NDN Blog

NDN seeks DC Membership Coordinator - NDN and the New Policy Institute seek a DC Membership Coordinator to manage our DC-based member network and work as part of the Membership & Development team in securing the organization’s annual budget. 

Specific responsibilities will include:

• Scheduling and executing member events in Washington, DC
• Maintaining relationships with current members and helping to prospect and solicit new members
• Communicating with current and prospective members to share information about NDN and the New Policy Institute’s activities

Applicants should be outgoing and able to foster and maintain interpersonal rapport; be detail-oriented with strong organizational skills; and be able to work independently on assigned projects.  Relevant development/fundraising experience or experience managing or operating in a member-based program is highly valued. The position reports to the VP of Membership & Development. 

Salary and benefits package commensurate with experience.

Please send a cover letter, resume and references to jobs@ndn.org by Friday, February 12.

I wanted to highlight for you some research that Robert Shapiro, the Chair of NDN’s Globalization Initiative, recently conducted on international tax policy. The study examines the economic impacts of limiting the deferral rules that protect U.S. businesses from bearing significantly higher tax burdens on their earnings abroad than their foreign competitors. The paper is entitled: The Economic Benefits of Provisions Allowing U.S. Multinational Companies to Defer U.S. Corporate Tax on their Foreign Earnings And the Costs to the U.S. Economy of Repealing Deferral.

Last week on National Public Radio (NPR), I heard a great story by Alex Blumberg of Planet Money: "Sweet Memories Of A Snack Food Financial Scheme" that helped explain, by analogy, the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme.  To listen click here, or see the transcript below:

Morning Edition, March 13, 2009 · Today, Josh Bearman has gone straight. He's a successful writer in Los Angeles. But he was briefly a criminal mastermind — in 1980 — when he transferred to a new school in Minneapolis and joined the third grade.

It was a fancy school where all the kids had fancy snacks like chewy granola bars and Rice Krispies treats.

Bearman himself grew up in a spartan home with no sugar.

To make matters worse, kids wouldn't just eat their lunches — they'd flaunt them. Every day, a brisk trade in lunch snacks would take place. Kids would pile all their best items onto one main table and start bartering.

"People would say, 'Oh, well listen, I've just had my fill of Rice Krispies treats for two weeks in a row, straight. Why don't I have some of your Fruit Roll-Ups?' And so they would trade it all around," Bearman recalls. "And it actually is a pretty efficient system. Everyone got what they wanted. It kind of all worked out for them. It didn't work out for me at all because I was totally outside of this economy. Because my peanut butter and jelly sandwich had no currency value in this market whatsoever."

Cake Futures

And so, Bearman came up with a plan. A scheme. A lie. He told his classmates that every year, on the last day of class, his mother would bake a cake. A huge cake. The most delicious cake you've ever tasted.

"So what I said was, 'Listen, that's going to be a great day. But in the meantime, I can offer you this special opportunity. And what we can do is, if you give me those Cheetos now, today, you can lay a claim — you know, on a share of this future cake. You can have a deposit, and have a piece of this cake when it comes.' So, basically, I developed this sort of derivative lunchroom market for delicious cake futures."

This idea took hold and spread, totally disrupting the old lunchroom economy. Bearman's classmates would line up in front of him at a new table: One Fruit Roll-Up bought a share worth one slice of cake; one chewy granola bar was worth two slices.

To keep up appearances, Bearman would dutifully record the transactions in his Trapper Keeper. He'd even customize them. If a fellow classmate had a snack Bearman really wanted, something with giant-sized marshmallows for example, he'd say they could specially request what kind of cake they wanted — red velvet, chocolate or angel food.

"Even, at a certain point, I believed in the cake, even though I'd made it up. Because I just imagined the hero's welcome I was going to receive when they wheeled this Technicolor, baked colossus into the schoolyard, and how incredible it was going to be," Bearman says. "So there was this mutually reinforcing psychology: We all just bought into the idea of this cake."

Well, not all. One kid named Spencer, who had been the king of the old lunchroom economy because of all the delicious treats he regularly pulled out of his lunch box, was suspicious of Bearman and the ever-expanding ledger in his Trapper Keeper. Suspicious, and good at math.

"Mr. Fundamentals, Spencer, is over there saying, 'Hey, the numbers don't add up,' " Bearman recalls.

