Inclusionist.org

The recently released 2006 edition of the National Women's Law Center's annual report on state child care offers a mix of good and bad news. Income eligibility limits in child care are quite low—200 percent of poverty or lower in three out of every four states, and 150 percent of poverty or lower in one out of every three states. Some 18 states have waiting lists or frozen intake, but the rest were able to serve all eligible families. Serving all eligible families is a fairly modest policy goal that should really be required by federal law—after all, there's no waiting list or frozen intake for the federal dependent care tax credit. Most states increased their income eligibility limits between 2005 and 2006 to at least keep pace with inflation, but over a longer time period, the last five years, only about a third of states have kept pace.

One may hope that the backlash to the influential ideas of cognitive linguist/progressive "framing" guru George Lakoff has reached it final stages. Lakoff's most recent book Whose Freedom: The Battle Over America's Most Important Idea focuses on the need for progressives to reclaim the concept of freedom from conservatives and utilize it in debates about a broad range of issues, including economic issues. This is a valid and, I should think, not particularly controversial idea that's been articulated in various ways over the years by a diverse array of thinkers, including Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen, political scientist John Schwartz, legal scholar Cass Sunstein ... oh, and I almost forgot that New Deal guy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

But Lakoff's conception of freedom has been criticized by, among others, Bernie Horn of the Center for Policy Alternatives, William Galston in the new journal Democracy, and most recently and shrilly, linguist Steven Pinker in a book review in TNR.

In today's WSJ, Deborah Solomon has an article on the Dems' use of economic inequality arguments on the campaign trail in which she observes:

Figuring out how to reverse the trend poses a problem for policy makers. Most Democratic candidates favor an increase in the minimum wage, modest proposals for college and child-care tax credits, rolling back some of Mr. Bush's tax cuts, and finding ways to shield Americans against rising gas prices. But beyond that, Democrats candidates haven't fleshed out a program for reversing inequality.

The Hamiliton Project—funded by Robert Robin and other wealthy contributors and housed at the Brookings Institution—is one of the more recent attempts to address this problem. The Project's testimony on "Promoting Fiscal Discipline and Broad-Based Economic Growth" before the Senate Budget Committee and penned by the Project's Director Peter Orszag provides a good way to evaluate how Hamiliton is doing.

Over at the Huffington Post, Tracie McMillian has a great post on the Bloomberg Anti-Poverty commission. In addition to noting the importance of the commission's recommendation to measure poverty using "relative" measures, she also makes a good point about the commission's emphasis on benefits access:

Yet there is a real shocker in there, if you know where to look: Not at the policies, per se, but at the philosophies undergirding them.

Stealth radical solution number one is to establish an online screening process, accessible from any internet connection, where people can input basic information about themselves and see what public programs they might qualify for—and how much aid they're likely to receive. That way, people can spend a few hours checking out what programs they ought to go to the bother of applying for (many require in-person interviews and extensive application processes).

Social scientists Jens Ludwig and Susan Mayer have an important piece in the most recent issue of Future of Children that does one of the best jobs that I've seen lately in demolishing claims that "marriage promotion" and other behavioral interventions are the key to reducing poverty among future generations. Ludwig and Mayer's basic argument is that encouraging parents to marry and engage in other virtuous behaviors won't do much to reduce the "intergeneration transmission" of poverty to children, because most people who end up living in poverty have parents who are married, work, and otherwise virtuous.

Even if parents’ culture as indicated by marriage, work, and religion had a causal effect on children’s schooling and adult income—which is uncertain [Ludwig and Mayer also do a good job of reviewing research on the causal relationship between these things and poverty]—encouraging parents to marry, work, and become religious would do far less to reduce poverty among future generations of American adults than most policymakers believe. The reason for this conclusion is that children who grow up with parents who are married, working, and religious also face some risk of experiencing poverty as adults. Therefore even successful efforts to change parental behavior or culture among “high-risk” families will have surprisingly modest effects on poverty in the next generation. We term this the poverty-prevention paradox.

