Georgetown Public Policy Review

By William T. Gormley, Jr.

Over the past decade, my colleagues and I have produced a series of peer-reviewed articles evaluating the effectiveness of Oklahoma’s universal pre-K program, which President Obama praised in his State of the Union Address. Oklahoma’s program, established in 1998, now reaches approximately three-fourths of the state’s four-year-olds. The “Sooner State” has decided that sooner is better than later when it comes to early childhood education.

Our research has focused on Tulsa, the largest school district in the state. The Tulsa school district was an attractive research site because it serves children from diverse racial and ethnic groups.

When we first visited Tulsa, we had reason to believe that the Tulsa pre-K program would be successful. Unlike many other preschool programs, Oklahoma mandates high quality, at least in terms of educational inputs: every lead teacher must have a B.A. degree, must be early childhood certified, and must be paid a public school wage. A child-staff ratio of 10/1 ensures that each child receives personal attention.

As it turns out, our hunch was correct. In fact, the Tulsa pre-K program has generated phenomenal improvements in school readiness.

By Manon Scales

As we continue to slog through this highly irregular and seemingly deadlocked budget season, the nebulous “reduction of tax expenditures” is a frequently discussed strategy for addressing the deficit.  Despite its recurrence in many sound bytes and its mention in both the House and Senate budget resolutions, no proposals for substantive action in pursuit of such a strategy have surfaced.

By far the largest tax expenditure is the employer-sponsored health insurance (ESI) subsidy. The primacy of employer-sponsored insurance in our current health system, coupled with its favorable tax treatment, is projected to cost the government approximately $760.4 billion in forgone tax revenue from 2013–2017.  Such forgone revenue is projected to amount to 1.8% of GDP from 2013–2022.  While the thought of making changes to the subsidy is anathema to most, a comprehensive consideration of the major provisions of the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA) suggests that there may be an opportunity to significantly alter or remove the current employer-sponsored insurance tax subsidy without sacrificing its most important beneficial effects.

Executive Interview Editor Josh Caplan and Senior Interview Editor Maya Khan talked with former Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) for the Spring Edition of the Georgetown Public Policy Review, which will be released on Thursday.

Sen. Feingold served in the Senate from 1993 to 2011 after having spent ten years in the Wisconsin State Senate.  After losing his 2010 reelection campaign to Republican Ron Johnson, he founded Progressives United, a 501(c)4 political action committee (PAC) devoted to facilitate grassroots mobilization.  As a senator, he was known for being on the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, yet able to broker bipartisan deals on challenging issues.  He worked with future Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) to reform the campaign finance system with the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, also known as the McCain-Feingold Act.  In 2001, he was the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act, saying that the anti-terrorism legislation unnecessary violated the civil liberties of innocent Americans. Following are excerpts from the full published interview.

Georgetown Public Policy Review (GPPR): In recent decades, partisanship and polarization in the US have been consistently increasing.  What do you think is causing this divide?

Russ Feingold: Well, I watched this happen. After I came to the Senate in the early ‘90s, it didn’t seem to be particularly partisan, compared to now. One of the things that happened is a bad cycle, which really began with the Contract With America coming into 1994. That group came in with a very partisan attitude, into Congress. And then Democrats often responded in the same way, and we sort of drew up sides. In the Senate, we used to have a much more bipartisan nature.

A lot of the things that have fueled this are the growth of talk radio and cable TV, where they need to fill up the time 24 hours a day. You’ve seen the extreme positions and almost bias, of both Fox and MSNBC, where people are constantly drilled with mostly just one side of the story. That really causes people to have their news and their attitudes filtered in one direction. And, unfortunately, people seem to be demanding that their elected representatives toe a strict line of one side or the other rather than finding good opportunities to work with the other side. I used to feel that we were rewarded or praised if we worked with the other side, when I worked with John McCain. That needs to come back again.

GPPR: Partisanship, filibusters, and an aversion to compromise in the Senate are at all-time highs.  Is the Senate broken or can Congress come back away from their culture of brinkmanship we’ve been seeing?

By Alex Engler

Congressional apportionment, the process by which Members of the House of Representatives are distributed among the states, affects every corner of federal policy. Whether it’s the Sun Belt’s water policy or the Rust Belt’s tax credits, geography defines politics. How a nation is changing—not just in its population but also in its representation—is worth keeping an eye on.

The number of seats in the House of Representatives has been set at 435* since the Apportionment Act of 1911, but where these seats have been apportioned has changed quite a bit over the last century. During this period there have been 202 seat transfers, for an average of 22.4 following each decennial census.

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by Jacob Patterson-Stein

At the end of March, while answering questions in the House of Commons, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper calmly explained why he was stopping payments to an organization that, in his words, “spends less than 20 percent of the funds that we send […] on programming.” At a time when governments everywhere are feeling the urge to justify spending, it is not surprising that representatives cheered after the PM’s brief statement. What caught many international observers off guard, however, was the organization to which Harper was referring: the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). Indeed, even the UN was surprised to learn that Canada was withdrawing from the Convention and reportedly only found out about Ottawa’s decision after being reached for comment by Canadian press.