Lessons From The Old Lunchroom Economy

And here, Bearman's third-grade financial confidence game took on the exact contours of many of our current financial scandals. There's the group, taken in by the promise of a glorious future, and then there's the skeptic, saying this all doesn't add up.

These two viewpoints tussle for a while, but eventually, the truth wins out. The dynamics are as true today as they were at a third-grade lunch table in 1980.

"Listen, I was giving the people what they wanted," Bearman says. "They wanted — they liked the idea of this cake. And also, they figured they were too far in. They were into this cake for 40 bags of Cheetos and 20 Nutter Butters. And so they couldn't walk away from all their investment!"

Eventually, the regulator, the school administration, who had previously turned a blind eye on the whole fraudulent enterprise, got involved — long after, it must be said, anything could be done to help the victims.

Bearman was punished but, as he says, those Cheetos and Nutter Butters, they were never coming back.

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Very interesting report by Nikki Gamer on the local Washington, DC NPR station, WAMU 88.5, this morning discussing a new study by Demos.  The Demos report, "The Economic State of Young America," suggests that high costs of education, healthcare and homeownership combined with growing debt and declining incomes are intersecting to make the adage that each generation is better off than the last an increasingly unlikely scenario for the Millennial Generation.  Millennials, the study asserts, may be the first generation to not surpass the living standards of their parents.  Listen to Nikki Gamer's report in Windows Media or Real Audio, or check out a PDF of the study here.

This just further hightlight's NDN's call for our leaders and government to craft a comprehensive agenda which addresses the needs of 21st century America, for more on our efforts visit www.ndn.org.

The response of Warren Buffett, the 77-year-old chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., when asked by Germany's Der Spiegel weekly whether he thinks the U.S. could still avoid a recession.   "Perhaps not in the sense as defined by economists. ... But people are already feeling the effects of a recession," he continued.  He also said that as far as the average person is concerned, it is already here.  "It will be deeper and longer than what many think," he added.

With the Stimulus checks already in many consumers hands, Congress taking steps to address the housing/mortgage crisis, and as the Presidential nominating process finally begins to resolve itself, it seems an appropriate time for our leaders to turn their attention to crafting a comprehensive economic strategy for our future, that makes globalization work for all Americans and addresses the pressing issues of health care and global warming.  We at NDN have been trying to do our part through our Globalization Inititiative and nascent Green Project.

Sam Dillon of the New York Times reported today in his article: "States’ Data Obscure How Few Finish High School" how official graduation rates reported to the Federal government are often grossly inflated or inaccurate. Many educators, administrators and others attribute this as yet another negative effect of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act. NCLB does not measure completion rates appropriately and perversely awards school systems that push underperformers to drop out, thus leaving many children behind, the article reports. The Times had an interesting graphic of the discrepancies between the reported and actual graduation rates:

NDN has been advocating that we need to do more to prepare American students for a flatter, more globalized world, including our most recent, modest proposals: A Laptop in Every Backpack and Tapping the Resources of America's Community Colleges but this article reveals a deeper problem with our education system that was being masked by NCLB and will be surprising to some, but perhaps all too familiar to those students and workers who have been left behind.

The most recent Gallup Poll daily election tracking of the Democratic race shows Clinton gaining a small lead recently (2%). However, the race remains very tight, as is illustrated by the graph below of recent tracking results over the past 4 weeks:

Other findings have both Democrats now running about even with McCain, although McCain (46%) has opened a slight lead over Obama (44%) in the latest results.  For more from the poll, visit gallup.com.  

It is interesting that at no point during this track did Clinton reach or exceed 49% (unlike Obama, who hit 50% twice in the track) and thus it remains to be seen if Obama can regain his lead and build upon it after his powerful speech today on race, or whether Clinton can even reach 50%.

With so much attention on the election this November, it is perhaps easy to forget the recent 2006 elections and how NDN believes that those elections will mark the End of the Conservative Ascendancy.  Over the past few weeks with November 2008 looming ever closer, we've gotten a reminder of the hubris which preceeded the conservative fall in 2006 - that as Simon Rosenberg presciently wrote in September 2005 Absolute Power Corrputs...  

