Cristina Jimenez
The California Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case over the constitutionality of a state law (AB 540) that allows undocumented students who graduate from state high schools to pay in-state tuition at public universities.
The lawsuit filed by parents and out-of –state students who attended California universities argues that AB 540 violates federal law by granting in-state tuition to undocumented students while not offering the same fees to students outside of California. Wonder who represents these students? Kris Kobach, chairman of the Kansas Republican Party. Clearly, Republicans don’t seem to get that the anti-immigrant card, as pointed out by Karl Rove, is suicidal. But going back to this in-state tuition battle let me point out a couple of important facts that have been missing from this debate.
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Posted at 2:11 PM, Jan 06, 2009 in Education | Immigration
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Amy Traub
On Monday, John discussed the politics behind the newly announced tax cuts planned for the new stimulus package. Whatever the political wisdom of this approach, the policy implications are troubling.
Media reports suggest that the main tax provisions of the bill will include allowing businesses to accelerate tax write-offs, providing incentives for business investment, and a tax credit for companies that make new hires or avoid layoffs. But these corporate tax cuts are unlikely to be effective. Commentators on this blog have already discussed the analysis of Mark Zandi – former economic advisor to the McCain campaign – whose economic models indicate that corporate tax cuts will generally provide less bang for the stimulus buck than public spending (Zandi’s calculation for the return on accelerated depreciation of new investment – similar to what the Obama team seems to be contemplating – is actually an abysmally low 27 cents on the dollar).
But the economic rationality behind the numbers is equally compelling. Simply put, businesses don’t make decisions about hiring, firing, and investment based on a nominal federal tax cut. They decide based on economic demand for their products or services. If there’s demand for more widgets, management at the widget factories will invest in more equipment and hire more widget-makers. If demand is stagnant or falling, tax cuts will have to be lavish indeed to induce companies to invest more in churning out a product for which there is little demand. (If the public interest in widget production in itself is that great — as I’ve argued in the case of the auto industry –- we ought to find a more direct and efficient way than broad corporate tax cuts to incentivize it).
Finally, I’m skeptical of the argument that there aren’t enough productive ways to quickly spend the amount of money necessary to shore up the economy.
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Posted at 8:23 AM, Jan 06, 2009 in Congress | Employment | Federal Budget | Infrastructure
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Kia Franklin
Cross-posted from TortDeform.com
Happy New Year, and happy day! My wish for 2009: that it will be the year of Civil Gideon.
Right now when budgets are being trimmed, cut, and scrutinized, advocates for the poor must continue to work hard demonstrating that adequate funding for legal services to the poor makes for sound policy, is economically smart, and also is just the right thing to do. Today’s New York Times (published last night online) contains a fantastic opinion peice on Civil Gideon which does just that:
Advocates for the poor argue, persuasively, that outlays for civil legal services are budgetary pennies that save many dollars. A foreclosure prevented is an eviction avoided, a family kept from homelessness — and a considerable burden lifted from the government’s social-service safety net. With legal help, poor people can avoid litigation, easing the load on judges and courtrooms. They can get food stamps, leveraging federal dollars in an underused program. If they avoid the poorhouse they will have, by definition, more money to spend, increasing sales tax revenues and benefiting local businesses.
Kudos to the Times for this well written piece. In the current ecnomic climate, where any proposal to spend more money makes the average person wince, it’s important to highlight how some forms of spending will ultimately lead to massive savings in the long run. That is the case with funding legal services to the poor.
Posted at 3:54 PM, Jan 02, 2009 in Civil Justice | Economic Opportunity | Economy | Financial Justice | New York | financial crisis | public services
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John Petro
From the Boston Globe:
“In a paper published this month by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, economists Gerald A. Carlino and Albert Saiz looked at 150 metropolitan areas around the United States and found that those rich in what they called ‘consumption amenities’ - the things that make a city delightful, such as parks, historic sites, museums, and beaches - ‘disproportionally attracted highly educated individuals and experienced faster housing price appreciation.’”
Specifically, the study looked at the relationship between the number of “leisure visits,” or tourist visits, and the growth of metropolitan areas during the 1990’s. While it is an interesting study, I have reservations about using “growth” to determine a city’s success. By looking at growth, older, more developed cities often will get short thrift because they have less room to expand and therefore grow.
The study may also be out of date already, even though it was released in September. It examines growth during the 1990’s, a period in which Sunbelt cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix saw extraordinary growth. These cities are now seriously hurting, however, as the housing bubble has led to massive decreases in home prices.
