Tip of the Hat

This is a great idea:

Green Carts are mobile food carts that offer fresh produce in certain New York City areas. Local Law 9, signed by Mayor Bloomberg on March 13, 2008, establishes 1,000 permits for Green Carts.

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A total of 500 full-term permits will be available in 2008: 175 permits for Brooklyn, 175 for the Bronx, 75 for Manhattan, 50 for Queens, and 25 for Staten Island. Beginning in July, 2008, these permits will be issued to individuals who have applied to be on the Green Cart waiting lists. In 2009, 500 more Green Cart permits will be available.

Maybe I'm wrong, but it doesn't seem like there's sufficient outrage in the progressive blogosphere about the awful Senate mortgage bill, so a tip of the hat to DMI Blog for this:

If there is one thing that distressed homeowners need right now is smart, forward thinking legislation that can help slow down the wave of subprime mortgage inspired foreclosures, and establish strong anti-predatory lending measures.

Unfortunately, the Foreclosure Prevention Act of 2008 which the Senate is poised to vote on, is not the one. Commentators on both the ideological right and left have plenty to complain about. It's the kind of bipartisan, patchwork Frankenstein monster that only a politician's mother could love.

Let's be fair. It's not all bad. In fact there is alot about the bill that is promising. It includes much needed FHA modernization provisions, monies for foreclosure prevention and housing counseling, and CDBG Block Grants for state and local governments to purchase foreclosed properties and turn them into affordable housing.

But ultimately, in an effort to satisfy Senate conservatives, none of whom are particularly interested in helping out distressed homeowners, it's filled with unnecessary tax breaks and measures designed to serve the interests of homebuilders and, bizarrely enough, perhaps even speculators. Even the "enhanced" mortgage disclosures are a cruel joke for those hoping for full-scale, subprime mortgage era, anti-predatory lending provisions.

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Beckett is one year today. It's been a wild ride, and lots more fun and rewarding than I ever imagined.

The folks at the Drum Major Institute have put together a fantastic new website for tracking federal legislation "of significance to the current and aspiring middle class." The site combines have all sorts of great Web 2.0 bells and whistles, including great graphics, with a cutting edge approach to communicating about economic policy.

For DMI, the middle class is an aspirational concept (along the lines of the American Dream), not a narrowly defined political one, and a "middle class issue" in their view isn't simply one that targets tax breaks or benefits to families with incomes between $60,000 to $80,000.

The middle class is more than an income bracket. Over the past fifty years, a middle-class standard of living in the United States has come to mean having a secure job, the opportunity to own a home, access to health care, retirement security, time off for vacation, illness and the birth or adoption of a child, opportunities to save for the future and the ability to provide a good education, including a college education, for one’s children. When these middle-class fundamentals are within the reach of most Americans, the nation is stronger economically, culturally and democratically.

Most Americans identify themselves as middle class. Yet DMI is concerned not only with those who currently enjoy a middle-class standard of living, but also with expanding the middle class by increasing the ability and opportunities of poor people to enter the middle class. The middle class is strengthened when more poor people are able to work their way into its ranks. In a nation that is increasingly polarized between the very wealthy and everyone else, DMI sees the poor and middle class as sharing many of the same interests. Simply put: what strengthens and expands the middle class is good for America.

In some anti-poverty circles, there's still discomfort with using the term "middle class" in advocacy communications. This is unfortunate given that most Americans either see themselves as, or aspire to be, middle class. If you're against poverty, you should be for building the middle class.

A tip of the hat to the analysts at the Government Accountability Office (GAO) who now have a union for the first time in GAO's history. GAO analysts overwhelmingly voted, 897-445, to be represented by the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers. The IFPTE also represents workers at CEPR, EPI, and some other DC-based policy shops.

PS: If you're a policy analyst or advocate in DC and want to have a voice in your workplace, contact the folks at IFPTE Local 70.

A tip of the hat for Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) for engaging in a series of four nightly online policy discussions starting tomorrow night. The topic is our national broadband strategy.

During those four nights, I am looking for the best and brightest ideas on what Congress should do to promote and foster broadband.

