NDN Blog

Another Reason to Reform the Senate

As the topic of the distinctly undemocratic Senate has garnered increased attention in the press, we wanted to repost a piece from NDN's spring '12 researcher Leslie Ogden. She previously published this op-ed in the Tufts Daily covering Senate's small state bias, and is worth revisiting as we think about our representation in government: 

"The list of reasons why Americans feel their politics are broken is long and growing. Here’s one of many: The U.S. Senate, which due to the way the U.S. population has grown and settled, has developed a “small state bias” so grave that it is on the verge of becoming an undemocratic institution. The issue is serious enough that it has become necessary to question whether major reform of Congress, and particularly the Senate, is needed.

According to the 2010 census, it is now the case that half of the United States’ population lives in just nine states, with the other half of America living in the other 41 states. While the voters in these top nine states have equal representation in the House with 223 Representatives (the other half has 212), in the Senate it is a different story. Because of this population distribution, the half of the U.S. living in the largest nine states is represented by 18 Senators. The other half of the country living in the other 41 states has 82 Senators, more than four times as many. You don’t have to be good at math to see how much less representation in Congress those living in the big states have today.

Let’s take a closer look at this dynamic by examining California. With a population of about 37 million, California has more than 66 times the population of the smallest state, Wyoming, which has 563,626 people. California has 53 Representatives, and two Senators; Wyoming, one Representative and two Senators. So despite having 66 times the population of Wyoming, California has only 53 times the number of Representatives and an equal number in the Senate.

Furthermore, the four smallest states combined have eight Senators, giving California only a quarter as many Senators as Alaska, North Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming, even though California has 14 times the population of these states combined.

In creating our bicameral legislative system, the founding fathers attempted to balance the issue of big/little states by creating a House whose representation was based on population and a Senate based on proportionality. In The Federalist Papers, James Madison explains his intent to create a “mixture of principles of proportional and equal representation,” particularly “among a people thoroughly incorporated into one nation, [in which] every district ought to have a proportional share in the government.” In essence, to create an equal vote that is a “constitutional recognition of the portion of sovereignty remaining in the individual States.”

However, due to the growth of the number of states in the U.S. and the migration and expansion of our population, the big/little state balance in the Senate has become approximately one-to-four, creating a “small state bias.” This small state bias is additionally exacerbated by the proportional allocation of Congressional seats, which immediately gives each state one Representative, regardless of population. This means that while California has more than 66 times the population of Wyoming, as we saw, it only has 53 times more Congressional seats. Therefore, even in the House, large states do not receive the proper amount of representatives because each state is automatically allocated a Congressman, regardless of the mathematical proportion. The net result of this is that smaller, more rural and less demographically diverse populations in the U.S. have exaggerated influence in Congress today.

Where this small state bias becomes undemocratic is on issues that affect large and small states very differently. Immigration reform is a good example. Most of the new migrants who have come to the U.S. in this last wave of very heavy immigration have ended up in the large states. Seventy percent of Hispanics, for example, reside in the top nine most populous states. The states where most recent migrants and their families live have somewhere between 20 and 30 Senators representing them in Congress today even though they have a majority of the U.S. population. The other states, with a minority of the U.S. population, have between 70 and 80 Senators representing them. Despite the fact that poll after poll show that a clear majority of Americans support “comprehensive immigration reform,” it has been extremely difficult to get it passed through Congress in recent years. The voices of the majority who support immigration reform are wildly underrepresented in the current design of our Congress.

At a time when societies around the world are working hard to improve their own civic institutions, it would be a welcome sign for the world’s most important democracy, the United States, to help inspire this process by updating and renewing its own."

 

Op-Ed: "America the Violent? No More" in the Hill

In Tuesday's edition of The Hill, NDN's Simon and I penned an op-ed titled "America the Violent? No More." The piece investigates the claim that America has a caustic "culture of violence." However, the rate of violent crime in the US has plummeted over the past two decades, and is half of its peak in 1993. Violent crime and murder rates in many urban areas continue to fall at remarkable and encouraging rates.

From the piece:

"This precipitous decline in violent crime in the U.S. over the past 20 years needs to be seen as one of the truly great public policy achievements of the post-World War II era... The assertion by some that there is a rising tide of violence in the U.S. just isn’t true, and it serves to obscure a truly great societal achievement brought about by our law enforcement officials, politicians and courageous community leaders across the country." 

Ultimately, we conclude that "it is clear — if you want to reduce the rising tide of gun violence in the U.S., you have to focus on the new, much more permissive availability of guns themselves and their enhanced lethality. As we move forward in this debate about gun violence, the focus needs to be on the real guns killing and injuring Americans of all kinds — not the fictional ones in our movies and our games."

Simon has supported common sense steps to lessen gun violence in other pieces and appearances. He sparred with Fox's Neil Cavuto on the topic in this video clip and in this blog post to our site earlier this year.