The thing that strikes me the most while reading the study is just how difficult it can be to analyze cities using elaborate mathematical formulas. This study uses metropolitan level data. Consider a metropolitan area like Atlanta, that sprawls over a vast geographic area, with some areas being directly tied to the central city and others nearly independent from it. How can we possibly account for the diversity of land uses and neighborhood types over such a large area?
I still think that these types of studies are useful, but what is a policy analyst, a planner, or an elected official meant to take away from all of this? The authors use the number of leisure visits as a proxy for the attractiveness of a metropolitan area. But what is really important is the idea of “place” and good urban design. No one wants to live in a theme park (well, most people don’t). Residents of “destination cities” usually avoid the touristy areas. What is most important to residents is what is happening at the neighborhood level. Street trees, grocery stores, good restaurants, neighborhood parks: these are what attracts residents, not Baltimore’s Inner Harbor or D.C.’s National Mall. Invest in neighborhoods, and you will have a happy, healthy, successful city.
Posted at 1:50 PM, Dec 31, 2008 in
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Mark Winston Griffith
It arrived yesterday in the mail: The $400 property rebate check that the City Council so insisted upon, like it was my birthright as a New York City homeowner.
Don’t get me wrong, I can use the four hundred bucks, but sending $400 to homeowners strikes me as political gimmickry, not to mention economic recklessness, considering that the City Council simultaneously approved a 7% property tax increase. Why put a few hundred dollars in my left pocket, while taking a few thousand from my right? Aren’t we in the middle of a financial crisis? As one New Yorker commented in the New York Times, “Giving me a rebate check and raising taxes doesn’t make any sense.”
What would have made more sense is if the City Council had invested the full $256 million property tax rebate load into foreclosure prevention/relief for areas like Central Brooklyn and South East Queens. That will at least targeted at homeowners who need it the most while having a residual effect on the surrounding community.
In the meantime, it will be up to the few, the chosen, to put it towards a more poetic and righteous cause than, say, bolstering the economy through consumerism. One of my colleagues is thinking about donating her rebate check to Homes for the Homeless.
In the meantime, let’s hope 2009 delivers a better set of economic decisions.
Posted at 1:34 PM, Dec 31, 2008 in Economic Opportunity
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Cristina Jimenez
Last week, a New York Times editorial, offered a hopeful view of the future of immigration policy. Similar to what the editorial states, DMI’s “Principles for an Immigration Policy to Strengthen and Expand the American Middle Class” argues that immigration policy must strengthen the rights of undocumented workers. Why? Because when the rights of undocumented workers are undermined, working conditions and wages are dragged down for all workers.
Working conditions and wages would improve only when both, native and foreign-born workers are able to demand fair wages and exercise their rights.
The next administration must keep in mind that sound immigration policy would benefit, strengthen, and expand America’s middle class. To do this effectively, immigration policy should: 1) strengthen—not undermine— the contributions that immigrants, documented and undocumented make to our economy, and 2) strengthen the rights of all immigrants in the workplace.
Posted at 3:31 PM, Dec 30, 2008 in Immigration
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Penny Abeywardena
To support your favorite think tank AND get a tax break…
This has been a tough year for all of us but I hope you will make a gift to DMI today. It’s with your support that we keep the lights on and do the think-tank business you like to read about right here.
Next year will be critical. Here’s why you should support our work—no matter what the amount:
The most important issue facing the incoming Administration is the squeezed middle-class. This is our issue. We are the go-to for a progressive middle-class agenda, and are prepared with the ideas and tools to propel this agenda forward.
Cities will be the frontlines of the economic crisis. DMI’s advocacy for a progressive federal urban agenda, and our work to lift up the best models of policy that meet entrenched challenges on the local level, are necessary now more than ever.
New leadership at the top must be supported by fresh faces in the ranks of policy in DC and throughout the country. DMI Scholars is the first pipeline dedicated to supporting and guiding talented young people from underrepresented communities into professions in the public policy field.
We take the lead on issues too often ignored – even by progressives. That’s why we aggressively combat the
successful assault on regular Americans’ ability to access the court system.
We’ve seen the incredible power of the web to organize people around campaigns. But what do we do with their hunger to make a difference? From TheMiddleClass.org and MayorTV.com to the DMIBlog, DMI is using the web to connect people to the policies that determine the quality of their lives.
We aren’t a beltway think tank, and so won’t be compromised by connections in our efforts to hold the new administration accountable for advancing a progressive agenda. Our location in New York City, the media center of the country, and around the corner from the Stock Exchange, gives us a bird’s eye view and the perspective to influence the debate locally and nationally.