I will begin each night's discussion with a conversation about some of the core principles I think are important, and then I'll ask for you to contribute your ideas that will help me craft legislation.

There are two reasons I'm asking for your help and participation. The first is because I think we need more public participation and transparency in the way Congress crafts significant legislation. This is an approach to legislation that has never been tried before. If it's successful—as I believe it will be—it may become the way lawmakers approach drafting bills on other issues like education, health care, and foreign policy.

The second reason I'm doing this is because broadband policy is one of the most important public policy issues today. Frankly, America does not have a national broadband strategy, and we are falling behind. That means our families don't have access to the best medical technologies, our students don't have access to the best educational opportunities, and our entrepreneurs are limited in the markets they can access.

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A tip of the hat to the folks at OMB Watch for their excellent recent commentary on the problem with the outdated ideology of the Hamilton Project:

Prominent policy analysts for the Brookings Institution's Hamilton Project remain wedded to the ideology that government intervention in the marketplace does more harm than good. Their vision damages the public's perception of government and promises to fall short of ensuring that the "rising tide" of economic growth does indeed "lift all boats."

A recent paper released by the Hamilton Project — written by Jason Furman, who leads the Hamilton Project, Lawrence Summers, former Secretary of the Treasury and President of Harvard University, and Jason Bordoff, who is the Hamilton Project's policy director — articulates the ideology that pervades many of the think tank's products. The following excerpt is revealing:

Industrial policies and direct market interventions can try to change the before-tax distribution of income. But ultimately such policies harm the economy—for example, excessively high living-wage laws can result in large job losses for low-skilled workers.

Similar categorical statements about the efficacy of government intervention appear in other Hamilton Project products.

To be sure, Hamilton Project authors see a place for a government that addresses social needs. But that role is constrained to taxation and budgeting decisions. Demands for higher spending and tax rates are tempered by strong concerns over long-term budget deficits and the effects that either might have on market structures and economic behavior. Furthermore, Hamilton authors appear to go out of their way to make negative statements about government, when their focus is on an affirmative vision.

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According to Monday's CongressDaily AM:

The Oregon state Senate voted 18-11 last week in favor of a House bill that would cap interest rates on consumer loans at 30 points above the federal reserve discount rate, the Associated Press reported. The discount rate is now 6.25 percent.

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Democratic Gov. Ted Kulongoski has said he will sign the bill. Payday and car title lenders have said the legislation will put them out of business in the state.

Let's hope that the legislation puts predatory lenders out of business in Oregon—if they can't stay in business despite being able to charge a 36 percent interest rate, they're getting what they deserve.

Simon Maxwell Apter on the cultural significance of The Simpsons:

"Then I had this crazy dream that my family were all just cartoon characters and that our success led to some crazy propaganda network called Fox News."—Bart Simpson

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Terribly animated (at least by Pixar or Dreamworks standards), unabashedly crude and, at times, prone to deus ex machina endings (including one featuring a robed, sandaled and bearded God who actually booms, "Deus ex machina!" as he sets things right), The Simpsons will present its 400th episode on Fox on May 20.

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After a lackluster 300th episode ... The Simpsons struck back. Bush 43's America, after all, had begun to resemble the Bush 41 America from which the show originally had spawned. Homer was sent to India after Mr. Burns outsourced every job at the nuclear plant, only to be sent home after conferring benefits, transferable sick days, vacation time and general laziness upon his South Asian employees—"the American sense of entitlement," according to Lisa—and Mr. Burns was financially forced to bring the plant back to Springfield. Another time, after suffering from amnesia caused by a head injury, Marge was prematurely released from the hospital because, according to her doctor, she's "as well as her insurance will pay for." Life, perhaps, had become more ridiculous and, in turn, more susceptible to ridicule.

Human Rights Watch gets a huge tip of the hat from Inclusion for the report they released this morning on Wal-Mart's violation of US workers' right to freedom of association.

