ConservativeHome's Platform

308 million Americans is good, but not when it feels like they're all in one city: one conservative New Yorker's reflections on population and gridlock

Herbert London is president of the Hudson Institute and author of the book Decline and Revival in Higher Education (Transaction Publishers).  

A former Commissioner of Traffic several decades ago was asked, “what is the best way to get across town in Manhattan?”  He thought for a moment and said, “Be born there.” That statement was made before bus lanes, bicycle lands, outdoor seating in the middle of Times Square, trains bursting with passengers at all hours of the day and an MTA that puts most of its money into employee salaries rather than infrastructure maintenance.

New York is now at virtual transportation gridlock. There simply isn’t a way to get from point A to point B in the center of this city. As I see it, the best way to get cross town today is to dream about it.

For physicians, the expression “primum non nocere” [first no harm] is axiomatic. But this expression should apply to government officials as much as doctors. In the last three years New York City officials have built 200 miles of bike lanes making First and Second Avenues impassable during rush hour. The attempt to convert New York into a bikers’ paradise is bizarre. Only an elitist who doesn’t ride a bus or walk the streets thinks that this metropolitan city can resemble Amsterdam.

Some New York residents actually believe bike lanes are pedestrian walkways making them extremely hazardous to your health. Moreover, since there aren’t regulations for bikers there is the belief that riding against traffic is permitted. DOT Commissioner Janette Sadikkhan contends, “There’s a new street code out there and we need everyone to look out for one another and be safe.” Is she kidding? In New York, the code is move if you can and let the pedestrian be damned.

Of course, this is only half the problem. Mayor Bloomberg got the inspired idea that tourists need an outdoor seating area in the middle of Times Square and Herald Square making two of New York’s busiest areas into a nightmarish congestion. If God forbid, you need an ambulance or fire truck in these locales to save a life, you can count on dying. There is simply no way to pass.

In addition, our government leaders contend the best way to get around this city is by subway trains, that is if you can get on them. The Numbers 4 and 5 on the east side are always jammed; in fact, I usually consider myself lucky if I can get on the train at all. At the 42^nd Street station there isn’t enough room to stand with would be passengers sitting on the steps in the hope they can get on the next train.

Because the east side trains are so crowded I have opted for the R, running along Broadway. However this train is the slowest in the western world. A trip from the Staten Island Ferry to Fifth Avenue and 59^th Street, a trip of roughly six miles took me on hour and twenty minutes last week. I am persuaded I can walk more briskly than that pace.

What this adds up to is a city in transportation gridlock. Roads designed for bikers; avenues designed for tourists and trains designed for sloths. I love New York, but I would like to be able to move in this city before I move out of it. I would like to believe that New York was more than a place for those living in zip code 10021.

You would have to be myopic to design a transportation system as chaotic as ours. The cost of getting around has to be factored into the business equation. The frustration of sitting in traffic has to take a toll on drivers. The congestion of trains must be having an effect on passengers.

But New York goes on blithely as if these conditions are “normal.” Let me assure my fellow New Yorkers that the city is coming to a standstill. You will not be able to move across town or uptown, traffic will be frozen. At that point, the mayor is likely to say use a helicopter to get from one place to the next. Now there’s a practical answer for the city’s transportation woes.

We can reduce school budgets and improve student achievement at the same time: 9 myths about education funding

Dr. James Guthrie is senior fellow director of Education Policy Studies at the George W. Bush Institute in Dallas and a professor at the SMU Annette Simmons School of Education. In addition to his academic career, he has been a high school principal and elected school board member.

In a speech Nov. 19 in Louisville, Bill Gates exhorted America’s chief state school officers to focus spending on instruction and squeeze far greater efficiency out of their education budgets. “Our best chance to change budgets starts now,” he said. “Your appropriations committees will see the state school budgets and ask you to show them an easy way out. I think you can tell them, ‘There is a way out, but it’s not easy.’”

The truth is, we can reduce school budgets and simultaneously pursue high standards, but to accomplish these goals we have to dispel some pervasive myths. Here are the major ones…and the facts that refute them:

Myth:  America’s schools have been underfunded for a long time – now is the worst time to cut spending further.

Fact:  Schools have been riding a century-long wave of rising revenues.

Per-pupil-spending today, adjusted for inflation, is triple what it was 50 years ago. To be fair, this is a national picture that does not hold for every locality. Nor does it account for the added cost of our now including handicapped children in public schools. Still, in most places, real dollar school spending has been increasing for a long time

Myth:  Class sizes are growing.  Budget cuts will accelerate this process.

Fact:  Virtually all past spending growth has been used to hire more teachers and reduce class size.

The pupil/professional ratio, now 14 to 1, is half its 1946 level.  Despite significantly reducing class size, student achievement lags behind many international competitors (such as Japan, Germany, France, and England) with less favorable pupil/teacher ratios.