Please do make a donation today. It is with the generous support of you, our DMI family, that we are able to continue our work and drive a progressive agenda for America forward. The times ahead are rough; we need ideas and discourse now more than ever.
Posted at 10:52 AM, Dec 30, 2008 in Drum Major Institute
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Amy Traub
First things first. Congress and the incoming Obama Administration are hammering out an economic recovery package with major investments in infrastructure, education, energy efficiency, health programs and aid to the states and localities (see Paul Krugman’s excellent discussion of why such assistance is particularly vital during an economic downturn). While the to-be-decided details of the plan will be critical to its success, the broad outlines look like precisely what the ailing U.S. economy desperately needs: a plan that creates jobs quickly while addressing the nation’s long-term public investment priorities and helping those hardest hit by the recession. Phew!
I know what they say: don’t count your policy victories before they’re passed. But while we work for the right kind of stimulus, we also need to think about the wider context. As we look for a path back to the economic good times we’ve also got to face the fact that, for a lot of Americans, the good times of the 21st Century so far weren’t actually that good. At the peak of the last economic cycle, during a time of high productivity and soaring corporate profits, middle-class Americans still hadn’t recovered the ground lost in the last downturn. We earned less, borrowed more to make ends meet, and were even less likely to have employer-sponsored health care. Something is deeply wrong with that picture.
What this tells us is that working people don’t have enough power in the labor market to ensure that their incomes keep pace with the rising cost of living – even during the best of times. Historically, one powerful way to build that power has been through labor unions.
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Posted at 8:40 AM, Dec 30, 2008 in
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Kia Franklin
Here’s to a New Year filled w/ safe products, effective government regulation, and corporate accountability! Hip hip!
Okay, so that might not exactly have the pizzazz of other New Years toasts, but wouldn’t it be nice to know that government agencies like the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Food and Drug Administration actually operated with the best interests and safety of consumers in mind? Raise your glasses, folks.
In this article in the LA Times, David Lazarus observes the air of optimism among consumer advocates who believe that with a new administration and a new year may also come a new, and long overdue, commitment to consumer rights:
You’ll be safer in 2009. At least that’s the expectation of consumer watchdogs who believe the changing of the guard at the White House in a few weeks will mark the beginning of a new era in protecting people from stuff that can hurt you.
“It may not be a golden age,” said Ed Mierzwinski, consumer program director for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group in Washington. “But it’s definitely going to be an opportunity for consumer advocates to be heard for the first time in years and for there to be meaningful change.” [Read full article]
According to the article, Pam Gilbert, who worked in the CPSC under Clinton, might fill the CPSC Chair position for the Obama administration. The position has been empty since 2006, in part due to Bush’s insistence on filling the seat with a tort deformer or no one at all. Former Chair Hal Stratton, an ardent preemption supporter, left the CPSC to join a corporate lawfirm that, according to Lazarus, “specializes in shooting down class-action lawsuits filed by consumers.” Bush’s next pick, Michael Baroody, didn’t come through because he had some sketchy ties to the National Association of Manufacturers. All the while Pam Gilbert and Ann Brown were quite vocal about insisting that Bush make better picks.
The article also reflects upon what changes are needed to make the FDA more effective in regulating the safety of things like our foods, drugs, and cosmetics. One thing that can be said of both agencies is that they need a serious overhaul and significant shift in priorities. The safety is too expensive model has gotten out of hand and it is time for a change. To begin, the new administration must take steps to fix the preemption problem, which has seriously undermined our safety when it comes to the foods, drugs, and products we use. That should be the first item on both agencies’ New Years resolution list.
Posted at 3:39 PM, Dec 29, 2008 in Civil Justice | Consumers | Corporate Accountability | Governmental Reform
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Mark Winston Griffith
In all my years of running non-profits and a financial institution, I was expected to account for every penny my organization received. Whether it was for a general operating grant or a cash flow loan, detailed reporting - including financial statements, budget narratives, and a description of what the money was used for - was demanded in return.
And that was for private money. If my organization received government funds, the financial reporting requirements were nothing short of punishing.
So it seems nothing less than scandalous that the banks receiving public Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) funds should be allowed to casually “decline” requests to account for that money. 21 of these banks were contacted by the Associated Press and were asked to report on how much TARP money was spent and on what. None provided specific answers. Some shrugged their shoulders and said they didn’t know. You would think they were sitting in their living room and someone asked where they put the TV remote.