In a speech this week at the National Press Club responding to the report of her Commission on the Future of Higher Education, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings called for "greater fiscal and academic accountabilty" in higher education system. Spellings bolstered her case with this claim:

Our universities are known as the best in the world, and a lot of people will tell you things are going just fine .... But when 90 percent of the fastest-growing jobs require postsecondary education, and fewer and fewer Americans are getting one, are we satisfied with just fine?

I definitely think that more Americans should be going to, and finishing college, but I wondered how well Spellings' 90 percent figure reflects the job market as a whole.

Education and training data guru Gwen Rubinstein, my colleague at The Workforce Alliance, helped clarify the data. According to Gwen, Spelling and others who cite figures like this tend to focus on the “fastest growing jobs" or "job growth" which don't necessarily reflect the actual need for skills in the job market.

I'm no Dick Armey fan, but I have to tip my hat to him after reading this in the Miami Herald:

... three years after leaving Congress, the former House majority leader is now savaging conservatives in his own party for what he calls ''knee-jerk'' opposition—''emphasis on jerk''—to the Bush administration's efforts to create a temporary guest-worker program and overhaul the nation's immigration system.

Armey, who is chairman of a Washington-based grass-roots organization called FreedomWorks, was a leading architect of the Republican takeover of the House in 1994 and remains a prominent and outspoken advocate for conservative causes.

But when it comes to the immigration debate that has raged in Congress for much of the past two years, he takes an almost polar-opposite position from many of his former Republican House colleagues, who are pressing for tough border security measures, including a 700-mile fence along the Southwest border.

I've written before about the efforts of anti-immigrant forces to frame immigration as a "cost" despite its economic benefits. My colleagues at CBPP have done good work to rebut some of the more outrageous cost-related claims out there, but I personally think it's more important to tell an affirmative story about the benefits of legislation that provides new pathways to legal immigration, such as the immigration bill that passed the Senate earlier this year.

A new report I wrote for the National Immigration Law Center does just that. Based mostly on data from the Congressional Budget Office, it finds that creating new pathways to legal immigration would boost economic growth and improve the solvency of the Social Security Trust Fund. A reasonable middle-ground estimate is that GDP would increase by about $36 billion a year on average over the next five years, and by $134 billion a year on average over the next ten. In addition, the net fiscal benefit of the Senate provisions would be about $60 billion over the next ten years.

The Kaiser Family Foundation released its 2006 survey of employer health benefits. About half of all employers offering health insurance say that it's likely that they will increase the amount that employees pay for health insurance next year and 6 percent say that they're likely to drop coverage entirely.

And, if you're looking for an indictment of our current taxpayer subsidized system of employer-based coverage, look no further than these figures.

Sixty-five percent of higher-wage firms (less than 35% of workers earn $20,000 or less annually) offer health benefits, compared with 42% of firms with a greater percentage of low-wage workers. Sixty-seven percent of firms with relatively few part-time workers (less than 35% of workers work part-time) offer health benefits, compared with 44% of firms with a higher percentage of part-time workers. And, 87% of firms with at least some union workers offer health benefits, compared with 60% of firms that have no union employees.

MaxSpeak has posted a transcript of economist Jared Berstein's remarks to the September 22 Democratic Economic Forum. Here's what Jared thinks needs to be done to close the growing gap between economic growth and wages:

What’s needed is a policy agenda that goes after each one of these problems.

--get the fiscal house in order by allowing the high-end Bush tax cuts to expire.

--get serious about energy independence by following the model laid out by the Apollo Alliance.

--raise the minimum wage: it’s a small part of the solution, because you only reach those at the bottom of the pay scale, but it’s a proven way to reconnect our most disadvantaged workers with overall growth without distorting economic outcomes.

--level the playing field for union organizing: it should come as no surprise that around half of the non-union workforce tells pollsters they’d like to be represented by some type of collective bargaining arrangement, but the organizing playing field is titled against them. Policy makers should take a close look at the Employee Free Choice Act, an active piece of legislation designed to reset the balance of power.

