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No Quick Fixes

Friday, June 11th, 2010
Elbert Ventura


Elbert Ventura is the managing editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. He formerly served as the managing editor of the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Elbert Ventura

“At this point, there are no good solutions — only a choice among painful and distasteful ones.”

Steven Pearlstein’s words in today’s Post make for a glum start to the day, but there’s no better time than the morning to ring the alarm. And when it comes to our economy, you can’t sound the warnings often enough.

Pearlstein notes the infuriating lack of consensus among experts about our economic predicament. Do we spend more stimulus, or start cutting back on spending? Do we worry about deflation or inflation? Do we encourage more consumer spending to speed up the recovery, or should we orient our economy toward more saving and sustainable growth?

There’s confusion on where to go – but everyone can agree on how we came to this pass:

The controlling reality is that the global economic system is rebalancing itself after years in which the United States was not only allowed but encouraged to live beyond its means, consuming more than it produced and investing more than it saved. Now the bill for that is finally coming due — all the clever and seemingly painless ways for postponing that day of reckoning have pretty much been played out.

Pearlstein’s diagnosis brings to mind a headline from last week: “Save Us, Millennials.” Timothy Egan’s blog post covered a Pew survey on millennials, which painted a picture of a generation that is “confident, self-expressive, liberal, upbeat and open to change.”

If any generation had a right to be steamed at their predicament, it would be the millennials. Their parents may have given them cars and paid for their tuition, but they also left the kids with crippling obligations. They join an American economy that will be less generous to the children than it was to the parents. And yet the millennials, according to Pew, are “more upbeat than their elders about their own economic futures as well as about the overall state of the nation.” (The audacity of hope!)

They’ll need that sunny disposition to weather the coming storm. Egan’s plea seems jokey, but there’s more than a hint of justified desperation there. If we are to emerge from this economic mess, it’s the younger generation that will have to carry us. The bill has come due, and they will have to pay it.

There are no good solutions, as Pearlstein says, and a culture weaned on the happy ending has been throwing tantrums for the past year and a half. There has been not a hint of reflection, no acknowledgment that the American disconnect between what it expects from government and what it expects to be taxed is to blame for our problems. Instead we’ve been treated to a nonstop primal scream session. Thank god the kids are acting like grown-ups.

Photo credit: Lamtastic’s Photostream

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Growing Food, Creating Jobs, Improving Health: Tom Colicchio to promote “Good Food, Good Jobs” initiative

Friday, April 30th, 2010
Steven Chlapecka


Steven K. Chlapecka is the director of public affairs for the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Steven Chlapecka

MEDIA ADVISORY
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 30, 2010

Register for the event.

CONTACT:
Steven Chlapecka – schlapecka@ppionline.org, T: 202.525.3931

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Tom Colicchio will join the Progressive Policy Institute and FreshFarm Market on Wednesday, May 5 to promote a “Good Food, Good Jobs” initiative—a food jobs program—to fight hunger, foster economic growth and bolster employment.

With almost 49 million Americans living in households that can’t afford enough food, high food prices and skyrocketing unemployment have forced millions of families to choose less healthy, less expensive food. Affordable, nutritious food is key to fighting the chronic problems of hunger, malnutrition and obesity that face many communities throughout the United States. And innovative employment ideas are needed to get the nation back to work.  Joel Berg’s report for PPI on this topic argues that, just as the Obama Administration and Congress have supported  “green jobs,” they should launch a “Good Food, Good Jobs” initiative, quickly creating food jobs to boost the economy and improve public health.

WHO:               Tom Colicchio – Chef and Head Judge of Bravo’s Top Chef

Joel Berg – Executive Director, New York City Coalition Against Hunger, author of All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America? and former Coordinator of Community Food Security under the Clinton Administration at USDA

Ann Yonkers – Co-Director, FreshFarm Markets

WHAT:            Public event to promote policy proposal outlined in the Progressive Policy Institute report “Good Food, Good Jobs: Turning Food Deserts Into Jobs Oases” written by Berg.

WHEN:           5 p.m. Wednesday, May 5

WHERE:        Foggy Bottom FreshFarm Market, 2301 I St. NW, Washington, D.C. (Near 24th St. and New Hampshire Ave.)