In fact, their responses amounted to a giant middle finger to the American taxpayer. “We’ve lent some of it. We’ve not lent some of it. We’ve not given any accounting of, ‘Here’s how we’re doing it,’” said Thomas Kelly, a spokesman for JPMorgan Chase, which received $25 billion in emergency bailout money. “We have not disclosed that to the public. We’re declining to.”
I want everyone reading this to stick their head out their window, or cubicle, and yell at the top of their lungs: “Where’s the frickin’ money? I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”
Thank you.
Some simple accounting on how the money was used should have been the first condition placed on banks, even if it had to be the only condition. As a friend of mine commented, there should have been a GPS tracking device, blue dye, a little red blinking light –something – attached to this money before it was just given away.
If change is to truly come to this country, let Wall Street and bank accountability be the first order of business.
This entry is cross-posted on Huffington Post.
Posted at 10:19 AM, Dec 24, 2008 in Corporate Accountability
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Maureen Lane
Government leaders are talking incessantly about revenue shortfalls, downsizing and cut backs. The economic crisis is dominating media coverage. But we cannot ignore the child welfare crisis. We need bold policy solutions from the new national leadership officially taking charge in Washington next month. The same old politics will not get us to a better place.
There was a little ray of hope in October when President Bush signed into law the Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act. The legislation is progressive in several respects. It provides money for grandparents and other relatives caring for foster children; and extends foster care payments up to age 21 for youth who are now aging out of foster care at 18 years old. But child welfare in the U.S. is still a long way from being fair or equitable. The majority of children separated from their parents are from poor minority families. In fact, the racial divide is overwhelming, as many studies show. “Forty-two percent of all children in foster care nationwide are Black, even though Black children constitute only 17 percent of the nation’s youth.”
And the economic hardship of these children is just as staggering: One in 5 will become homeless, and a third won’t graduate from high school.
In September, I attended a gathering of family advocacy organizations. The convocation was sponsored by the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform (NCCPR) and David Tobis, Executive Director of the Child Welfare Fund.
The participants included grassroots organizations of parents from all over the country. Parents whose families have been torn apart by children services agencies driven by harmful policies like the Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA).
At the September conference, Bernadette Blount, a parent leader from Child Welfare Organizing Project (CWOP) in NYC spoke about hope. She said that CWOP parents envision a major Agency for Children Services (ACS) system shift from foster care to a family preservation system. CWOP works to establish an ACS focused on the needs of the family, with full knowledge of their neighborhoods, communities and cultures, and respect and compassion for parents and children.
In the past few years, ACS’s involuntary removal of children has decreased quite a bit and referrals for preventive services are up. CWOP organizers have made gains in NYC but there is a big distance left to travel both in the city and nationally. If a mother has a domestic violence problem, she can be charged with child neglect even if she is the victim of the violence. A CWOP parent was in this situation and turned her personal struggle into action and organizing and help for others. But parents and grassroots organizations cannot do it alone. Elected officials and political leaders need to act.
Posted at 6:54 AM, Dec 24, 2008 in Child Welfare
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Cristina Jimenez
The current economic crisis has led immigration restrictionists to blame immigrants for the country’s economic downturn. What restrictionists seem to be ignoring is that our economy relies on the contributions of immigrants.
And this week, yet another report indicates that immigrants are essential for economic growth. The report Destination NJ: How Immigrants Benefit the State Economy by Rutgers University concludes that New Jersey’s 1.7 million immigrants have no negative impact on the state’s economy. Here’re some other findings:
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Posted at 1:47 PM, Dec 23, 2008 in Economy | Immigration
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Amy Traub
Is Governor Paterson finally coming around? On Saturday, the New York Times reported that Paterson might consider raising taxes on New Yorkers who benefited most from the state’s economic growth. But the Governor’s economic logic is still askew. He insists a broad-based tax increase on the wealthy is a last resort, because ” it automatically kicks in less job creation and leads to people leaving the state.”
I’ve already noted that Nobel-Prizewinning economist Joseph Stiglitz concludes that public spending cuts will harm job creation and economic growth more than raising taxes on the wealthy. Now the Fiscal Policy Institute has released a letter from more than 100 other economists who agree.
Posted at 8:46 AM, Dec 23, 2008 in New York | Tax Policy
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Kia Franklin
Cross-posted from TortDeform.Com:
My neighbor passed my house in Seattle on skis today. People don’t know what to do here when it snows more than three inches. In light of the stormy weather, I thought this article’s title, Even jury hiring is frozen, was particularly timely. But what really got my attention from the article is the following:
The economic storm has come to this: Justice is being delayed or disrupted in state courtrooms across the country.
