2301 I St. NW, Washington, D.C. (Near 24th St. and New Hampshire Ave.)

MEDIA COVERAGE: The event is open to the media and individual interviews with speakers are available upon request. Media in attendance are required to register in advance of the event to Steven Chlapecka at schlapecka@ppionline.org.

For further questions, please contact Steven Chlapecka at schlapecka@ppionline.org, 202.525.3931 (office), 202.556.1752 (cell).

# # #

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Posted in Media Advisories | No Comments »

Health Care Lies Are Powerful

Wednesday, April 28th, 2010
Ed Kilgore


Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.

by Ed Kilgore

One of the most unnerving aspects of the recent health reform debate was the extent to which opponents of various Democratic plans (usually lumped together as “ObamaCare”) embraced and promoted outright falsehoods, most famously the idea that the legislation would encourage euthanasia-by-rationing.

Brendan Nyhan now has an important article at The Forum that not only looks at the role of deliberate misinformation in the “ObamaCare” debate, but compares it to a similar Big Lie that “stuck” during the earlier debate over the Clinton administration’s health reform proposal (i.e., the claim that the proposal would eliminate the ability of Americans to choose doctors). He notes the seminal role of pseudo-wonk Betsy McCaughey in both episodes of disinformation, and the importance of partisan conservative media in reinforcing fabricated claims.

Nyhan’s conclusion is sobering:

The evidence presented in this article suggests that misinformation played an important role in the two most recent debates over health care reform. While some critics have faulted the response of the Clinton and Obama administrations to these charges… the argument presented in this article suggests that political myths are extremely difficult to counter. For instance, proponents of reform might attempt to address concerns in the bill-writing process, but Betsy McCaughey’s 1994 article suggests that such disclaimers can be distorted or ignored. And false claims with no actual basis in legislation such as the “death panel” myth are especially insidious precisely because they cannot be addressed in the bill itself. As a result, until the media stops giving so much attention to misinformers, elites on both sides will often succeed in creating misperceptions, especially among sympathetic partisans. And once such beliefs take hold, few good options exist to counter them—correcting misperceptions is simply too difficult.

A particularly depressing finding of Nyhan’s is that belief in Big Lies about health reform actually increased among those Republicans who thought of themselves as well-informed on the subject. This reflects the experience many have had with conservative talk radio or Fox News fans who feel “empowered” by the “truth” about liberal policy ideas or politicians, and are exceptionally resistant to contrary facts or “objective” referees of the facts. Any progressive who’s done conservative call-in shows (or had extended discussions with conservative-activists friends or family) and dealt with inquisitors who perpetually suggest they are “on to you” and have divined your secret plans and motives knows exactly what I am talking about.

It’s almost certainly unfair and counterproductive, and in any event a waste of time, to criticize consumers of deliberate misinformation as ignorant. When it comes to complex topics like health care, even extremely well-informed people filter information — or misinformation — via ideological presumptions, partisanship, and the “trust factor” of where they turn to become informed.

The better course, as Nyhan argues, is to focus on the elites who invent and disseminate misinformation, and relentlessly undermine their bogus credibility. Serial offenders like McCaughey should be hooted off the public stage when they pop up again (as did, to some extent, happen during the ObamaCare debate). And politicians who retail misinformation should be held accountable just as much. Personally, I wish that much of the vast progressive sea of contempt for Sarah Palin’s rhetoric and mannerisms would instead be channeled into a relentless focus on her huge and unrepentent role — via a Facebook post, no less — in turning the lie about government-encouraged euthanasia into the Big Lie of “Obama death panels.” This despicable act, aimed at terrifying seniors and the families of those with disabilities, not her general lack of intellectual curiosity or her inexperience in governing, is what should disqualify her from any elected office at least until she confesses and seeks absolution.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/andrewaliferis/ / CC BY-ND 2.0

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Posted in A New Framework for Growth and Equity, Daily Fix, Fixing Our Broken Politics | No Comments »

The Greening of Massachusetts

Thursday, April 8th, 2010
Mike Signer


Mike Signer is a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Mike Signer

Much to Mitt Romney’s chagrin, Massachusetts has been in the news a lot recently as the birthplace of President Obama’s new health care reforms. Despite Romney’s protestations to the contrary, Obama’s ideas indisputably grew out of the reforms that the commonwealth enacted a few years ago.

Now it turns out that Massachusetts is also leading the country in another area that will likely become the subject of intense national controversy later this year: environmental regulation and the quest to build a clean economy. In one of America’s oldest and most traditional states, a coalition of business, policy-makers and nonprofits are leading the way in transforming the American economy – and bringing us closer to a clean, green future.