Wal-Mart is a case study in what is wrong with US labor laws. Wal-Mart is the largest company in the world with roughly $351.14 billion in revenue and $11.3 billion in profits in the fiscal year ending January 2007. It is the largest private employer in the United States with over 1.3 million US workers and close to 4,000 stores nationwide. None of those
workers is in a union. This is no accident. Wal-Mart employs a sophisticated and
multifaceted strategy to prevent union activity at its US stores and, when that strategy fails, quashes organizing wherever it starts.

As an influential market leader, Wal-Mart’s conduct is especially troubling. By definition,
Wal-Mart’s treatment of its own workers has a significant impact in the United States and
beyond.

Our research shows that Wal-Mart aggressively interferes with workers’ right to organize. We believe that this should be cause for concern regardless of one’s views on the ongoing debate over whether Wal-Mart is good for local communities and, more generally, for the United States as a whole.

Wal-Mart is the largest employer in the United States, yet they refused HRW's repeated requests to meet so that HRW could obtain the company's views on the issues examined in the report. It's worth remembering that Human Rights Watch started in 1978 as Helsinki Watch, to monitor the compliance of Soviet bloc countries with the human rights provisions of the landmark Helsinki Accords. Which makes me wonder whether Wal-Mart's refusal to meet and discuss the human rights concerns uncovered by HRW is all that different from how those countries responded back then to human rights investigations. Sounds like it's time for a little glasnost at Wal-Mart.

It's all but official—Washington State is now the second state in the nation—joining California and 168 countries—with paid family leave:

Lawmakers wrapped up the 2007 Legislative session Sunday with last-hour compromises on paid family leave, the state pension system and the mandatory assessment test for high school graduation.

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However the new bill establishing a five-week paid family leave is perhaps the Democrats' most notable legislation this year. The measure is the culmination of a battle that has raged for years, lead by the union interests who are the Democrats' strongest supporters. As Democrats increased their majorities to near record levels, paid family leave became an 'if-not-now, when?' question.

The compromise bill allows workers to take paid leave to care for newborn or adopted children. If Gov. Chris Gregoire signs the bill as expected, it would go provide the leave beginning in October 2009.

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Currently California is the only other state that provides paid family leave -- but as Washington takes it up, several others including Oregon, New York and New Jersey are considering the legislation.

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Word is that the the five nations without paid family leave—Lesotho, Liberia, Papua New
Guinea, Swaziland, and the United States—are none to happy about this radical trend.

PS: Pay-go fans will want to know, is it paid for?

Where the money to pay the parents $250 a week will come from remains unsettled. Senate Bill 5659 calls for a task force to come up with a recommendation for funding - which caused heartburn among some former supporters but was accepted as reasonable by the measure's key proponents.

So not yet, but sometimes that's the way progressive change happens.

Until I read her obit in this week's NYT, I hadn't realized that Mollie Orshansky, the federal government employee who designed the poverty line in the 1960s, died in December at the age of 91. Her measure now plays a central role in policy, even though Orshansky never intended it to be used that way:

.... In May 1965, the Office of Economic Opportunity, the federal agency charged with carrying out the antipoverty effort, adopted the “Orshansky index” as the yardstick to measure poverty.

It was a use that Miss Orshansky herself had never intended. “Orshansky developed the index as a research tool, not an instrument of policy of a criterion for determining eligibility for anti-poverty programs,” the historian Michael B. Katz wrote in “The Undeserving Poor,” a 1989 history of antipoverty efforts.

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Miss Orshansky, a lifelong liberal Democrat, expressed sympathy with the criticisms of the poverty line. “The best that can be said of the measure,” she once wrote, “is that at a time when it seemed useful, it was there.”

The obit also relates an interesting back story about how Orshansky ended up in a position to develop the official poverty measure:

Miss Orshansky, whose parents had known poverty in Ukraine, worked for the Social Security Administration from 1958 until she retired in 1982. She was “one of a respected but mostly invisible cadre of women research professionals based at S.S.A. and other government agencies during the postwar years,” the historian Alice O’Connor wrote in “Poverty Knowledge,” a 2001 history of poverty research.