Myth:  We can save a lot merely by trimming the fat and the frills.   

Fact:   Sadly, we cannot.

Only 20 cents of each school dollar goes to non-salary items such as utilities, supplies and transportation.  Meaningful savings can only come from rethinking our employee pay policies. 

Myth:  If we have to trim staff, let’s protect our most experienced teachers. 

Fact:  Effective teachers, not experienced teachers, make a difference to students.

If staff reductions are necessary, we owe it to students to retain their most effective teachers -- who are not necessarily those with the most seniority -- as judged by value-added student gain scores.  We now know that having an uninterrupted sequence of effective teachers can narrow the achievement gap between middle-class and low-income students.

Myth:  Laying off teachers is a violation of the basic right to education.

Fact:  Cutting ineffective teachers is a civil rights victory for students.

Budget decision-makers must realize that effective teachers and principals represent the best hope for disadvantaged students.  The right of even the poorest student to receive the best teaching and leadership talent must take precedence over outworn and self-serving notions of employee seniority. 

Myth:  Teachers were historically underpaid, and still are. 

Fact:   Some teachers are underpaid, others are overpaid.  The vast majority enjoys luxurious healthcare and pension plans.

Most teachers are rewarded for the years they serve and for graduate courses taken during vacations.  Today we know that the link between student achievement and their teachers’ seniority and graduate-course-count is weak – if it exists at all.    Tying compensation to effectiveness and eliminating raises for Master’s degrees outside a teacher’s field will improve student outcomes and yield savings.  One large Southern city found that a no-Master’s-pay policy could reduce annual budgets by 5 percent.

Teacher health plans without employee contributions or co-pays do not benefit student achievement.  Adjusting teacher fringes to private sector levels benefits students by taking the strain off the school budget. 

Myth.  Teachers of all subjects are equally valuable and should be paid equally.  

Fact.   Private-sector pay is calibrated to attract talent. 

Physics and chemistry teachers are in high demand; physical education teachers are plentiful.  Working with the market gives schools better teachers in more expensive but nationally vital subjects—and preserves scarce education funds to serve students.

Myth:  Technology cannot replace good teachers

Fact:   Right, but it augments good teachers, makes them more effective, and delivers new resources which benefit more students.

Digital technology already helps students who have reading and math difficulties.  It can help advanced students by providing access to the best instruction in specialized areas such as physics and biology. Technology allows schools to deploy resources to more students, while paying special attention to both the weakest and the most gifted students. 

Myth:  It takes a superman to make these changes.

Fact:   It takes leadership, common sense, and political courage.

The looming budget crisis may reveal that these resources are more abundant than we think.   The quality of public and professional leadership will make the difference.  As Gates said in closing:

’  …The design of our schools, the way we teach, the way we budget – has kept so much human energy locked up inside.    Let’s unleash it.  

Fiscal austerity and deficit reduction will be good for middle American wages and jobs

Piotr Brzezinski is a freelance writer and former Conservative Party policy analyst.

As employment hits 9.8%, it’s easy for Republicans simply to blame Obama for the suffering on Main Street. But let’s not forget that even the go-go years weren’t great for middle America: Inflation-adjusted median weekly wages for both college and high school graduates fell from 2000 to 2009 (respectively from $1,030 to $1,025 and $629 to $626). How Republicans manage to bolster middle class earnings while simultaneously tackling America’s unprecedented fiscal crisis will be critical to the country’s future.

Wage stagnation for most Americans set in long before the Great Recession –median household income fell by 4% in the decade up to 2008. Of course, these problems shouldn’t be overstated – Americans are living healthier, longer lives – but the fact is that even in the boom years most people were suffering from economic stagnation, masked (for some) by rising housing prices.

Given America’s ballooning debt – set to increase by 42% over the next few years – it’s easy to see that more government spending isn’t the answer. The government expanded massively under both Presidents Bush and Obama without benefiting middle America’s earnings, and, even if we wanted to go on spending, international bond markets won’t support it.

The risk, however, is that these deficits will give rise to future taxes that compound the middle class pain. The costs of debt interest, social security and healthcare alone will consume an estimated 20% of GDP by 2030. Taxing higher income workers can raise some revenue, but squeezing the rich will hit diminishing returns long before covering the deficit, leaving the middle class will be next in line. So spending reductions hold the key to shielding Middle America’s earnings from the cost of reducing the deficit.

The single most important thing Republicans can do for both wage stagnation and deficit reduction is cutting healthcare costs. Skyrocketing employer costs have held down wages by diverting money from workers to the healthcare sector, but reversing this process requires more than just the repealing unpopular elements of Obamacare. Yes, ending the tax penalty for individually owned health insurance and reducing state barriers to entry should help reduce costs by promoting a competitive national healthcare market. But reducing Medicare reimbursement rates – which will cascade throughout the healthcare system as many private payments are pegged to Medicare – and raising copayments will also be necessary to manage demand and get costs down.