…At least 19 other states [in addition to New Hampshire, described as the “poster child” state for this problem] have slashed court budgets and other government services as their economies have tanked, said Daniel Hall, vice president of the National Center for State Courts, a nonprofit in Williamsburg, Va.
“Courts are there to provide a fair and impartial resolution of disputes,” Hall said. “When you start affecting that, you affect who we are.”(Emphasis added)
The article then references different states in which budget constraints have led to serious cuts in spending for the judiciary. As a result of these cuts, the civil justice system gets the short shrift so that criminal cases can continue being processed. Says the author, “cascading bankruptcies, foreclosures and business disputes have only increased the backlog” of civil cases. Of course, many of these civil claims wouldn’t even exist were it not for the severely hands-off approach to regulation that has allowed lending institutions and other corporations to behave so irresponsibly and callously.
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Posted at 5:19 PM, Dec 22, 2008 in Civil Justice | Corporate Accountability | Economy | Mortgage Crisis | financial crisis | judges | public services
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Mark Winston Griffith
This entry is cross-posted on Huffington Post.
While I guess it made for interesting reading, there’s not much that should be regarded as “news” in yesterday’s New York Times article about how the Bush administration fueled the housing crisis through deregulation and the careless inflation of the housing bubble. The housing polices of the late nineties (yes, including those of the Clinton Administration) and most of the two-thousands have been an excruciatingly long and drunken set up to a suicide dive, with countless people standing on the sidelines warning about the reckless cliff dance and the dangers below.
In fact the Bush Administration, in response to the Times article, actually said that “the failure of financial institutions to perform normal and necessary due diligence in creating, buying and selling new financial products” was a “problem that almost no one saw as it was happening.” Wrong! As someone who has been writing about the over-selling of homeownership, while simultaneously taking part in an advocacy movement that has for years been crusading against abusive lending practices and the securitization process, I’m well beyond “I told you so.”
What I’m more concerned about is how policy makers and even advocates seem to be unwilling to have a frank conversation about what a new paradigm of homeownership should look like in the wake of the Bush’s “Ownership Society” implosion. Here are some points that are missing from today’s conversations about America’s housing economy:
Ditch Risk-based pricing - I reject the notion that subprime lending is necessary for “minorities” to receive loans. As someone who ran a lending institution, the notion of charging higher rates to people with lesser means never made sense to me. The business model used among high-cost lenders - feed on consumer desperation while raking in an assortment of transactional fees - is not just exploitative, it’s simply too volatile for an industry involving a family’s shelter and the nation’s economic security.
Let’s put aside for the moment that a high percentage of subprime loans were made to people who could have qualified for lower-priced “prime” loans. Risk is best addressed by increasing the borrower’s equity stake or capacity to repay - like a larger downpayment or a co-signer - rather than an increase in the borrower’s month-to-month financial burden.
Promote and Incentivize Bank-to-Borrower Lending - The subprime crisis came about because lenders no longer had a compelling, over-riding, interest in making sure the borrower paid back the loan. The securitization assembly line, from mortgage broker to hedge fund investor, rewarded the passing along of risk and the grabbing of fees. Show me a lender who originates a loan and holds it for thirty years and I’ll show you sound underwriting.
Recognize that Wages Matter - Advocates, foundations, think tanks and elected officials of varying ideological stripes have for years been promoting homeownership and asset-building as the “new” way to build wealth among “minorities”, arguing that policy makers have been too fixated on wage and income disparities. Well, wage and income stagnation helped lead families to rely too much on credit and home equity to make ends meet and live their version of the American dream. While asset-building opportunities are obviously important, it’s time to focus public policy on lifting American wages.
Stop saying Homeowners are Better People - We need to stop creating public policies that transmit the message that evolved stakeholderhood and more wholesome values come from owning a home. Not only is that not true, that narratives creates a dwelling hierarchy and takes our eye off the needs of renters.
Promote Affordable Housing, not Real Estate Speculation - Housing bubbles generate a gold rush in which the dollar stakes, almost by definition, are in the hundreds of thousands or millions. As a result, family housing needs get conflated with investment goals. Our public policy needs to focus on creating opportunities for people to spend less on maintaining a roof over their head, regardless of whether that is achieved through renting or home-buying.
Keep the air out of the bubble - The Bush administration is trying to jump start another housing bubble by driving down mortgage interest rates and driving up housing prices, thus preventing the housing market from correcting itself. Focusing attention on helping people avoid foreclosure would have the effect of normalizing and stabilizing the housing market, without over stimulating it.
Posted at 9:06 AM, Dec 22, 2008 in Economic Opportunity
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