Fareed Zakaria holds a similar position. The Washington Post also ran an interesting article comparing video game expenditure with gun-related murder, which can be read here. This article in the Atlantic contains some interesting statistics certainly pertinent to the gun violence debate, and this blog post over at Monkey Cage also served as a jumping-off point for our research. Other pieces that were used in our research include this piece by Suzy Khimm in the Washington Post, this article in Scientific American arguing that there is a great deal of data showing wide scale use of video games has significant benefits for kids (behind a paywall), this long story from Sunday's Washington Post which is a must read for anyone wanting to make sense of the generation long decline of violent crime in the US.

To read the NDN round-up on gun violence, click here

NDN's Brad Bosserman Discusses Shifting Oil Politics in the Jerusalem Post

The Jerusalem Post published an in-depth piece analyzing the changing oil geopolitics of the Middle East. Political Editor Ilan Evyatar takes a look at the implications of demand for Middle East oil shifting dramatically over the next few decades from the West to the East. I argue that the US should remain engaged in the region based on a broader economic and strategic relationship in order to counter-balance rising Chinese influence, given Beijing’s track record in the rest of Africa. This entire dynamic is going to be extremely important to medium-term regional politics and there is not nearly enough discussion about this reality here in Washington. The article is excerpted below and I encourage you to read the full piece. 

WHILE THERE appears to be a consensus that China’s rapidly growing energy needs mean it will need to nurture a stable environment and adopt a more proactive foreign policy in the region, not everyone shares Biran’s far reaching vision of a Pax Sinica.

“Surging Chinese demand for energy resources over the next several decades will make their more prominent role in the Middle East inevitable. China is now second only to the United States in consumption and importation of oil, a trend that will only continue as the Chinese continue to urbanize their population and bring millions more cars on line. No country can afford to remain uninterested in a region that it will be so dependent upon,” says Bradley Bosserman, a foreign policy analyst and director of the Middle East program at the NDN New Policy Institute, a center-left Washington think tank.

Bosserman, however, cautions that there has been consistent divergence between the US and China on regional issues, from Iran to Syria and elsewhere. “While a peaceful and agreed-upon settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute would contribute to regional stability, China has never shown much interest in investing diplomatic energy… in other parts of the world where it had economic interests.”

He points to the potential lessons to be learned from China’s engagement in Africa, and warns that while the optimists may believe that China’s growing energy interdependence with the Middle East will lead to Beijing becoming more interested in productive diplomatic engagement, its record in Africa gives “little indication that it will pursue that path.”

“For the past half-century,” says Bosserman, “China’s policy of non-interference has provided capital and investment to corrupt governments who have been more than happy to avoid the complicated work of economic and political reform that is often demanded by the United States and Europe. Throughout Africa, China has consistently valued preferential trading terms, lopsided leasing deals, and short-term profits over the kinds of lasting investments in good governance, political reconciliation, and poverty alleviation that lay the groundwork for real stability. It seems more likely that it is that model that they will try to export to the Middle East rather than some other idealized version.”

New Brownstein Article on Millenials Prominenty Features NDN's Winograd and Hais

In today's National Journal, writer Ron Brownstein describes the shifting political landscape and posits that Obama's recent SOTU reflects the importance of millennials in this new era, quoting NDN's Morley Winograd and Michael Hais:

"This speech didn’t—and no single speech could—position the president to shatter the GOP resistance (particularly in the House) that could block many of the initiatives he unveiled. The lasting significance came in how the speech deepened the identification of Obama and his party with the preferences and priorities of his emerging “coalition of the ascendant,” especially the giant millennial generation at its core. “It does look like he is willing to say, ‘It’s a new era, a new Democratic Party, and it’s a new coalition that comprises the party,’” says Morley Winograd, a fellow at the Democratic advocacy group NDN, and the coauthor, with Michael Hais, of two books on the 95 million-strong millennials..." 

"Obama’s speech marked a milestone in his effort to anneal the Democratic Party to that coalition’s priorities. Especially striking was how much of it seemed targeted directly at the massive and diverse millennial generation, born between 1981 and 2002... As Hais and Winograd note, millennials represented under one-fourth of eligible voters in 2012 but will reach 30 percent by 2016 and 36 percent by 2020... “Electoral realignments don’t occur because people change their mind about their partisan affiliation,” Hais said. “They occur because a new generation comes in with sufficient unity and number to tip the balance between two otherwise closely competing points of view. And that’s what we think is under way.”

Winograd and Hais predicted a Millennial-oriented SOTU on NDN's blog prior to the SOTU, which you can read about here.

Fri Feb 15 - Dr. Rob Shapiro's New Op-Ed in the Washington Post: "Weak Job Creation has become the New Normal"

Today, Dr. Rob Shapiro, Chair of NDN's Globalization Initiative, published the following op-ed in the Washington Post

"Weak Job Creation Has Become the New Normal"

"As President Obama said on Tuesday: The hardest economic challenge facing the country doesn’t involve tax reform or fiscal cliffs. The critical question is: What has happened to the strong job creation that was the economic norm in the United States from the 1950s through the 1990s?