And fiscal consolidation will require addressing the cost of other entitlements like Social Security and state pensions. This could come from a move toward defined contribution-based systems, direct benefit cuts, and an increase in the minimum retirement age.

Of course, a serious approach to deficit cutting will also demand discretionary spending cuts – eliminating earmarks, reducing corporate tax subsidies, shrinking and privatising government services, and cutting defence spending. But these are less important than entitlement changes; although discretionary spending gets most of the media coverage, entitlements form the bulk of future burdens.

It makes for a politically unpalatable agenda but, unfortunately, there’s no painless alternative. And, indeed, these reforms will place some pressure on middle America, but it can be minimized by focusing on the ‘cost-free’ elements of entitlement reform, like encouraging Medicare competition and raising the retirement age. And it’s less painful than the alternative: raising taxes.

More importantly, the combination of fiscal consolidation and deficit reduction can break the logjam of wage stagnation. It will promote economic growth by addressing the real uncertainty over future taxes hanging over business investment – until the government cuts spending potential investors won’t believe politicians’ “no new taxes” promises. And, by alleviating healthcare cost pressure, getting the deficit under control will help ensure that wages take a greater share of future employer spending.

Furthermore, boosting GDP growth will, on its own, reduce the burden of America’s debts. Regulatory reforms – rolling back everything from absurd state-based licensing restrictions to over-zealous safety and environmental laws – can complement spending cuts by making America more competitive. Without productivity increases, global competition will keep downward pressure on American wages.

Ultimately, America’s politicians face a series of very difficult challenges over the coming decade. Fiscal austerity can play a critical role in restoring the American economy as an engine of growth for middle America; the risk, however, is that spending cuts will be seen as a threat to the middle class – taking away small goodies – and instead the US will get an ineffectual mixture of tax rises and Know-Nothing nativism. So both for their electoral chances and for the prospects of healthy fiscal consolidation, let’s hope that conservatives can put together a program that cuts the deficit while addressing wage stagnation. 

Dennis Lennox: Post-partisan Obama a threat to Republicans

 

Dennis Lennox is active in Republican politics in Michigan and is the elected drain commissioner in his county government, an office that dates to the 14th century when Geoffrey Chaucer was appointed as commissioner of dikes and ditches. He has worked on presidential, congressional and statewide campaigns. You can follow him on Twitter by clicking here.

The GOP must be careful not to play into the hands of the White House’s new strategy to cast President Barack Obama as a pragmatic voice opposing, as they call them, the extremes partisans of the Democratic and Republican parties. 

The image of a  post-partisan, centrist-driven president who is more concerned about sound public policy worked in 2008, when Obama was successful in capturing self-identified independents and enough moderate-to-liberal Republicans — headliners by the likes of former Governor William Weld and Susan Eisenhower. Many conservatives will say good riddance to what they call Republicans-in-name-only, but the fact remains that a party cannot realistically win nationally when it writes off upwards of 15 states.

It takes independents, who are drawn to support Lincoln Chafee — the liberal former Republican senator, who opposed both the Republican and Democratic parties to win the governorship of Rhode Island in November. These swing voters are the same demographic that propelled Scott Brown to the U.S. Senate after winning a by-election in Massachusetts last year. It’s also what helped Governor-elect Rick Snyder win in Michigan with 58% of the vote. By comparison, Obama won Michigan, a traditional swing state, with 57%.

In a recent poll, Obama would win Michigan in 2012 with only native son and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, whose father was a popular governor of Michigan, coming close to picking up the home of General Motors, Ford and Chrysler.

With Obama playing up his independence from party orthodoxy in the first skirmishes of his re-election campaign, his numbers are increasing, according to a Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll released late Wednesday. As with the Michigan poll, only Romney comes close to defeating the president.

Obama’s new strategy is boosted by phony criticism from Democrats in Congress, who are gleefully playing along. The Democratic charade is then of course picked up by right-wing talking heads, who claim it’s an example of liberal frustration with the Obama administration.

This gives conservatives, and by extension Republicans, a false feeling of security.

For Republicans to win, they must also play the pragmatic card and not allow Obama to rebuild his winning coalition. It’s very much what propelled the victories of Prime Minister John Key’s National Party in New Zealand and the center-right coalition of Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt in Sweden.

If Republicans can’t focus on what matters to swing voters, Obama will coast to re-election with the help of middle-class suburban voters in swing constituencies, such as the one held by Democrat Congressman Gary Peters in metropolitan Detroit.