MEDIA COVERAGE: The event is open to the media and individual interviews with speakers are available upon request. Media in attendance are required to register in advance of the event to Steven Chlapecka at schlapecka@ppionline.org.

For further questions, please contact Steven Chlapecka at schlapecka@ppionline.org, 202.525.3931 (office), 202.556.1752 (cell).

# # #

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Earth Day at 40: Can Obama Outperform Nixon?

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010
Danny Morris


Danny Morris is a research associate for the Center for Climate and Electricity Policy at Resources for the Future. The views expressed here are his own.

Nathan Richardson


Nathan Richardson is a visiting scholar at Resources for the Future. The views expressed here are his own.

by Danny Morris and Nathan Richardson

Today is the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, the first of which took place in 1970 at the beginning of the golden age of environmental legislation in the United States. It’s a telling statement that in the past four decades, the most successful environmental record belongs to Richard Nixon.

Our most disgraced president looks rather hippie-esque when you look at the achievements that passed during his administration: the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Marine Mammals Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act and the Endangered Species Act all became law under his watch, and he established the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) soon after Earth Day One.

Since then, environmental policy has often meandered from favored conservative punching bag to a second-tier issue. President Barack Obama has a chance to cement a similar environmental legacy by acting on climate, energy and natural conservation legislation. How has he done so far? In his first term in office, President Obama has achieved notable environmental progress by simply not being President Bush.

Following arguably the most anti-environment administration since the 1970s, almost anyone would shine in comparison. Like on many other fronts, Obama does not lack for ambition. He included energy as one of his three top priorities during the 2008 campaign and has signaled that it will be getting his attention very soon. That being said, the Obama administration has not yet established an impressive or even cohesive environmental record. Many of the president’s actions have been piecemeal, either addressing specific policy problems or cleaning some of the messes left over from the previous eight years. He has yet to achieve a stout victory on the environmental front, but it has only been one year. He still has time to work.

Below is a list of the top five environmental actions that occurred in the first year of the Obama administration – and five other items on which he needs to do more work:

The Accomplishments

  • Endangerment finding: This finding, which said that carbon dioxide is a pollutant that endangers human health, gave the EPA authority to regulate it under the Clean Air Act. This is the most significant step toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions the U.S. government has yet taken.
  • CAFE standards: The EPA increased average fuel economy standards for cars and trucks in the U.S. fleet to be 35 mpg in 2020, the first increase since 1990. The regulation is estimated to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 960 million metric tons by 2030.
  • The stimulus package: The American Reinvestment and Recovery Act channeled $8 billion toward energy projects, mainly focusing on renewables and energy efficiency. It included another $6 billion in water and wastewater projects.
  • Copenhagen: Simply put, international climate negotiations would have collapsed were it not for the direct personal involvement of the president. He was instrumental in getting almost every country in attendance to commit to two-degree temperature rise targets, helped get important concessions from China on emissions monitoring and established long-term financing ($100 billion annually by 2020, $20 billion for the U.S.) for international adaptation efforts.
  • Executive appointments: Lisa Jackson at EPA. Steven Chu at Department of Energy. Nancy Sutley at Council on Environmental Quality. Ken Salazar at Department of Interior. John Holdren at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Jane Lubchenco at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Carol Browner as special adviser to the president on energy and climate change issues. These are all smart, competent, committed people who will help the president shape effective environmental policies over the course of his administration.

So what can Obama do for the environment in 2010 and the second half of his term? Here are just a few things:

