What’s At Stake In The Census Count

In my piece on the ten-year U.S. Census as a jobs creator, I mentioned that the count determines billions of dollars in federal funding. The Chicago Tribune’s Oscar Avila has a more precise report of how much money is at stake — in 2008, Illinois received $19.1 billion in federal funds tied to Census figures. Chicago alone got $12.6 billion. The money is especially important for covering highway costs and Medicaid reimbursements.

Avila gets his information from a new Brookings Institution study — the study finds that the Census count will determine $500 billion in federal funding.

Unemployment Benefits Are Economic Stimulus

The Washington Post’s Michael A. Fletcher and Dana Hedgpeth have a report on unemployment benefits that includes Arizona Sen. John Kyl doubting that the continual extension of these benefits helps the economy. The Post frustratingly doesn’t point out that Kyl is probably wrong. Almost every economist agrees that these benefits do, indeed, stimulate the economy by putting money into the hands of people likely to spend that money immediately. Read more »

Gas Stations In The Sky

The New York Times’ Christopher Drew reports that defense contractor Northrop Grumman withdrew its bid to build a $40 billion fleet of Air Force refueling tankers. This means that Boeing wins the bid by default. It also suggests that the bidding to construct these aerial refueling tankers, a/k/a gas stations in the sky, is now in its third and final act. Here’s a quick review of a saga that shows the need for defense contract reform. Read more »

Protracted Labor Pains

The New Republic’s John Judis looks at the stalled nomination of Craig Becker to the five-member National Labor Relations Board, which arbitrates disputes between business and labor. Judis persuasively argues that Senators like John McCain and Mike Enzi have inconsistently and opportunistically opposed Becker, a University of Chicago law professor and former adviser to labor unions.

Becker’s nomination is part of a package — if the Senate doesn’t confirm him, two other NLRB nominees also don’t get confirmed. This means that the NLRB has only two of five members: Read more »

Financial Reform on the Cheap

The Washington Post’s Binyamin Appelbaum points out a simple way Barack Obama can do financial reform: appoint stronger regulators. In the next year, Obama can name a new comptroller of the currency, head of the Office of Thrift Supervision, and chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Obama could especially change financial regulation with a more regulation friendly comptroller of the currency. That office regulates the nation’s largest banks and it’s currently headed by John C. Dugan, a banking lawyer who says that states can’t make their own financial regulations.  Also, Appelbaum doesn’t even get into the fact that Obama will fill three vacancies on the seven-member Federal Reserve Board.

The best regulators in the world can’t accomplish as much as a financial reform bill that changes the laws of regulation. But Obama can’t make Congress pass a meaningful bill. What the president can do is make appointments that reverse the anti-regulatory approach of George W. Bush appointees like Dugan.

Civil Rights in Obama’s Ed. Dept.

The New York Times’ Sam Dillon reports that, according to a statement by Education Sec. Arne Duncan, the Dept. of Education’s civil rights office will “reinvigorate civil rights enforcement.” The Education Dept. will do this through compliance reviews — that is, looking at whether individual districts are giving equal educational opportunities to women, minorities and disabled students. However, the Obama administration won’t do significantly more compliance reviews than the Bush administration did:

Russlyn H. Ali, assistant secretary of education for civil rights, said in an interview that the department would begin 38 compliance reviews before the current fiscal year ended on Oct. 1. That number compares with 29 such reviews carried out last year, 42 in 2008, 23 in 2007 and nine in 2006, she said.

“But the big difference is not in the number of the reviews we intend to carry out, but in their complexity and depth,” Ms. Ali said. “Most of the reviews in the recent past have looked at procedures.”

The Obama Education Dept. has not incorporated civil rights enforcement into their overall policies. Duncan’s prescriptions for urban schools — more charter schools, teacher evaluation based on student test scores, shut downs of poor-performing schools — doesn’t address the intense concentration of black and Latino students in many of these districts.

These more rigorous compliance reviews could be important. But what would be more important is if Obama and Duncan confronted lingering segregation in public schools, including charter schools.

As The World Burns

The Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin and David Farenthold report on what could be the beginning of the end for serious action this year on global warming:

On Thursday, Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) introduced a bill that would put a two-year freeze on the EPA’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases from power plants. His was the latest of various congressional proposals — from both chambers and both parties — designed to delay or overturn the EPA’s regulations.

As I reported on last month, a “cap-and-trade” energy bill is on its deathbed and EPA regulation is the only game in town. To get a bit into the weeds of Rockefeller’s proposal, the bill would block EPA from regulating stationary sources like coal-fired power plants that cause the vast majority of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. The proposal, though, would allow EPA to regulate tailpipe emissions from automobiles.

This is an important distinction. Read more »

Public Pension Fund Managers: Old Age Should Be an Adventure

Why do I keep expecting government officials to behave rationally with the people’s money?  Many state pension fund officials are still betting on stocks and high-risk investments, reports Mary Williams Walsh of the New York Times, just scant months after these same funds took massive hits from investments in . . . stocks and high-risk investments.  While claiming their portfolios are “aimed at diversification,”

public pension funds are trying a wide range of investments: commodity futures, junk bonds, foreign stocks, deeply-discounted mortgage securities and margin investments.

This is the same strategy that helped decimate pension funds in California and Florida.  And state pension funds are often intertwined with operating cash (in case you weren’t already concerned).  Some states are more creative and choose real diversity for their investments, but Williams Walsh’s reporting shows that too many are trying to win in the short term.  They’re liable to lose what millions of teachers, police, firefighters, paramedics, nurses, and social workers are owed in the long run.  Federal rules are needed — and soon.

True Fact: Government Agencies Cooperating

By Marci Greenstein

National Institutes of Health chief, Dr. Frances Collins was talking up his agency’s partnership with the Food and Drug Administration on NPR’s Diane Rehm Show last week.  The move is intended to speed up the process for getting drugs from laboratories to the marketplace.  What’s surprising is that this collaboration hasn’t happened sooner.  How often have we heard about patients desperate to get drugs that are successful in clinical trials but are moving at a snail’s pace through the FDA’s regulatory maze? Read more »

Murder at Camp No

Harper’s Magazine, one of the best publications in America today, continues to expose hypocrisy in American government and the violence that is integral to our country today.  Read Scott Horton’s shocking investigation into the deaths of three detainees at the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Naval Base.  These three men each “committed suicide” in one night, in the same way:  by first (somehow) stuffing rags down their own throats and then (improbably) hanging themselves. Read more »

Regulation that Creates Jobs?

The argument that Phil Longman and Barry Lynn make in the latest Washington Monthly is that America’s post-WWII boom, and the explosion of innovative companies which appeared in 1970s and 1980s America, depended on government anti-monopoly initiatives taken during Roosevelt’s New Deal.  It’s a provocative idea, and a hard one to prove in a magazine article, but Longman and Lynn point out that FDR’s Justice Department

set out to engineer rivalries within large industries whenever possible . . . and in sectors of the economy where efficiencies of concentration were far harder to prove — retail, restaurants, services, farming — the government protected open markets.

Competition among the fast-growing corporations of America’s post-war boom led to “an astounding burst of innovation,” one that the authors say is lacking in today’s economy — one dominated by fewer and fewer large corporations that not only throttle competition, but even cut back their own innovations in order not to upset a marketplace they comfortably control. Read more »