This is the demographic drawn to Obama’s reborn pragmatism. These are same voters who supported Republicans in the mold of Snyder, Weld, Brown and popular common sense Governors Bob McDonnell of Virginia and Chris Christie of New Jersey.

To defeat Obama, Republicans must take a page from the solutions-based electoral strategy of these sensible conservatives. 

Ted Bromund: the defense budget is not just about numbers, it's about American values and exceptionalism - which we neglect at our peril

Dr. Ted Bromund is the Margaret Thatcher Senior Research Fellow in the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom in the Heritage Foundation.

There has been quite a bit of public debate about whether the defense budget should be cut along with the rest of the government as we get our deficit under control. This debate usually begins at the wrong end of the argument. The U.S. spends money on its armed forces in order to fulfill the Constitutionally-mandated requirement to provide for the common defense, and because, like all democracies, it has interests it seeks to advance.  These interests are not simply material: because the U.S. was founded on the belief that the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are universal, our interests are defined, in part, by our values.  Before critics blindly take a hacksaw to the defense budget, they should explain exactly how they propose to defend America’s citizens, interests, and values by spending less, or spell out precisely which of those responsibilities they plan to abandon.

It is important to recognize that the U.S.’s role in the world does not begin with its defense budget.  We have a substantial – though historically modest, in comparative terms – defense budget because we have substantial responsibilities.  No one can deny that Congress has larded the federal budget with pork, but recognizing that tells us nothing whatsoever about America’s responsibilities, and how much we must spend – efficiently and responsibly – to meet them.  The defense budget must be the manifestation of those responsibilities.  The closer we get to that ideal, the better off we will be.

As we approach the opening of a new Congress, every incoming representative should understand, and be able to articulate, our fundamental foreign policy priorities, because it is these priorities that should drive the debate on defense, and much more.  For foreign policy is not just about what the U.S. does with foreigners.  It shapes our security as individuals, affects our well-being as consumers, and defines our future as self-governing citizens.  Americans may not always care about foreign policy, but foreign policy cares about them.

The first duty of American foreign policy is to ensure the United States remains a sovereign and independent nation.  Nothing was closer to the hearts of the Founding Fathers, and nothing should matter more to us.  Sovereignty is a complicated word for a simple idea: it means that we make our own laws, define our own policies, and shape our own future.  It means that here, the people rule.  It would be a serious mistake to believe that American sovereignty will endure forever simply because it was established in 1776.  America’s sovereignty will last just as long as we care for it, and no longer.

The GOP needs to take up tax reform, but beware of proposals that try to boost consumption and spending over savings and investment

Mason Herron is a freelance political writer living in New York City and a contributor to FrumForum.

Although the final plan released by the Bowles-Simpson deficit commission failed to receive the votes necessary for official recommendation to Congress, it has proved effective at advancing a serious dialogue about deficit reduction. Its proposals will form the basis of any meaningful debates we have in the next year on deficit issues. In particular, the plan has placed tax reform on the table as a potential legislative goal over the next two years. 

Should Congress decide to take up tax reform, Republicans should take hold of the issue and advocate a tax system that leans toward consumption, rather than income. The result would be a tax system that encourages more savings and investment. While such a drastic and sudden reform is politically unlikely, there are modifications that conservatives could make to the current tax system that would shift the source of taxes.

The kind of tax reform that the Bowles-Simpson plan endorses contains three primary adjustments to the tax code: lowering marginal rates; eliminating the plethora of tax expenditures that cloud our tax system; and treating capital gains and dividends as income, rather than treating them as a separate means for investment. It’s this last provision that could prove to be the most economically harmful. Although the plan aims to lower the capital gains rate for the bottom rate to around 12%, it would significantly raise the middle and upper rate to 22% and 28%, respectively.

While the 3% rate reduction for the lower bracket would stimulate investment among individuals and businesses with a lower income, it would significantly impede the incentive to invest by those in the middle and upper brackets—two groups who dedicate a significant part of their income toward capital gains.

Worse, however, is that the health care reform bill contains a 3.8% tax on interest, dividends, and capital gains on couples making more than $250,000 per year or individuals making $200,000, which would effectively raise the upper rate to 31.8%.

With the elimination of a significant number of tax expenditures also comes the elimination of numerous tax shelters for savings, such as tax-exempt IRA accounts or nontaxable interest on state and municipal bonds. These expenditures create incentives to invest, rather than spend, and in effect provide households with a much firmer financial ground to stand on.

Increases in the capital gains rate also impede new business startups. Between 1969 and 1972, the capital gains rate rose from 27% to 45%, resulting in an overall decrease of venture capital funding of 69% over that same period. Between 1986 and 1988, the capital gains rate rose from 20% to 33%, leading to a venture capital decrease of 52%. In contrast, decreases in the capital gains rate have led to significant increases in venture capital. It’s hard to ignore these numbers, and anyone with a desire to raise the capital gains rate should keep them in mind. 

