Great Ideas

We've all heard about profound challenges facing American elections and the people who run them.  As we approach the 2022 midterms we wanted to check in with one of America's leading experts to see whether things are on track to run smoothly, or if maneuvers to harass election administrators, suppress votes, or even subvert elections are still coning to be a major concern.   Bob Brandon helped establish the Fair Election Center 16 years ago, and it continues to support election reform, litigation, advocacy, student engagement, and getting people to work at the polls to make the cogs and gears of our democracy run. 

Recently the Center for American Progress issued a report that said “Online service companies have produced substantial wealth, but these gains have failed to reach the American workforce more broadly. Pervasive, ubiquitous digital surveillance has eroded Americans’ civil liberties. Exploitation of people’s data has created novel consumer threats around privacy, manipulation of consumer behavior, and discrimination. Americans face these and other harms from online services, including but not limited to widespread fraud, abuse of small businesses, abuse of market power, faulty algorithms, racist and sexist technological development, cybersecurity challenges, threats to workers’ rights, curtailed innovation, and challenges with online radicalization and misinformation.”

But one of the authors of that reports says that despite this massive litany of destructive problems, big tech platforms can be fixed, and the Internet can be...good! Erin Simpson of CAP joins to explain.

The system of paying cash bail is so familiar to us in this country that it's faded into the background of our awareness. But in recent years, reform advocates have been sounding the alarm about the disastrous consequences of a system that is profoundly broken: more damaged lives, more economic ruin, and ironically, more crime. In fact, the practice of assigning cash bail as a condition of an individual’s pretrial release has led to a two-tiered system of justice. People with money can return to their communities while they await trial, while those without money are forced to choose between remaining incarcerated—and facing the harms that accompany pretrial detention—and entering into a predatory contract with a commercial bail company to obtain release.

Rachael Eisenberg is the Senior Director of Criminal Justice Reform at American Progress, where she leads the organization’s efforts to shrink the footprint of the criminal justice system and promote justice and safety. 

Homelessness is America's national shame, a problem that we out to be able to solve in the wealthiest country in the world. There has been a growing awareness of the many factors that contribute to homelessness and a determination from political leaders, including our current president, to end homelessness in America. And yet, homelessness remains an intractable problem and in some of our biggest cities seems to be growing even more acute. So are any of the currently applied solutions working? And is there a realistic prospect of ending homelessness in America anytime soon? Dr. Stephen Eide is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal. He researches social policy questions such as homelessness and mental illness. Eide has written for many publications, including National Review, the New York Daily News, New York Post, New York Times, Politico, the Wall Street Journal. 

Like many people, we are still reeling from the mass shooting in Texas that killed 19 children and two adults and injured many others. Parents like me are raw with anger, despair, and hopelessness. And what feeds our hopelessness is that at the federal level, there is no prospect of doing even the slightest thing to stop more of this from happening again. Which is why an article caught my eye this morning that is about the real, achievable, practical things that counties and cities can do to curb gun violence. One of the authors of that article, Alex Barrio, is the Director for Advocacy for Gun Violence Prevention at the Center for American Progress, and he joins us to talk about the very real prospect of making a difference on the local level even if our federal government won't.

This is a crossover episode of Great Ideas and Beyond Politics.

More than 3.5 million people have fled Ukraine since Russia invaded on Feb. 24, the fastest-moving refugee crisis in Europe since the end of World War II. The massive displacement of millions of people threatens not only a humanitarian disaster, but an ongoing challenge for European nations and the United States. Elisa Massimino is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Executive Director of the Human Rights Institute at Georgetown Law. She led a team that recently issued a report titled “What the European Union and United States Need to Do to Address the Migration Crisis in Ukraine.”

Today, looking closer at just how dysfunctional the United States Congress has become, and what we might do to fix it. The Gallup poll found in January 2022 that American approval of the job the US Congress is doing had fallen to 18%, one of the lowest points in the last 50 years. The last Congress under President Trump passed the fewest bills that got signed into law of any Congress going back to 1973. And that record-breaking level of futility has become almost commonplace in the last decade, since the three sessions of Congress from 2011-2017 were some of the least productive on record.  The Congress almost never does its annual homework assignment of passing individual appropriations bills, engages in stunts like the House voting to repeal or amend the Affordable Care Act more than 50 times with no hope of success, and seems continually locked in partisan flame wars.

Our guest today examined a slice of this problem in a recent op-ed in the Washington Post titled “House committees are hearing from fewer witnesses. That hurts public policy.” So today we look not only at that specific problem, but also the larger issue of just how off track one of our three branches of government has gone, and what we can do to fix it.

High profile incidents in recent years, including the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent Black Lives

But a third approach does appear to be moving forward. The FCC has required phone companies to make the number 988 operational by July 2022. It is intended as a new alternative to 911 for “Americans in crisis to connect with suicide prevention and mental health crisis counselors.” Its purpose: to isolate these cases so that they can be responded to in a more specialized fashion—with social workers and, in some cases, specially trained police. Advocates believe that the new system may lead to fewer mental-health-related shootings by police and less involvement of the mentally ill in the criminal-justice system.