The To-Do List

  • Climate: Above all, the president should push Congress hard to pass legislation that controls greenhouse gases by setting a price on carbon. The president already has a climate bill, Waxman-Markey, that had passed the House last year and was ready to go to the Senate. Instead of pushing this bill, he and the Senate leadership chose to focus on health care. That process consumed the heart of this Congress’ legislative calendar and much of its political energy. While that choice was understandable, it leaves action on climate and energy as the largest unfulfilled element of the president’s legislative agenda.Debates on climate appear set to start again in the Senate with the release of a new bill next week. The president should push the debate forward, hopefully resulting in a new law that sets economy-wide greenhouse gas controls before the November elections. This is admittedly an ambitious goal. If it proves impossible, Obama should dedicate as much energy in the second half of his term to climate as he did to health care in the first.
  • Air pollution: With so much focus on climate, traditional forms of pollution haven’t drawn much attention. Conventional pollutants like sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxides, mercury and ozone still pose significant health risks, and economists believe reducing emissions of these pollutants would result in substantial net benefits to the economy in life expectancy and quality of life. The EPA’s recent attempts to tighten regulations on these pollutants (both of which, it must be said, were authored by the Bush EPA) were struck down by courts. The Obama EPA should renew efforts to regulate these pollutants by issuing new versions of these rules (called CAIR and CAMR) as soon as possible. The president should throw his support behind proposed “3-pollutant” legislation on the Hill that would remove the legal barriers to stricter regulation of these pollutants, and follow that legislation up with action from the EPA. (More on that bill in a later post.)
  • Nuclear waste storage: The president has thrown his support behind nuclear power with $8 billion in loan guarantees for two new plants in Georgia. Regardless of your opinion of nuclear power as an energy source, you have to admit the storage of waste poses quite a problem. The president eliminated Yucca Mountain, the long-controversial water repository in Nevada, without proposing a specific alternative. He organized a blue-ribbon panel to look into solutions to the nuclear waste problem, and the commission is supposed to issue its recommendations sometime next year. They have their work cut out for them.
  • Environmental foreign policy: The president should also consider making environmental issues a more central part of his foreign policy. Whether it’s pushing China, India, Russia and others to agree to global cuts in carbon emissions, or calling Japan out for its cynical efforts to avoid limits on bluefin tuna fishing, ample opportunities exist for advancing U.S. environmental interests internationally and re-establishing our position as the global leader on environmental policy innovation. The president has made a good start in this area, but he can do more.
  • Future environmental dangers: Finally, the president can move beyond environmental issues that have been neglected in the past to examining possible future environmental risks. Many such risks, such as pollution of water with pharmaceuticals and the environmental impacts of nanotechnology, aren’t sufficiently understood. Government also lacks the tools to deal with these issues even if they are identified as dangers. The president should dedicate resources to investigating these and other future risks, and push Congress to give the EPA authority to regulate them when supported by the science. These are the kinds of forward-looking reforms that Nixon pursued, and which could give Obama an enduring environmental legacy.

Success on these fronts — and above all on climate — would not only fulfill President Obama’s environmental promises, but would put him in contention as the most environmentally successful president since Nixon, and likely ever.

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A Look at the Governors’ Races

Monday, April 19th, 2010
Ed Kilgore


Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.

by Ed Kilgore

With all the obsessive focusing on congressional races that is natural to Washington, it’s not a bad time to take a more comprehensive look at the 37 governors’ races that will be decided in November (if you happen to have a subscription to the Cook Political Report, their wizard on gubernatorial and Senate races, Jennifer Duffy, has a new overview out).

It’s quite an even playing field between the two parties: Democrats are defending 19 governorships and Republicans 18. More importantly, thanks to a combination of term limits and retirements, 22 of the 37 races are “open.” And quite a few of those are in states where the party controlling the governorship has not been the dominant party generally (thus creating a particularly ripe climate for a switch this year), ranging from “red states” with Democratic governors like Wyoming, Kansas, Oklahoma and Tennessee to “blue states” with Republican governors like Vermont, Connecticut, Minnesota, Hawaii and California. Absent a really massive Republican wave, we will probably see both major parties gain and lose more than a few governorships.

The other factor lending instability to governors’ races is, of course, the fact that state governments as a whole have been roiled by recession, revenue losses and automatic counter-cyclical increases in spending even more than the federal government (at least in all but a few fortunate, recession-resistant states), and nearly all have constitutional or statutory balanced budget requirements. It didn’t get much national attention at the time, but states didn’t really receive a lot of help from the 2009 economic stimulus legislation, with the exception of a temporary “super-match” for Medicaid (which is, along with mandates for expanded coverage, being continued by the new health reform legislation).