Kevin Carey (a former CBPP colleague of mine) and the excellent Education Sector have a great new finger-waging report out on the US News college rankings:

The U.S. News ranking system is deeply flawed. Instead of focusing on the fundamental issues of how well colleges and universities educate their students and how well they prepare them to be successful after college, the magazine's rankings are almost entirely a function of three factors: fame, wealth, and exclusivity. They directly or indirectly account for 95 percent of a school's ranking ....

As a result, the influential rankings have led colleges and universities to focus their energies on becoming wealthier, more famous, and more exclusive, often at the expense of what matters most—educating their students well. College rankings have increasingly defined the terms of the marketplace in higher education and the message from the market is clear: wealth, fame, and exclusivity are what gets colleges and universities ahead today.

Earlier this year, New York City's Mayor Bloomberg unveiled a Commission for Economic Opportunity tasked with developing recommendations for reducing poverty in the city. The Commission released a report with its recommendations last week, and I've finally got around to paging through it. There's plenty to quibble with in the report, but overall it's not too bad.

The Commission's decision to provide recommendations on reducing poverty among three "target populations"—working poor adults, young adults aged 16 to 24; and children 5 years old and younger—has been framed as a pragmatic narrowing of focus, and been criticized by some advocates. But as a practical matter, the vast majority of, if not nearly all, poor families headed by working-age adults have members that fall into one or more of these categories, so I'm not so troubled by this. (Although I wouldn't have chosen to frame it as a narrowing of focus).

The policy recommendations tend to be fairly wonky—for example, the Commission proposes to "restructure and coordinate workforce development services to promote career skills building and career advancement" and there are several recommendations that relate to increasing access to benefits. Both are certainly good ideas, and the kind of recommendations that have appeared in all sorts of reports over the last 20 years. But highlighting a smaller number of bolder recommendations while leaving the more technical stuff to an appendix might have been a better idea. For example, the commission could have recommended that the workforce development and education systems in the city be restructured to ensure that all workers have access to at least two years of post-secondary education and training.

One of cognitive linguist/political language guru George Lakoff's basic claims is that what he calls "Strict Father" model is at the center of the conservative worldview, while a "Nurturant Parent" model is at the center of the liberal worldview. In essence, Lakoff argues that strict father morality is what gives conservative thought and policy positions a coherence that doesn't seem readily apparent to most progressives. I've always found Lakoff's claim intuitively appealing, while questioning whether the Strict Father/Nurturant Parent opposition is as fundamental as he suggests.

In a fascinating post on the role that authoritarian beliefs and attitudes play in American politics, political scientists Jonathan Weiler and Marc Hetherington provide some evidence that backs up Lakoff's claims about the importance of the Strict Father model. According to Weiler and Hetherington, "authoritarianism embodies an entire world view that provides the connective tissue for a range of attitudes on issues that happen now to be at the center of the political fight."

Gov. Granholm signed legislation yesterday making Michigan the 20th state to establish a state Earned Income Tax Credit. MIchigan's EITC wil be equal to 10 percent of the federal credit in 2007 and rise to 20 percent after that.

The massive 2001 and 2003 tax cut laws—or as I prefer to call them, the "Tom 'Nothing is more important in a time of war than cutting taxes' Delay Memorial Tax Acts of 2001 and 2003"—are chock full of new and expanded tax incentives for retirement and other forms of savings. So, no matter one's opinion on the package as a whole, it seems safe to conclude that the law at least will have a positive effect on savings, right?

Well ... no. In a new paper, Bill Gale and Len Burman conclude that the legislation actually reduces savings overall:

... we estimate that the income and estate tax changes could at most raise private saving by about 0.5 percent of GDP between 2002 and 2011. Unfortunately, those gains are more than negated by the higher deficits arising from the fact that EGTRRA was entirely debt-financed. Our best point estimates suggested that public borrowing will increase by more than three times as much as the increase in private savings over the decade. As a result, EGTRRA is likely to cut national saving—the sum of private and public saving—by more than 1 percent of GDP. Even if private saving is highly responsive to tax changes, the entire package is likely to reduce national saving by at least