Taken together, the tax reform proposed by the Bowles-Simpson plan is essentially a shift away from a tax system that encourages investment, savings, and limited debt, toward a system that encourages consumption and spending.

Such a system would be based on a severe misunderstanding of the causes behind the financial crisis, which was preceded by increases in consumer spending and debt. To help prevent future crisis, our tax system should work toward injecting banks and other savings institutions with funding while providing incentives to invest rather than consume. Doing so would promote innovation, growth, and higher future living standards. 

Of course, conservatives could face strong opposition from Democrats who would argue that such a tax system is a handout to the rich that hurts the poor, partly because higher-income households have a greater propensity to save than lower-income households do. However, the benefits that a pro-investment tax system provides would affect everyone in the form of higher real incomes and wages. 

Considering that tax reform will be merely part of the larger effort of deficit reduction, placing the right tax system in place could prove to be a valuable windfall. A tax system designed to promote investment is exactly the kind of stimulus the U.S. economy needs right now.

Bowles-Simpson is a healthy start. Its desire to simplify our tax system and expand the tax base points us in the right direction. But in following its lead we should not take our eyes off the key drivers of investment and economic growth that our economy so desperately needs right now.

Republicans risk alienating the elderly and poor by pursuing a conflicted strategy on drug importation

Roger Bate is the Legatum Fellow in Global Prosperity at the American Enterprise Institute. His papers are available at his scholar page. This is the second of a series of articles Bate is writing on drug issues the GOP should be paying attention to in 2011.

Americans pay more--often a lot more—for drugs than Canadians and Europeans. That is unfair, but wholesale importation of drugs from these locations isn’t the answer.

Come January, the new blood of Republican Congressional members will want to tackle the many problems with US healthcare. High-priced drugs is a big concern of voters, even if it's overlooked in the bigger debates about health insurance and health spending.

When it comes to drug prices, on solution congressional leaders discussed in 2010 was legalizing the importation of cheaper drugs from places such as Canada and the European Union, where governments restrict drug prices. US pharmaceutical companies oppose such wholesale importation, as do most Republicans. But there are nuances to the issue, of which newbie congressman and their staff should be aware, before they dismiss all discussions of importation.

Plans to allow importation would certainly lower drug costs, but the negative impact on research and new product development might be significant, since most drugs are developed by small and large US-based drug companies. The reason for this is the unusual nature of drug development. Most of the costs of drug development are upfront, sometimes estimated at a billion dollars, which means that normal marginal cost pricing of drugs is inefficient.  It is far better to tier the pricing based primarily on income - in other words it is both efficient and equitable that richer people pay more for their drugs.

To a certain extent Europeans and Canadians (and numerous other countries) free ride by not paying their fair share.  The best solution would be for these other nations to reverse policy and allow competition, rather than government dictat, to set prices. But while these nations free ride, should Americans continue to foot most of the research and development bill? Probably, since the benefits of new products accrue to Americans often before other nations. This is especially hard to swallow for congressional leaders whose states border Canada, where some of their elderly buy their meds from over the border.     

Drug pricing and importation is an important debate and one that should continue, especially if it can help drive better policies in Europe. But some of those opposed to importation know the debate is never entirely won and that at some stage importation may be allowed. So they are always looking for new reasons to block importation, and one way is to scare people.  

Are imported drugs dangerous?

There are certainly numerous examples of dangerous imports, from contaminated Chinese drugs to counterfeiters selling bogus pills over the net. But according to my research team's work, internet-sourced drugs are probably a lot safer than you think. In fact, with the exception of fake Viagra with packaging from China, which not only didn't have the right active ingredient but could have contained a lethal one, none of the five brands from 70 web pharmacies we assessed failed basic quality testing (our original study of 55 online pharmacies was published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature and can be accessed here).

It is important for Republicans to appreciate that their constituents know European and Canadian imports are, by and large. well-made products. After all, while surveys indicate that Americans are concerned about Internet drug quality, millions buy online and have done so for years. This market is already more than $12 billion a year. For the elderly and isolated in particular, convenience and low cost outweigh the potential harm of using web pharmacies.

Certainly, there are still risks to buying drugs this way. The World Health Organization reports that drugs from Web sites that conceal their physical address are counterfeit in more than 50 percent of cases. And indeed, the few drug failures in our analysis came from Web sites lacking a physical address. Our research suggests that even non-approved Web sites (those breaking U.S. law by not requiring prescriptions and importing drugs) that at least have a physical address will deliver decent-quality brand drugs--albeit illegally. Your best bet is to go to the independent credentialing agency www.pharmacychecker.com and look at their approved list of web pharmacies before deciding. 