Most of the states are dealing with chronic budget shortfalls. And it’s all taking a toll on public confidence. A major new Pew survey just out today shows that the drop in the percentage of Americans saying government has a “positive impact” on their lives has dropped even more for the states (from 62 percent to 42 percent) than for the federal government (from 50 percent to 38 percent) since 1997. With voters viewing past state administrations somewhat nostalgically, it’s not surprising that there are no less than five former governors running for their old jobs this year (which, as Duffy points out, is really an unusual number): Democrats Jerry Brown of California, John Kitzhaber of Oregon, and Roy Barnes of Georgia; and Republicans Terry Branstad of Iowa and Bob Ehrlich of Maryland. All but Ehrlich have been out of office for at least eight years (Branstad for 12 years, and Brown for 28 years). Another wild card: there are presently three viable independent candidates for governor, all in New England (Maine, Massachusetts and Rhode Island), where weak Republican parties make indies a preferred alternative to Democrats for many voters.

Add it all up, and it’s very difficult to discern big national trends in governors’ races, aside from the fact that turnout patterns are likely to boost Republican prospects generally. Duffy currently rates an astonishing 17 races — close to half — as “toss-ups,” including seven governorships held by Democrats and ten by Republicans, with another seven races looking competitive. Some could be real barn-burners, with close, expensive races likely in big states like California, Texas, Florida, Illinois and Ohio. Others could produce upsets if the “wrong” candidate wins large, multi-candidate primary fields. This is particularly true on the Republican side, where the conservative/Tea Party upsurge could beat more electable Republican candidates in primaries ranging from Iowa to Alabama.

So buckle up the seat belts for a wild ride in gubernatorial elections this year.

Poll Watch

The most interesting polls to come out in the last few days involve highly competitive governor’s races. A new Quinnipiac survey shows Democrat Alex Sink significantly reducing Republican Bill McCollum’s lead in Florida; the race is now within the margin-of-error in that particular poll. Rasmussen now has incumbent Republican Rick Perry locked in a close race with Democrat Bill White in Texas. And Western New England College shows a close three-way race in Massachusetts among Democratic incumbent Deval Patrick, Republican Charles Baker and independent Tim Cahill.

Ed Kilgore’s PPI Political Memo runs on Mondays and Fridays.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jstephenconn/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

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Posted in Daily Fix, Fixing Our Broken Politics, Political Memo | 1 Comment »

Exploding a Stimulus “Study”

Thursday, April 1st, 2010
Ed Kilgore


Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.

by Ed Kilgore

It’s considered gospel truth in many conservative circles that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, a.k.a. the “economic stimulus package,” was just a porkfest aimed at buying votes or rewarding Democratic constitutencies at the expense of good, virtuous taxpayers and their grandchirren. In support of this hypothesis, Veronique de Rugy of George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, and a regular contributor to conservative and libertarian magazines and web sites, recently wrote a “study” designed to show that ARRA dollars went disproportionately to districts represented by Democrats and/or that voted for Obama in 2008, regardless of their actual economic needs. De Rugy helpfully touted her study at National Review’s The Corner yesterday, for the edification of those who look to that blog for talking points.

Looks like she should probably have kept the paper to herself. Nate Silver of 538.com took a look at it, and pretty much demolished it today.

Turns out that de Rugy didn’t notice, or didn’t mention, that most of the “Democratic districts” that show up in her study as the top recipients of ARRA dollars happen to contain state capitals. Thus, ARRA spending designed to benefit states as a whole (the Medicaid super-match, school improvement incentives, state infrastructure grants, the state “flexibility” funds, etc.) are attributed by her to individual districts. She also ignored economic indicators showing poverty and local unemployment, which may or may not be correlated with Democratic voting habits, but which certainly indicate actual need.

I hear through the grapevine that de Rugy plans to respond to Nate’s demolition job at some point. If she manages to climb out of this crater, I’ll certainly be impressed.