Massachusetts has a distinctive environment that makes clean energy a particularly bright choice. The commonwealth has unusually expensive electricity (from a lack of indigenous coal or natural gas) and a deregulated power market (where utilities do not own power plants).

Recently, PPI convened about three dozen clean tech industry leaders at the beautiful Parker House Hotel in downtown Boston. PPI’s new E3 Initiative held an event keynoted by Massachusetts Secretary of Energy and Environment Ian Bowles and also featuring Nick Darbeloff and Peter Rothstein, president and senior vice president, respectively, of the New England Clean Economy Council.

Secretary Bowles recounted for the audience the advances that have taken place under Governor Deval Patrick. Massachusetts has taken the lead in New England’s Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative covering all major power plants, which caps emissions at 2009 levels through 2015, after which the cap will decline to reduce emissions 10 percent by 2019. Its efficiency programs have been so successful that the state is on track to cut its energy use by 30 percent by 2020. And under the renewable portfolio standard it adopted they have already exceeded their targets. Massachusetts has also built greenhouse gas emission reductions into the state environmental review process, which is leading to greater private investment in green buildings. The state will also provide utility customers with $1.6 billion in incentives to conserve energy at home, including free energy audits and rebates to purchase more efficient appliances.

National leaders looking to Massachusetts for lessons would do well to keep one thing in mind. Just as muscle needs a skeleton for support, structure and politics both matter for environmental regulation. Soon after Patrick was sworn in, and with the cooperation of Massachusetts’ legislative leaders, Massachusetts became the first state in the nation to merge all its energy and environmental agencies (six total) into a single cabinet secretariat with the overall mission of bringing clean energy technology to market, curbing greenhouse gas emissions and achieving energy efficiency.

With that structure in place, Bowles and his team went about achieving their agenda by closely cooperating with legislative leaders in the state House and Senate. Too often American states (or the federal government, for that matter) have seen promising environmental issues die on the vine, as special interests whittle ambitious legislative proposals into pilot projects that fail to achieve the economies of scale and systemic effect necessary for change. In Massachusetts, however, Bowles and his team began working very closely with legislative leaders in 2007, soon after Patrick took office. With a lot of elbow grease and diplomacy, Massachusetts enacted six major energy and environmental laws achieving broad energy reform, greenhouse gas reduction and comprehensive oceans management.

In advance of the battles certain to come this summer in Washington about a carbon control system, the E3 Initiative was proud to showcase Massachusetts’ pioneering work on achieving a clean economy. With smart ideas, proven economic benefits and steady political talent, we can see results instead of gridlock.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mnsomero/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

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Posted in Clean Energy and Modern Infrastructure, Daily Fix, Report Weight | 1 Comment »

Speedy Elections

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010
Ed Kilgore


Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.

by Ed Kilgore

As noted yesterday, the 2012 presidential election cycle is already informally underway, and will get very real the day after the midterm elections on November 2.

By comparison, check out our older cousins in the United Kingdom. Today Prime Minister Gordon Brown set the date for his country’s next general election: 30 days from now.

Now obviously, electioneering in Britain is not totally confined to the formal period of the campaign, but much of it actually does take place in the sprint to election day, and that’s the case in most other democracies as well. It helps illustrate one of the major drawbacks of our own system, in which constitutionally fixed general election dates allow campaigning for major offices to creep back through the calendar relentlessly.

As for the likely outcome of the UK elections, the Conservatives have long led in the polls, which is unsurprising given the long tenure of Labour control (13 years), and the condition of the economy. But the Tory gap over Labour has been shrinking lately, and if it continues to shrink, what looked like an almost certain Tory victory a year ago could turn into a narrow advantage producing a “hung parliament” — i.e., where no party has a majority in the House of Commons. That scenario could create a minority government in which either the Tories or Labour form a coalition with the third-party Liberal Democrats, or if negotiations with the LibDems fail, another quick election.

American Republicans looking to the British elections as a possible harbinger of good things to come here at home should take note of Tory leader David Cameron’s repeated pledged that protecting the National Health Service — a.k.a., “socialized medicine” in the real, not (as with ObamaCare) imaginary sense – will be his “top priority.” Tories have also been blasting Brown for exceesively austere fiscal policies. So a Tory victory, if it happens, wouldn’t exactly be transferable to the U.S.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/secretlondon/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

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Posted in Daily Fix, Fixing Our Broken Politics | No Comments »

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