But our guest today says that cities should proceed cautiously. In an article in City Journal entitled “The Future of Crisis Response, replacing cops with social workers for mental-health emergencies is fraught with risk, Stephen Eide argues that there are many unanswered questions and problems to consider. Dr. Eide is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal. He researches social policy questions such as homelessness and mental illness. He has written for many publications, including National Review, the New York Daily News, New York Post, New York Times, Politico, the Wall Street Journal. He has a Ph.D. in political philosophy from Boston College.

The biggest issue on Americans' minds today is the rise in prices. It has overwhelmed American's perceptions of the the economy, which by most other measures has been doing well.  At the root of recent inflation is a significant rise in energy costs, which Americans mostly experience in gasoline prices, but also through the rising cost of natural gas that affects home heating and even the price of electricity. Today on Great Ideas, understanding what is driving these price increases, where prices will be headed next, and what policymakers can actually do to achieve stable, affordable energy. Our guest experts are Mike Sloan, Senior Director, Energy Markets, and Andrew Griffith, Senior Energy Markets Consultant, both of ICF. 

Today: the promise, the peril, and the challenge of China. China is a re-emerging superpower that is increasingly contesting the United States for economic, political, military, and even cultural dominance in the world. In recent years the question of how to successfully manage our relationship with China has become even more pressing, and even more vexing.  We are clearly deeply interconnected with the Chinese economy and even dependent on it, as recent supply chain disruptions have shown. The emergence of the Covid pandemic and discussions of managing global warming at COP26 have shown in the starkest terms just how much we need Chinese cooperation to tackle the biggest challenges that our country and the entire world face.

At the same time, we find ourselves embroiled in conflict -- over the Trump trade war, repression of the Uighur ethnic minority that many including the United States government have called a genocide, over disruption of the democratic government in Hong Kong, lingering flashpoints with Taiwan, and the increasingly aggressive economic investment agenda that China has been pursuing around the world. And we face a growing uncertainty over the future course that China will take as president Xi Jinping solidifies his hold on power and takes bold steps to shape Chinese Society.

Affordable housing is the kind of issue that people love not to think about. It rarely generates a lot of political heat, and in rural areas it’s barely an afterthought. But guess what the top issue in the California legislature is this year.  31 bills were signed by the governor last month that were all housing bills. In California, and increasingly in much of America, a lack of affordable housing is the key issue, and also a burning problem that drives a lot of the other things we think about in policy. The definition of affordable housing is people spending no more than 30% of their gross income on housing. In California, the majority of households are now spending more than 50%. But it’s not just California. It’s a growing problem in a lot of places. In Maine, one out of every 5 households is spending half of their gross income on housing.

Our guest Sibley Simon – an innovative affordable housing developer – described how California is sending the rest of America a scary postcard from the future of what an affordable housing crunch looks like, and he explained the kinds of fresh ideas they are trying and that we will need to solve the problem.

Our guest today says that American kids who are in danger and in need of foster care are being left in dangerous situations far too long.  But even more provocatively, she makes the case that children are sometimes being used as pawns as part of a broader social agenda that, however well-intentioned, can be disastrous for kids left in foster care limbo. Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute where she focuses on child welfare and foster care issues. She has written for the Atlantic, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post and has appeared on NBC, Fox News and CNBC. Her new book is No Way to Treat a Child: How the Foster Care System, Family Courts and Racial Activists Are Wrecking Young Lives. She explains where the system is coming apart and how better data, more coordination with civic groups, and reconsidered priorities could help stitch it together. 

Over the last 20 years, there has been perhaps no issue in our public discussion more emotional, more fraught, and more elusive in terms of finding long term solutions than immigration. There have been many brief periods where it looked like the stars were aligning and political forces were coming together to support a longer-term consensus approach. Each time, those efforts have disintegrated into bickering and political backlash. 

But some analysts believe that right now, we may be on the cusp of a longer-term solution. One of those experts is Nathan Kasai. He’s a Senior Policy Council at the Washington DC think tank Third Way, and he’s just published an article laying out the argument for why now could, and should, be the time to finally get something done on immigration.

The past year and a half has been unusual to say the least when it comes to the way Americans live and interact. During the Covid pandemic, we’ve all had to adapt in all kinds of ways, and many of us have also found our preferences and priorities changing. Nowhere has that been more obvious than in the workplace. For Americans who have kept their jobs, there has been a new reality in day to day work life. From putting on protective gear to working behind a plastic shield… from meeting remotely over zoom to working out hours when you can get away from family caretaking commitments.  And then of course there are the tens of millions whose jobs were disrupted or lost altogether. As we begin to emerge from this pandemic conditions, American workers and businesses are re thinking how we work, How much we work, what we do at work,  and what we need out of our jobs.