Contrary to what one might expect, we also found that price was no indicator of quality. Drugs from India, which were marked up 20-fold from their local retail price, passed basic quality tests, as did those from Europe. 

It's true our sample size is still fairly small. But if replicated by further studies, the conclusion is clear: though there remains a clear risk to buying cheaper drugs over the Internet, as long as the requested drug brand is delivered and the web site has a physical address, with staff contactable by phone, the risk is really pretty small.

Such a conclusion undermines the fear-based argument being used to oppose importation.

Republicans should stick with the economic arguments against (wholesale) importation. They must appreciate the nuance of opposing importation of drugs, which undermines efficient and equitable tiered pricing of drugs, but acknowledge that US patients pay higher prices, and the uninsured or underinsured often cannot afford them. To punish the desperate is immoral and surely loses future voters. All Republican leaders need to do is decriminalize personal importation of drugs for up to 90 days supply, but continue to deny insurance reimbursement of such purchases. That way they do not fatally undermine tiered pricing on which future drug development depends, but assist the poorest voters in their constituencies.

Middle class Americans are more likely to divorce and have children out of wedlock than affluent Americans

W. Bradford Wilcox is Director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia.

Americans are acutely aware of Tiger and Elin's divorce; Brad and Jennifer's divorce; and, yes, Al and Tipper's divorce.  These high-profile divorces contribute to the popular impression that the richer you are, the more likely you are to divorce.

While that may be true in celebrity culture, it is not the case for affluent and educated Americans in the real world. Indeed, in high-rent urban neighborhoods and the prosperous suburbs of the nation’s major cities, divorce is down, marital satisfaction remains high, and nonmarital childbearing is still an exotic activity. It is not upscale America but Middle America that is experiencing marital troubles. From small towns in the heartland to working class suburbs outside of the nation’s major cities, divorce, marital dissatisfaction, and nonmarital childbearing are on the rise. In a word, marriage is in much better shape among Whole Foods regulars than it is among Walmart shoppers.

It wasn’t always this way. Up until the 1970s, marriage had a strong hold over both Middle and upscale America. But over the last four decades, dramatic changes in the economic, cultural, and civic fabric of the United States have eroded the strength of Middle American ties to marriage; by contrast, the ties that upscale Americans enjoy to marriage have remained resilient in the face of these changes.

Hence, the nation is witnessing a growing “marriage gap” between these two Americas. This marriage gap is placing the American dream beyond the reach of many in Middle America, imperiling the social and emotional welfare of millions of children from Middle America, and opening up a social and cultural divide that does not augur well for the American experiment in democracy. This is the fundamental message of my new report, When Marriage Disappears: The Retreat from Marriage in Middle America.

More precisely, moderately educated Americans, who make up 58 percent of the adult population aged 25-60, and are defined here as Americans who hold a high school degree but not a 4-year college degree, have seen their rates of divorce and nonmarital childbearing surge in recent years, to the point where their family lives look more and more like those of the least-educated Americans, who are defined here as high school dropouts (and make up 12 percent of the adult population). By contrast, marriage trends among highly educated Americans—defined here as Americans who have a four-year college degree (30 percent of the adult population)—have stabilized since the 1970s.

Take nonmarital childbearing. Among white Middle American women, nonmarital childbearing rose from 5% in 1982 to 34% in 2006-2008. But among white highly educated women, nonmarital childbearing did not rise at all. Only 2% of unmarried white women with college degrees had a baby in 1982 and only 2% did likewise in 2006-2008. So much for all those New York Times and Atlantic stories on well-educated women having children on their own.

Writing in Slate, Hanna Rosin accepts my basic diagnosis of the marital ills afflicting Middle America. But she doesn’t like the fact that I think the nation needs to enact public policies and advance cultural changes that will strengthen marriage in Middle America:

The part I am uncomfortable with is the patrician solution. If it was wrong to impose the values of the sexual revolution on the pious underclass is it not wrong now to impose our love of marriage? The National Marriage Project [makes] the assumption that the retreat from marriage is not the result of but the cause of our troubles.

But I’m not so sure. I read report after report about the decline of marriage and it feels more like a symptom: of female independence, economic disaster, the declining status of men. Encouraging marriage among a group of people who have given up on it is fairly difficult, as the Clinton administration found out during the welfare reform era. By contrast other social policies – better child care options for single mothers, support for out of work dads who need to pay child support – are relatively easy.

I’m happy to see that Rosin is aware of the limits of public policy, though I’m mystified by her contention that public policies like jobs programs targeting nonresidential fathers have a better record than welfare reform-inspired efforts to promote marriage. Such programs, not to mention Head Start, have decidedly mixed records.

More importantly, however, Rosin misses two fundamental points from the research. First, virtually everybody in America wants to be happily married. So it’s not “patrician” to think about helping Middle Americans realize their marital dreams.