“These women,” Ms. O’Connor wrote, “found job opportunities in federal government and other ‘applied’ endeavors when university jobs were largely closed off to them, although within government they were often clustered in research bureaus focusing on such traditional ‘women’s’ concerns as social welfare, female labor force participation, families and children, and home economics. That experience as a career government statistician, a far cry from systems analysis, was what gave Orshansky the wholly unexpected designation as author of the government’s official poverty line.”

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The trade deficit is bigger than the budget deficit, but it's rarely mentioned in the mainstream media, and when it is, rarely with the teeth gnashing that accompanies most discussions of the budget deficit.

So a tip of the hat to Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) for having something to say about the trade deficit—here's the CongressDaily write-up of the hearing he recently held on trade:

Hoping to lay the groundwork for changes in presidential trade negotiating authority, Senate Commerce Trade Subcommittee Chairman Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., held a hearing today on whether current trade treaties have hurt U.S. jobs. Dorgan's premise is that trade deals have done just that. "Over the last two decades, under the leadership of both political parties, 'free trade' policies have lead us to trade deficits that now stand at $838 billion a year," Dorgan said in his opening statement. "Our deficits are now well beyond a level that [former Federal Reserve Chairman] Alan Greenspan described as dangerous and unsustainable three years ago. I think that the term 'free trade' has become synonymous with trading away America's national sovereignty, and allowing multinational corporations to pole vault over the standards that have allowed American to develop a strong middle class: fair labor laws, a safe working environment, clean air, clean water."

Dorgan invited several freshmen senators, who campaigned against trade treaties, to attend his subcommittee's hearing. Among them was Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, who beat former Republican Sen. Mike DeWine partly over the issue of trade, which Brown said has led to lost jobs in Ohio. Brown said he is seeking a new direction for trade agreements, including rescinding normal trade relations with China. The current trade negotiating authority law, which gives proposed trade agreements a fast track to congressional approval, expires June 30. Congress must vote on whether to extend the authority.

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For testimony from the hearing, check out the subcommittee's website. The testimonies of Leo Hindery and Lori Wallach are the ones to read.

Sounds like the House in Washington State weakened proposed leave legislation somewhat, but it's good news that they passed it. Since the Senate has already passed more progressive legislation, it seems safe to assume that Washington State will join California and the 163 nations that already have paid leave.

The state House on Friday passed a significantly scaled-down paid family leave measure, which would provide five weeks of paid leave to care for a new child.

Lawmakers also created a task force to figure out how to pay for the program.

The measure, which passed the House 62-35, now must go back to the Senate, where it passed last month with much broader language. House and Senate leaders will need to resolve the differences before the measure is forwarded to Gov. Chris Gregoire.

“No one should have to choose between the job that they need and the baby that they love,” said Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson, D-Seattle. “But that is exactly the choice that is facing far too many people in Washington today. It’s time for us to join virtually every other country in the world, by helping parents be with their newborns and their adopted children.”

Under the bill, starting in 2009, workers would get $250 a week for up to five weeks to care for a newborn or a newly adopted child. But a 2-cent-an-hour tax that was supposed to be taken from employees’ pay to cover the program was removed from the legislation. Instead, a new 13-member task force – including lawmakers, business representatives and others – would study how to finance the program. The task force must report its findings to the Legislature by Jan. 1.

Supporters have been trying to get paid family leave through the Legislature since 2001. Two years ago, it passed the Senate but got stopped in the House.

A coalition of mothers and their supporters has given the measure momentum this year, sending nearly 8,000 e-mails to lawmakers since the legislative session began in January and conducting rallies at the Capitol.

The version that passed out of the Senate would have also allowed workers to use the time to care for a seriously ill parent, but that language was removed in the House. Also removed by House Democrats was allowing the weekly payment of $250 to rise yearly with inflation.

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In an excellent new report, Policy Matters Ohio lays out a set of recommendations to improve Ohio's economy. The report, like much of our work at Inclusion, has clearly been influenced by the new and powerful communication research on how to talk about poverty and the economy. In her acknowledgements, Amy Hanauer thanks the Demos Center for the Public Sector, which has done some of the best work on how to talk about government in ways that aren't counter-productive. For a quick summary of the PolicyMatters Ohio report, you can check out the press release.