We've seen this narrative continue with yet another recent example of the moral bankruptcy of the conservative movement and how corruption has pervaded every corner of their world: the growing scandal involving Christopher Ward.  Ward, who until recently was the Treasurer of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) and served as treasurer for dozens of Republican political fundraising committees has alledgedly diverted up to $1Million from the NRCC - although a complete forensic audit is not yet completed - and potentially stolen from the other Republican political fundraising committees he oversaw as well.

The Politico's Patrick O'Connor first reported on this on February 20, 2008 and his update today, written with John Bresnahan, is only the most recent chapter in the ongoing collapse from corruption and failure to govern of the conservative ascendancy.  What might this foreshadow for Senator John McCain in the fall, a candidate who is proudly running as the heir presumptive to the Bush era?  McCain has already signalled that he will walk away from campaign finance reform and abandoned issues like immigration for political expediency... what chapter is next?

On Sunday The New York Times' Kate Zernike and Jeff Zeleny discussed the contradictions between Senator Obama's blockbuster presidential campaign and his B-movie bit-part in the Senate in their article, "Obama in Senate: Star Power, Minor Role" which is part of their series on the presidential candidates called The Long Run. One quote, from Senator Obama himself, illustrates this contradiction quite well:

'“I’ve been very blessed,” Mr. Obama told the crowd [of Washington’s elite at the spring dinner of the storied Gridiron Club] assembled in March 2006. “Keynote speaker at the Democratic convention. The cover of Newsweek. My book made the best-seller list. I just won a Grammy for reading it on tape. Really, what else is there to do?” he said, his smile now broad. “Well, I guess I could pass a law or something.”'

The article goes on to compare Sen. Obama's "megawatt celebrity" and "multimedia sensation" with his lackluster record, most notably, the fact that there are "few examples of the kind of bipartisan work he advocates in his current campaign." On immigration reform, which is of particular interest to us here at NDN, Sen. Obama joined the bipartisan group led by Senators McCain and Kennedy offering Comprehensive Immigration Reform, "yet when the measure reached the floor, Mr. Obama distanced himself from the compromise, advocating changes sought by labor groups [and] the bill collapsed."

The political reality for Senator (could-be President) Obama is that a Senate voting record would be a potential minefield to his campaign, as has been demonstrated by his campaign's bludgeoning of Senator Clinton with hers (Iraq vote, for example). Yet, in this new phase of the campaign, which Simon discusses in his recent post, there will be more focus on the realities behind the media and campaign personalities of the candidates. Senator Clinton's argument has long been that she has been through this close scrutiny before (but isn't a rerun inevitable and is that anything we want to see: CNN paging Kenneth Starr)? For Obama, this scrutiny will be new and more intense and will continue to ask the question: But could he deliver?

Sen. John McCain's problems with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) haven't gone away.

Yesterday, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) filed a complaint against McCain for alledgedly violating campaign finance rules by using the potential of public matching funds as collateral for a loan to keep his campaign afloat, but now trying to withdraw from the spending limits attached to those funds. The FEC last week issued a statement that McCain cannot withdraw his request for matching funds because the Commission, which cannot achieve quorum because 4 of the 6 seats are vacant due to an appointments battle between President Bush and the Senate, cannot issue a ruling on his request. Likewise, they cannot issue any rulings on the DNC's complaint against McCain for the same reasons. For more background on this check out my earlier post: Will Campaign Finance Rules derail the Straight Talk Express?

Ultimately, the crux of this issue is the spending limits. If McCain is bound to those limits (as the DNC complaint is seeking to ensure) then his campaign is on the verge of breaching them. Thus, McCain's campaign has a hard choice before them: stop spending money and go dark until the Republican Convention in September, or break the rules, defy the commission and risk a fine and potential imprisonment of campaign officials (although imprisonment is an unlikely outcome). For more on this, check out Daniel Nashaw's article in The Guardian.

So, the broken FEC is McCain's bane and blessing. Without a quorum, they cannot rule on his request to withdraw from the matching funds program creating an ongoing PR problem for him, but it's a blessing because the FEC cannot rule on the DNC's complaint or McCain's likely breach of the spending limits, either. Whatever happens, McCain seems to be abandoning issues central to his political and personal image (integrity and campaign finance) for political expediency. This isn't the first time McCain has sacrificed his integrity and flip-flopped (immigration). Does anyone expect it to be the last?