For the second Presidential Debate, which will be in a Town Hall format, half the Questions will come from the public. You can still get yours in by submitting them to this site. I’ve included mine below. Some are from my previous blog since they were not asked in the first debate.
Environment
Background: Renewable energies have become more cost effective than fossil fuels in price per mega-watt hour, with wind & solar thin film at $55 & $43/MWH, vs. gas & coal at $65 & $108/MWH, respectively. Question: How much will you invest in renewables, and how many new jobs would that create?
Background: Many politicians, Democrat and Republican alike, publicly support taxing carbon as a way to incentivize fossil fuel industries to cut carbon emissions. Question: Do you favor a tax on carbon, and if not, how would you fight climate change?
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Immigration
Background: Immigrants are twice as likely as US-born to become entrepreneurs, and half as likely to become incarcerated. They pay more into Medicare, Social Security and taxes than they receive in benefits. Question: Do you support a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants and what is it?
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Healthcare
Question: What is needed to stem the costs of healthcare, while still covering everyone?
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Economy / Jobs / Inequality
Background: Historically, healthy GDP growth was at least 3%. In the last several years, it has been stalled at less than 2%. The projections for this year are 1.6% (IMF) and 1.8% (Federal Reserve). Question: How would you increase GDP growth, and what data or studies support your ideas?
Background: Small businesses comprise 39% of GNP, 52% of all U.S. sales, and employ 54 million people (57.3% of private workforce). Question: How would you foster small business growth, and what data supports your ideas?
Background: The Earned Income Credit supplements low income worker’s wages, but the Guaranteed Minimum Income covers the unemployed well as low income employed, and is actually backed by many Republicans. Question: Do you favor the Earned Income Credit, or a Minimum Income to help the poor?
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Education
Background: The quality of education is critical to a nation’s economic health and standing in the world. Question: If investing in the future is important, what would you do to improve education?
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Terrorism
Background: Terrorists have been known to use US aggression against them as a recruitment tool for other terrorists. Question: How will you effectively fight terrorism without fueling further recruitment?
Background: Wars have proven too costly to fight, but we have other options to draw on for our security: partnering with allies, intelligence gathering, foreign weapons sales and foreign military training. Question: How would you fight terrorism, while minimizing spending and lives lost?
The topics chosen for tonight’s first Presidential Debate include: America’s Direction, Achieving Prosperity, and Securing America. Here are some of the Questions I want to see Asked.
America’s Direction This is one of those non-specific categories tailored for generic, boiler plate answers. I’m not crazy about the topic, but here goes…
ATQ: In order of priority, what are the 3 biggest problems negatively impacting the direction America is currently taking and, briefly, what would you do to change direction for each?
ATQ: If “investing in the future” is key to setting and maintaining a positive direction for America, how important is education, and what would you do to improve it?
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Achieving Prosperity ATQ: Historically, healthy GDP growth was at least 3%. In the last several years, it has been stalled at less than 2%, with projections for the future showing this continuing. What is the best way to increase GDP growth, and what economic data can you cite as the basis supporting your proposal?
ATQ: Small businesses are responsible for 39% of GNP, comprise 52% of all U.S. sales, and employ 54 million, or 57% of the private workforce. Given these statistics, what is the best way to foster small business growth, and what data can you cite to back that up?
ATQ: Do you favor the Earned Income Credit, which helps low income workers, or a Guaranteed Minimum Income that covers the unemployed as well as low income employed, and which Glen Hubbard and other Republicans support?
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Securing America ATQ: Given that fighting wars has proven too costly, what strategy would you employ to effectively fight terrorism that would minimize deficit increases as well as lives lost?
ATQ: What emphasis in importance do you give each of the following categories for fighting terrorism: military buildup, partnering with allies, intelligence, foreign weapons sales and foreign military training? How, and in what areas of the world, would you allocate resources to them? (Admin note: I know this is a mouthful, but I want a full breakdown.)
ATQ to Trump: You have proposed reinstituting water boarding to deter terrorism. Since terrorists are willing to die for their cause, and use U.S. acts against them as a recruitment tool, would water boarding deter terrorism, or actually encourage more of it?
ATQ to Trump: Given that terrorism has become globally fragmented, with most attacks being unsponsored, homegrown ones by individuals, how effective would banning all Muslims from countries with previous links to terrorism be, as you have proposed?
ATQ to Clinton: You are in favor of arming the Syrian rebels. How would you avoid another ‘Libya’ of unintended consequences, with chaos ensuing, in the event Syrian President al-Assad is deposed?
