politics

Half a century ago, President Lyndon Johnson launched America’s War on Poverty; yet by the 1980s President Ronald Reagan famously declared that “we waged a war on poverty and poverty won.” To back up this claim, conservatives point to official U.S. statistics showing that the percentage of Americans living in poverty, around 15%, has changed very little over the decades.

But the official poverty measure is outdated – so I teamed up with several colleagues to produce estimates using a more accurate one. When we use the improved measure, it turns out that U.S. social programs and taxes have had a powerful effect on reducing poverty since the mid-1960s. Back then, government programs did little to alleviate poverty, but today public programs and taxes cut the percentage of people living in poverty by almost half, from the 28.7% it would be without government efforts to 16% after public programs are included. Far too many Americans continue to have inadequate incomes, but U.S. policies have helped millions avoid poverty. more...

Relationships between members of the United States Congress and the judiciary are shifting, as Democrats and Republicans alike reassess whether the courts are political allies or foes in this highly polarized era. My research tracks what members of the House of Representatives have had to say about judges and the judiciary in recent years—specifically, I have teamed up with a colleague to analyze public statements published on official House websites from 2010 to 2014, a pivotal and contentious period in recent politics. more...

Almost half a century ago, the U.S. federal government expanded financial aid to college students to make college more affordable—but today the odds of getting a degree are more tightly linked to family income than ever before. Getting a college degree remains a good investment, but the current distribution of federal and state financial aid dollars leaves many families of modest means out in the cold. Between 1992 and 2004, the odds that a high school graduate who took at least Algebra II would decide not to go to college went up among all income-groups except the very wealthiest. Sadly, students from families of modest means have also become more likely to drop out from public colleges and universities—leaving with debts, not degrees. more...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently released its Fifth Assessment Report, presenting the latest accumulation of scientific evidence about the threat of global warming and calling for urgent actions to meet the threat. Earlier reports have pointed in the same directions, but the political, economic, and simple human obstacles to facing and coping with the dangers of global warming remain today as they were twenty-five years ago on the eve of the Intergovernmental Panel’s First Assessment Report. People in the United States and across the globe are no more likely to reduce greenhouse gas emissions dramatically in 2014 or soon thereafter than they were in 1990. Modern political and economic systems are not geared to cope with this sort of challenge. And there is an enduring collective action problem: no single individual or organization, not even a few working together, can execute necessary solutions. Most must learn to act together, or the game is over—the causes and dire effects of increasing global warming simply will not be handled in time. more...

In 2006, the Massachusetts legislature passed and Governor Mitt Romney signed into law a health care reform with subsidized health insurance coverage for low-income people, a health insurance exchange to help people not otherwise covered choose among available plans, an individual mandate requiring residents to obtain coverage if affordable, and an expansion of Medicaid to include children and long-term unemployed adults. The reform in Massachusetts turned out to be a blueprint for the Affordable Care reforms passed by Congress and signed by President Barack Obama in 2010. ObamaCare, as the federal reform law is sometimes called, is only now going into full effect, as debate continues to swirl about its provisions and its likely effects. No one can tell what the national reform’s impact on Americans’ health will turn out to be, but we can get an idea of possible benefits by looking at what is known so far about the aftermath of the earlier Massachusetts reforms. more...

The Affordable Care Act aims to extend health insurance to tens of millions more Americans through two major routes: by giving people information and in many cases tax credits to help them purchase private insurance plans offered on state or national “exchanges,” or online marketplaces; and by giving the fifty U.S. states plus the District of Columbia additional federal funds to expand their Medicaid programs to insure all low-income people just above as well as below the federal poverty line. States have a key role in implementing health reform. Each state can choose to run its own exchange marketplace and help its residents learn about their options for purchasing affordable plans. Each state also decides whether or not to accept new federal subsidies to expand Medicaid (covering 93% of the costs from 2014 through 2022). What states do—or refuse to do—makes a big difference, as a comparison of the nation’s two largest states, California and Texas, makes clear. California is leading the way in showing that Affordable Care can work, while authorities in Texas are obstructing implementation with gusto. more...

Imprisonment in the contemporary United States far surpasses other nations. The ironies are sharp and manifold. The United States deploys armies abroad under the banner of freedom and at the same time has the largest custodial prison infrastructure on the planet, a system of jails and prisons that locks up a greater fraction of our people for life—more than fifty for every 100,000 residents—than the population share imprisoned for any length of time by Denmark, Sweden, and Norway combined. American democracy is inspired by ideals of active and equal citizenship, yet racial and class inequalities run through the heart of our criminal justice system. Urban black communities have little voice in setting criminal justice policies, even though they experience the brunt of violations and the direct and indirect effects of punishment. Intellectuals have an obligation to lay bare the threat to American democracy caused by massive, racially skewed imprisonment. To that end, I offer the following reflections. more...

Even after felons pay their dues to society and leave prison, America sidelines them from the public square. Parolees and probationers are often perceived as undeserving of citizen benefits, and they have little power to assert their rights. Not only do governments often deny felons public resources such as Food Stamps, subsidized college loans, public housing and professional opportunities like licenses and contracts, it is also common for U.S. states to deny former prisoners the right to vote and otherwise exercise full and free citizenship.   more...

The state of Texas leads the nation in the percentage of residents lacking health insurance. In 2012, nearly a quarter of the state’s population went without health coverage, some 6.4 million people. Texas alone is home to 13% of all uninsured Americans, with poor and low-income people the most affected. More than ninety percent of well-off Texans have health insurance. But the ranks of the uninsured include more than two out of five impoverished Texans—as well as more than a quarter of individuals earning modest incomes in 2014 between $11,670 and $46,680 (or between $19,970 and $79,880 for a family of three). more...

When the Congressional Budget Office issued its latest report about the Affordable Care Act in early February, public reaction was sharp—and mostly focused on a drop of worrisome news in a sea of encouraging findings. On the good news side, the report found that insurance premiums are considerably lower than previously anticipated by the Budget Office, and that health reform is now projected to cost $9 billion less than previously estimated. And it debunked worries about a legal provision designed to buffer insurance companies from risk; it is not at all a “bailout,” as some have claimed, and indeed the federal government is projected to take in billions more than it spends. These and other encouraging findings were overshadowed by attention to another projection—that reform may reduce employment and worker hours by the equivalent of about two million full time positions in 2017. more...