Second, the retreat from marriage is both cause and consequence of many of our nation’s biggest problems. Yes, “economic disaster” and the “the declining status of men” hurt marriage. But when marriage breaks down, children and families are more likely to fall into poverty, men are less likely to get and keep a job, and kids raised in unmarried homes are much less likely to have a shot at the American dream. Indeed, Isabel Sawhill at the Brookings Institution has found that much of the growth in child poverty since the 1970s can be attributed to the nation’s retreat from marriage.

So, that is why I think that highly educated Americans like Rosin and me need to think about public policies, cultural reforms, and civic initiatives that will extend marriage to Americans of every stripe. After all, can’t we agree that marriage shouldn’t just be the privileged preserve of college graduates?

The U.S. needs to do more, not less, when it comes to defense, and our budget needs to meet the challenge

Thomas G. Mahnken is a Visiting Scholar at the Philip Merrill Center for Strategic Studies at The Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Between 2006 and 2009, he served as the deputy assistant secretary of defense for policy planning. In that capacity, he advised the Secretary of Defense and Under Secretary of Defense for Policy on strategy and planning.

The United States needs to get its fiscal house in order.  The long-term health of the American economy, and the long-term wellbeing of Americans, demands it.  What is less clear is the extent to which cuts in defense spending should be part of any package to do so.  Too often, the question has been posed in economic terms: how much we can “afford” to spend on defense?  The question should more properly be formulated in terms of U.S. national security: how much should the United States spend in order to protect the United States and its citizens from the challenges of today and tomorrow?

The answer to this question came in late July, when the congressionally-mandated Quadrennial Defense Review Independent Panel delivered its report to Congress.  The 20-member panel, chaired by former Clinton administration Secretary of Defense Bill Perry and former Bush administration National Security Advisor Steve Hadley, included former senior officials from Democratic and Republican administrations as well as retired senior officers. I served on its staff.  The group argued forcefully that if the United States is to continue play the international role it has for more than half a century, then we may need to do more, not less, when it comes to national defense. 

The panel found "a significant and growing gap between the ‘force structure' of the military -- its size and its inventory of equipment -- and the missions it will be called on to perform in the future." The panel's members were particularly concerned that the force structure outlined in the Obama Administration’s  2010 Quadrennial Defense Review "may not be sufficient to assure others that the United States can meet its treaty commitments in the face of China's increased military capabilities." The report calls for an increase in U.S. force structure in the Pacific to counter Chinese military modernization, noting, "A robust US force structure, largely rooted in maritime strategy but including other necessary capabilities, will be essential."

It is powerful statement that a group of 20 senior officials who have served Democratic and Republican presidents agreed that "the [U.S.] force structure needs to be increased in a number of areas, including the need to counter anti-access challenges; strengthen homeland defense, including cyber threats; and conduct post-conflict stabilization missions. It must also be modernized." They called for an increase in the size of the U.S. Navy, the acquisition of a next-generation bomber, and new long-range strike systems. They also acknowledge that although the Defense Department must do everything it can to achieve cost savings on acquisition and overhead, "substantial additional resources will be required to modernize the force. Although there is a cost to recapitalizing the military, there is also a price to be paid for not re-capitalizing, one that in the long run would be much greater."

The panel did point to areas of potential cost savings, however. For example, it tackled the sensitive issue of the Defense Department's rising personnel costs, noting that "a failure to address the increasing costs of the all-volunteer force will likely result in a reduction in the force structure, a reduction in benefits or a compromised all-volunteer force."  It also laid out ways to streamline and cut the cost of acquiring new weapon systems.  Both should be pursued vigorously.

Americans should welcome an honest debate over defense spending.  But to be honest, such a debate should revolve around the role the United States should play in the world and the value of maintaining it. 

Local solutions are still the best counter-attack to Washington's default progressivism

William A. Schambra is the director of the Hudson Institute's Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal. Prior to joining the Hudson Institute in January of 2003, Schambra was director of programs at the Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee. The article below is excerpted from his remarks on December 3 at the Hudson Institute's event on The New Promise of American Life and the 112th Congress.

The New Promise of American Life, published in 1995, came not from some abstract ideological doctrine, but rather from work a number of us were doing on the ground in the low-income neighborhoods of Milwaukee. 

For decades, those neighborhoods had been supervised by cadres of social service professionals who claimed to know better than everyday citizens how their affairs should be managed. 

The results there, as elsewhere across America, had been disastrous – decaying families, dysfunctional schools, rising crime. 

In Milwaukee, though, we saw -- and the Bradley Foundation encouraged -- the first indications of a populist rebellion against the regime of experts, namely, parental choice in education. 