I recently came across another story—the third in a few months—on economic turn around of disadvantaged who live in cities. Rather than add it to the other two in my [intlink id=”1402″ type=”post”]May 2015 blog[/intlink], I decided it deserved its own.
The NYT opinion piece is about the successful Houston nonprofit Neighborhood Centers, and its ‘bottom up’ approach to helping people lift themselves out of poverty. The author, David L. Kirp, writes that Neighborhood Centers “has enabled hundreds of thousands of poor residents, many of them immigrants, to move up the ladder of economic and educational opportunity each year. It’s a strategy that can — and should — be implemented nationwide.”
Though the nonprofit has been around for a long time, its growth in the last two decades has been “exponential”, and is largely attributed to the efforts of CEO Angela Blanchard. She sums up the orgs philosophy, saying “The people are the asset, the source of potential solutions, not the problem.”
The process is involved. “Hundreds of hours” are spent conducting community meetings and interviewing residents to identify priorities and community leaders, then funds are “cobbled together from 37 federal, state and local programs, with grants or contracts from the Departments of Education, Agriculture, Labor, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development and the Treasury.”
The payoff has been big. Houston, one of the fastest-growing and most diverse cities in the nation, now has over 70 Neighborhood Centers across the city and surrounding suburbs, an annual budget of $270 million, and serves over 500,000 people.
And the results are concrete. Last year, jobs were secured for 110,000 people, 5,600 were trained for careers in welding and pipe-fitting—skills needed at the Port of Houston, and women were taught how to turn baking into a small business and to run a thrift store.
According to Kirp, “the organization also operates 14 high-caliber pre-kindergartens and charter schools. In every grade, charter students’ test scores were higher than in the neighborhood public schools.”
Other of its missions include free tax preparation, and teaching local leaders how to work the political system. The latter helped some “residents persuade the City Council to operate a new bus line”, giving them better access to grocery shopping and health clinics. It also encouraged two others to run for City Council, and enabled a group of 10th-grade boys to design, lobby for, and get a $400,000 skateboard park.
While it is gratifying to hear success stories like these from 3 different cities, they should be still more widely reported. A search of the trusty TVNews Archive* produced a few hits for “Houston Neighborhood Centers”, more than for either the Minneapolis or Atlanta stories (respectively, a sprinkling on CSPAN; none), though none on major networks. Most of these reports are set in the context of an ‘urban renaissance’, which many experts claim has been happening for some time. I’ve included video of a few, along with their highlights, below.
Fareed Zacharia aired an 8 minute segment about Houston on his CNN show in June of 2014. Only a 2 minute excerpt was available on the website (below), but the full report can be found on TVNews Archive, here, in 1 minute segments.
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In it, Zacharia starts with big picture brushstrokes: “Houston was the first city to regain all of the jobs it lost in the 2008 recession. It actually created more than two jobs for every one it lost.” Touching on immigration, Neighborhood Centers’ CEO Angela Blanchard relates how, during a time when the issue was politically heated, she had to refute misinformation from the media on a daily basis in order to raise funds, and, in the end, Houston came together and solved its problems. With video of Neighborhood Centers as a backdrop, she suggests its long term benefits: “This is the world they (children) will remember. That is a powerful way to make a community safer. Belonging is the most powerful medicine.”
On his show about cities, after a brief introduction, Charlie Rose interviews co-authors Jennifer Bradley and Bruce Katz on their book “The Metropolitan Revolution” (10 min. long). Though the scope of the discussion is cities in general, Houston is singled out as an example.
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Some quotes—
Bruce Katz: “The real power is in cities and metropolitan areas because they are the engines of the economy.”, “[The] top 100 metros sit on 1/8 of the land mass, [and represent] 2/3 of the population and 3/4 of GDP.”
Jennifer Bradley: “Metro’s are not just governments, they are networks (of companies, philanthropic groups and individuals); they can fund things in a more creative or interesting way, … a whole lot of resources open up.”, “Cities need to come together and demand change in Washington.”
Following their segment, Mr. Rose interviews Columbia’s Center for Urban Real Estate director and “A Country of Cities” author, Vishaan Chakrabarti (15 min.), who says “Cities are a silver bullet to solve most of the major problems we have in this country, and by extension, the world.” He goes on from there.
All interviews inspire hope.
What is particularly interesting about the Houston story is how its model contrasts with those of Minneapolis and Atlanta. In those two cities, there was some backslide from the initial success of their models which had been imposed, top down, on the communities, rather than organically grown, bottom up, as in Houston.