Dr. Daniel Cox is a Senior Fellow in public opinion at the American Enterprise Institute, AEI, and the Director of the Service Center on American life. He has been closely tracking the real time evolution in Americans' attitudes about work and what they might mean for the future of employment in America.  He is the co-author of a new report called the Great American Jobs Reshuffle based on the American Perspectives Survey of almost 2500 American adults. And he’s here to tell us all about it.

The Covid-19 pandemic has now been a central part of our lives for a year and a half.  Along the way, our understanding of what this coronavirus is, what it does, and what we should do about it have evolved. In this episode, with all with the power of 20 months' worth of worldwide scientific research behind us, we look at both the present and future of Covid -- its risks, how to stop it’s spread, and how to protect ourselves; but also what is it going to take to end the pandemic conditions we’ve been living through and get ourselves to a new and better normal.  To explain all of this we have an outstanding scientist: Dr. Jodie Guest who is a Professor and Vice-Chair in the Department of Epidemiology at the Rollins School of Public Health and School of Medicine at Emory University. 

Every parent with a kid in school at any grade level over the last year and a half has some strong opinions about today’s topic. We all remember exactly what it was like in March of 2020. The sudden closure of schools. The scramble to figure out exactly what was next for kids. And then the patchwork of things that schools tried to do to hold the rest of the school year together. And of course, an even greater patchwork of approaches that schools tried across the country in this past academic year. Remote learning. In person learning. Hybrid schools. There are 13,000 different school districts in this country and there were 13,000 different ways to try to tackle learning during the pandemic.

So with that year behind us and the upcoming school year still full of lingering uncertainty, what lessons can we draw from that experience? What are some of the best practices that we can apply for learning in the future.

Doug Dunbar spent almost 30 years in senior positions in government. He was the deputy Secretary of State in Maine. The press secretary to the Governor of Maine and his Communications Director in Congress. He’s worked for US senators and state agencies. He’s also now a felon. So how on earth did Doug end up spending 136 days in jail? And more importantly, what happened afterwards, and what does it mean for our system of criminal justice in America?  Today, a look at the system through a story that’s unique, but in many ways is going to be far too familiar to millions of Americans.

A February poll by the Associated Press found that about half of Americans think Democracy isn’t functioning…only 16% think it’s working well.  The Pew Research Center finds that only 1/3 of Americans have confidence in the public’s wisdom in making political decisions, a figure that has been cut nearly in half in the last 25 years. 40 percent of Democrats and Republicans see the other party not just as people they disagree with, but as a threat to the well-being of the nation. 3/4 of American adults today say that Republicans and Democrats can’t even agree on basic facts.

It seems like our basic belief in Democracy and our form of government is being strained to the breaking point. But, there are signs of hope. Pew finds that 84 percent think that trust in government can be improved. And 86 percent believe it is possible to improve trust in each other.

So, how much trouble are we really in?  Our guest today Karlyn Bowman is an expert on tracking and analyzing American public opinion. She is a distinguished senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and has written extensively for a number of publications about how Americans think.   She says maybe the numbers aren't telling us the story it looks like...and maybe there's more reason for optimism after all. 

President Biden's first overseas trip to Europe last week brought our focus back to the relationships that defined American foreign policy – and much of world history – in the 20th century. But do they even matter anymore in the 21st? Max Bergman, a former State Department official who is currently a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress says the answer is yes. And by focusing there first, and accomplishing as much as he did, President Biden hit a foreign policy home run for America.

The fact is that Europe has undergone a massive transformation since World War II.Europe is integrating and has formed a union. The economy of the European Union is the same size as the United States. It's the same size as China. There's 450 million people in Europe – larger than the United States. It spends as much on defense as Russia and China. Its regulations set a standard worldwide.

On top of that, it is quite stable. It is democratic, capitalist and free-market oriented. It could be our greatest strategic partner. And on the flip side, if it disintegrates, that's what Russia and China are after. That could be a strategic nightmare.

Since the creation of the Affordable Care Act a decade ago, we’ve gotten stuck on health care.  It's become incredibly hard to make progress on the sector which makes up 1/6th of our economy, and for most Americans is the most personal and meaningful interaction of government policy with their lives. Both political parties are mired in seemingly unending health care wars, while about 4 in 10 Americans have difficulty paying their medical bills. Today, we present a new idea on how to make some meaningful progress.  Ladan Ahmadi is the Deputy Director of Economic Communications and Health Policy at Third Way. She says that the way to move forward is to focus on the right thing: capping costs.

President Biden wants to reverse Trump’s 2017 tax cut for the wealthy and use the money to pay for infrastructure. Republican leaders have drawn a line in the sand, saying they will not support any tax increase. And now the two parties are stuck. But conservative budget expert Brian Riedl of the Manhattan Institute says that there’s a better way: an approach that raises more revenue and that both parties could agree on.  Instead of fighting over taxes, why not cut back on some of the money that the federal government spends on rich people?