For the first time, low-income parents were able to make one of the most critical life-choices on their own, selecting the school their children could attend with public support.  The notion that parents knew better than experts about such matters was of course anathema to the teachers unions. 

But it proved equally unsettling to anyone possessing a professional social service credential.  That certificate of expertise surely merited willing and even grateful acquiescence from “ordinary” Americans, who would badly mismanage their own affairs without professional supervision.

As a great battle raged in Milwaukee around these questions, Lamar Alexander and Checker Finn -- who had managed to overcome their own handsome credentials in order to side with parents in the struggle for education reform -- began to explore the intellectual underpinnings of what Lamar came to call government’s “arrogant empire.”  And that led us all to Herbert Croly and the progressive movement of the early 20^th century.

Croly is best known as a proponent of the centralization of public policy.  But he argued for its professionalization as well. 

In the complex and interconnected circumstances of the 20^th century, he held, the promise of American life could no longer be fulfilled by the idiosyncratic and amateurish workings of democratic individualism. 

The promise instead demanded that our national life be turned over to knowledgeable experts immersed in the new sciences of nature and society, which enabled us to manage the growing webs of interdependence. 

These purely public-spirited social engineers would be devoted heart and soul to a grand vision of national purpose or national community – a vision all too likely to elude ordinary citizens, trapped as they were in shabby local communities, still clinging to antiquated, parochial moral and religious myths. 

By the early 90s, we had seen the results of the Croly vision:  once-proud, self-reliant American citizens were being turned into passive, helpless clients, increasingly dependent on social services lavishly funded, but poorly designed and ineffectively delivered.

If this helped fuel the congressional elections of 1994, how much more is it true of the congressional elections of 2010. 

Once again, we see the fiercely proud, “don’t tread on me” populist spirit in full rebellion against an arrogant empire of professional elites, whose credentials allegedly qualify them comprehensively to remake our health, energy, and financial systems. 

Once again, the elites dismiss resistance to those sweeping plans as remnants of retrograde religious doctrines providing pathetic comfort against the complexities of global interconnectedness. 

And once again, the tone-deaf arrogance of the elite’s response only feeds the populist fires.

If we declared war against Herbert Croly in 1995, though, it seems that Herbert Croly won, at least that round.  How will things be different this time? 

Well, if the professional service state was becoming too expensive in the mid-90s, it is most certainly too expensive in 2010, and cut-backs unimaginable earlier are now going to be unavoidable.

If school choice and charters seemed a quixotic challenge to the unresponsive education bureaucracy in the 90s, consider how far we’ve come since then.  Today, major movies like Waiting for Superman promote charters and blame teachers unions, rather than the Bradley Foundation, for the problems of public education.

The New Promise was one of the first conservative projects to suggest that Herbert Croly’s utopian intellectual vision might be more a source of our problems than, say, FDR’s far more practical New Deal. 

Since then, it’s become clearer to us how much of our politics spins out of the tension between the progressive nationalist vision of a reign of experts, and the democratic, decentralist vision of the framers of the American Constitution.

Such arguments were once of interest only to a handful of intellectuals.  But they have today found their way onto the whiteboards of our nation’s leading news network, while well-thumbed copies of the Constitution now protrude from thousands of pockets at the nation’s Tea Party rallies.

One other thing will be necessary, though, if Croly is to be beaten in the next round.  In the summer of 1994, Lamar Alexander traveled across the country spending time with dozens of neighborhood leaders who were successfully addressing our social ills. 

Their approaches reflected the everyday common sense and traditional moral and spiritual principles of the American people, rather than elitist doctrines of professional expertise. 

In his book entitled We Know What to Do – that is, American citizens, not the elites, know what to do – Mr. Alexander described his visits to sites like Pastor Henry Delaney’s school for low-income children in Savannah, Father Jerry Hill’s shelter for the fragile homeless in Dallas, and Sister Jenny Lechtenberg’s job training program, PUENTE Learning Center, in East LA. 

His notion that we must look first to street-level problem solvers for wisdom rather than credentialed elites meant that Lamar was Tea Party before Tea Party was cool.

If things are going to be different in 2010, our new Congressional conservatives will have to follow Lamar’s example, and turn once again to the wisdom and experience of our grassroots leaders. 

But this time, they must show a steadiness of purpose that failed them in 1994, once they had their own hands on the levers of national power. 

As we seek ways to roll back government, the problems it sought to address aren’t going away. 

Alternatives must be found, and we will have to look again at the more effective, less expensive, decentralized solutions that, as Bob Woodson has argued for thirty years, appear in glorious profusion across America’s neighborhoods.

For conservatives, the next successful journey to the White House will begin with a tour like Lamar’s.  It will seek out the local wisdom of grassroots leaders, and explore ways to sweep aside the failed solutions of progressivism’s arrogant empire, so that such local wisdom can flourish.