In this recent News Hour report (7 min. long), Harvard’s Raj Chetty discusses his study on urban areas and the high correlation between where a child grows up, and their chances of upward mobility. He states (paraphrasing): “We can’t move everyone out of poor cities like Baltimore. We have to fix the cities.”
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On the question of how to fix them, Houston has clearly added more, and important, data to that of Atlanta and Minneapolis. Now, let’s get the media to report it.
ATD Rule break: Cover The Topic.
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*Note: The TVNews Archive database may have data gaps, though none were uncovered in the use of it for this blog. [intlink id=”1347″ type=”page” anchor=”TVNewsArch_CCGaps”](more info)[/intlink]
In the quest for answers to Freddie Gray’s death in Baltimore, attendant focus on unemployment and urban blight, and the role they play in the tragic encounters between blacks and the police, brought to mind a story reported in March on the ‘Minneapolis Miracle’, a story with proven answers.
The joint piece between News Hour and The Atlantic tells of a broad regional prosperity that resulted from shared wealth policies in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area in the 1970’s, and the subsequent decline after policies were rolled back. Though the Twin Cities still enjoys high ratings in both affordability and upward mobility, an anomaly and powerful lure for millennials, the current ‘miracle’ is not as evenly distributed as it once was. Minneapolis now has one of the widest disparities in opportunity between blacks and whites in the country.
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It wasn’t always so. In the 70’s a concerted effort was made to create policies that benefited everyone. Progressive education, tax-sharing and housing laws were passed. The fiscal disparities law mandated that 40% of each community’s business tax base growth was shared regionally. That allowed the less rich communities to share in the commercial wealth of the entire city.
The Minnesota legislature also focussed on integration in public housing. For 15 years, 70% of low-income housing was in the whitest neighborhoods, providing access to better schools and jobs for those occupants.
In the late 80’s, as civil rights laws lapsed across the country, the housing laws were dialed back. Though fiscal equalization did survive, current statistics speak to a divide. High school graduation rates are 47% for African-Americans vs. 86% (statewide) for whites. Homeownership is 34% for African-Americans, 76% for whites. The state, overall, has the highest unemployment gap between whites and people of color, nationwide. (Comparative statistics for ‘before housing rollback’ were not cited, and would have strengthened this report.)
Still, Minneapolis is headquarters to 19 Fortune 500 companies, more than any other for a metro its size. Explaining the locale’s historical appeal to them, U. Minnesota’s Myles Shaver says: “Its most important resource never leaves the city–educated managers of every level, who can work at just about any company.” The implication of all this? Judy Woodruff sums up local leaders’ thoughts: “The racial disparity in education, opportunity and income must be addressed if Fortune 500 companies continue to come and thrive.”
So… one solution–progressive housing–found, then lost. The other–fiscal equalization–intact, but unreplicated and barely reported on. According to The Atlantic, no other large American city has adopted tax revenue sharing. In 2008, Seoul, Korea imported a version of it. The result was the gap between districts in social services funding, narrowed. Poorer communities were able to grow their tax base with minimal impact on richer ones.
Once again, we see coverage of the problem but nothing on solutions–proven solutions–in this case. The more I encounter this, the more it makes my blood boil.
To the News Media: Cover the Topic of solutions to poverty! They are off-the-shelf, ready-made and working. They help people… you know, the people you are supposed to inform so as to make their vote meaningful.
Do it! It’s. Your. Job.
UPDATE:
Three days after I posted the above Minneapolis Miracle blog, News Hour filed another such report on solutions to poverty, this one on Purpose Built Communities in East Lake, Atlanta Ga. PBC, started by Warren Buffett and local community leaders, turned East Lake around by targeting multiple elements simultaneously–housing, education, health and jobs.
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The project has been mostly successful–crime is down 90%, test scores are up, and other cities have replicated it with a Federal project in the works. The downside: surrounding areas have become more expensive, and there is less subsidized housing than originally, forcing the displaced to move to other low income areas. Still, with the state of things, it is ever more important to report on these endeavors to learn what works and empower the public to demand change. Predictably, a TVNews Archive search produced only a handful of CSPAN results in addition to News Hour.
So, again, good job News Hour. But to the rest of the News Media, I repeat: Cover the Topic of solutions to poverty!
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*Note: The TVNews Archive database may have data gaps, though none were uncovered in the use of it for this blog. [intlink id=”1347″ type=”page” anchor=”TVNewsArch_CCGaps”](more info)[/intlink]