For many on the left, the blame lies in slow growth. If only demand were stronger — cue, more stimulus — jobs would come back in large numbers. For many on the right, the fault lies in deficits and regulation. As Sen. Marco Rubio argued in the Republican response toObama’s State of the Union address, businesses will hire in large numbers again only if Washington will do less of everything. But analysis shows that over the past decade, neither stronger growth nor unfettered markets has been enough to prod U.S. companies to create jobs at anywhere near the rates seen in previous decades.

Weak job creation has dogged both the Obama presidency and that of his predecessor. Since the current recovery officially began 44 months ago, in June 2009, the number of private-sector jobs has grown, on average, 1.25 percent per year. These meager gains have confounded Obama’s economic advisers, whoseforecasts in early 2009 show they expected a normal rebound in jobs after U.S. businesses shed nearly 9 million positions in 2008-09. But slow job growth appears to be the new norm: Over the first 44 months of the2002-07 expansion, under President George W. Bush, private-sector employment grew even more slowly, expanding an average of just 0.72 percent per year.

Both records represent real and disturbing change. In the first 44 months of the expansions of 1982-89 and 1991-2000, the number of Americans holding private-sector jobs grew at average annual rates of 3.7 percent and 2.3 percent, respectively. The basic relationship between how fast the economy grows and how many new jobs businesses will create has undergone a sea change.

We can identify this change by comparing how many jobs would have been created under Bush or Obama had the economy expanded at the same rate of growth that occurred in the 1980s. In the first 44 months of the Reagan expansion, for example, gross domestic product (GDP) grew an average of 5.5 percent per year — compared with 3.0 percent per year over the comparable period of the Bush expansion. If the job-creation rate for the first 44 months of the 2002-07 expansion is adjusted for the strong economic growth over the same period of the 1982-89 expansion, job creation under Bush would have been higher — 1.3 percent as opposed to 0.7 percent. Much the same thing happens when job gains over the past 44 months are adjusted for the GDP growth of the early 1980s: The average annual rate increases would have been 2.8 percent, not 1.25 percent.

But those higher rates are still just a fraction of the rate of job growth in the 1980s. This tells us that even if growth accelerates in Obama’s second term, job creation will remain substandard — unless Congress and the president adopt policies designed to address this new reality.

The most powerful forces at work here are globalization and technology. As globalization has created tens of thousands of new businesses around the world, competition everywhere has intensified. The spread of information and Internet technologies across much of the global economy has also given consumers and businesses access to countless new outlets and suppliers, further intensifying competition. The result is that businesses have lost a lot of what economists call their “pricing leverage.” That means that when a firm’s costs rise — as they have steadily for energy and health care over the past decade — businesses cannot pass on all of their additional costs in higher prices. That, in turn, means businesses have to cut other costs — and they have started with jobs and wages.

What policies can help under these new conditions? On Tuesday the president suggested public-private institutes to develop new manufacturing technologies, access to training in advanced technologies and more funds for infrastructure. But the best approach would be to directly reduce the cost for business to create more jobs. Congress could, for example, permanently cut the payroll tax rate for employers and make up the difference for the Social Security trust fund with a modest carbon or value-added tax.

This new labor-market terrain also provides a new impetus to better control employers’ fast-rising costs of health coverage. Congress could strengthen provisions of the Affordable Care Act designed to slow health-care inflation. Start by expanding prevention programs and accelerating the shift to uniform electronic medical records. Even more powerful steps would include new rules and incentives for all providers to base reimbursements on results rather than services provided, and to adopt “best practices” that deliver the same results at less cost.

Sadly, the day has passed when U.S. businesses responded to strong growth by generating jobs for everyone who wanted to work. Over the past decade and two expansions, our job creation rate has fallen sharply compared with previous decades. Policymakers in both parties have to face this new reality and, with the president, devise approaches to actively promote stronger employment."

Dr. Shapiro's insight on jobs and wages in the new age of globalization was also recently included in Washington Post reporter Jim Tankersley's piece "Growth isn't Enough to Help the Middle Class." 

For more of Dr. Shapiro's work, including the graph Time hails as "The Most Important Chart in Politics" click here.

 

Rob Shapiro Featured in New WaPo Piece on Economy, Growth

A new piece today by Washington Post economic correspondent, Jim Tankersley, discusses the President's economic proposals in the State of the Union and features insight from NDN's Dr. Rob Shapiro. Tankersley gives his take on the President's job proposals in the SOTU, specifically the relationship between growth and jobs - a topic Dr. Shapiro has researched extensively. The correspondent joined Dr. Shapiro for a discussion about growth, jobs, and wages this past Monday. Below is an except from the article:

"'It makes it hard for firms to pass along their increases - for health care, energy, and so on - in higher prices," he [Dr. Shapiro] said. "So instead, they cut other costs, starting with jobs and wages.'" Tankersley then continues to reference Dr. Shapiro, including his recommendations to reduce the payroll tax on the employer side and to be more aggressive in limiting health-care cost increases.

Read more about Dr. Shapiro's recent work, including the graph TIME deemed "The Most Important Chart in American Politics." 

 

 

 

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