The larger point, though, is that without Nate’s intervention (and perhaps even after it), conservatives would be gleefully citing de Rugy’s bottom line “findings” as “proof” that ARRA was what they always said it was. She is, after all, an academic thinker, and her “study” is impressive-looking, with lots of footnotes and scatter plot charts. I’m not saying that conservatives are alone in conducting this sort of skewed and deeply flawed “research,” or in citing it without examination. But that doesn’t excuse it for even a moment, particularly when the “researcher” is out there circulating the stuff as agitprop for the chattering classes before the ink is even dry.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jbyoder/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

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Posted in A New Framework for Growth and Equity, Daily Fix, Fixing Our Broken Politics | 4 Comments »

The World Without Obama

Friday, February 19th, 2010
Ed Kilgore


Ed Kilgore is a PPI senior fellow, as well as managing editor of The Democratic Strategist, an online forum.

by Ed Kilgore

If you’ve been watching the cult TV show “Lost,” then you’re familiar with the concept of parallel universes. That is, alternate realities in which history turned out differently, because people made different decisions.

It’s a useful concept when it comes to thinking about President Obama’s current predicament. On a variety of fronts, the Obama administration is suffering from an inability to show Americans the parallel universe in which its past policies were not enacted — and the future that will result if its current proposals bite the dust.

That’s most obviously true with the early, fateful decisions to continue TARP and bail out the auto companies. They arguably averted the collapse of the global financial system, the virtual extinction of consumer and business credit, and 1930s levels of unemployment (especially hard-hit would have been the upper Midwest). Nevertheless, no matter how often the president tells us his actions kept a deep recession from developing into a Great Depression, it remains an abstract proposition for the people who are currently unemployed. The same is true for the 2009 economic stimulus package, which virtually all experts, public and private, credit with saving about two million jobs. The continued job losses reported each month make it hard to claim that one has succeeded by avoiding even greater unemployment.

The problem of “proving a negative” is even more daunting when it comes to prospective policy proposals. Critics savage Obama for a health care plan that doesn’t do enough to limit costs. Obama responds that health care costs are going up anyway, without a plan. But it’s not easy to convince people that the status quo is riskier than a large and complicated series of changes in how Americans obtain health insurance. That’s why the White House has made such a big deal out of Anthem Blue Cross’s gargantuan premium increases for individual policyholders in California. It is, they argue, a sign of where the status quo is headed absent reform. They do not, unfortunately, have such a convenient example that will help them explain the need for climate-change legislation, as conservatives, stupidly but effectively, cite this winter’s heavy snowstorms as disproof for the scientific consensus about global warming trends.

There is one way to deal with Obama’s dilemma. Although it’s difficult to prove that American life under the president’s policies is better than life without them, it should be easier to point to another parallel universe: life under Republican policies. But such an effort requires a basic strategic decision. Should Democrats point back to the reality of life under George W. Bush, which most people remember pretty vividly, and simply say today’s GOP wants to “turn the clock back”? Or should they focus on current Republican proposals, such as they are, which in many respects make Bush policies look pretty responsible? It’s hard to take both tacks simultaneously, since the extremism of contemporary Republican politics is in no small part motivated by a determination to separate the GOP and the conservative movement from association with that incompetent big spender, Bush, who failed because he “betrayed conservative principles.”

It appears the White House is increasingly inclined to take the second, forward-looking approach to highlighting the GOP’s desired alternate reality, rather than the first, backward-looking one. As much as some Democrats wail about the “bipartisanship” rhetoric that surrounds Obama’s outreach to Republicans, which he’s employed while challenging them to direct debate over health reform and economic recovery, the president’s main intention is clear. He wants to force the opposition to help him present voters with a choice between two specific courses of action — or simply admit that their strategy is one of pure gridlock, obstruction, and paralysis (which, as my colleage J.P. Green has pointed out, spells “G.O.P”).

The stake that Obama and the Democrats have in convincing Americans to consider these parallel universes couldn’t be much higher. This November, if voters remain fixated on the current reality, rather than the terrible alternatives, then the midterm elections really will be a referendum on the status quo and its Democratic caretakers. Explaining life as it would be without Obama, and as it could be under Republican management, is not easy. But Democrats must do it or face catastrophe at the polls.

This item is cross-posted at The Democratic Strategist.

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The Right Track: Improving President Obama’s High-Speed Rail Program

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010
Mark Reutter


PPI Fellow Mark Reutter is the former editor of Railroad History and author of Making Steel: Sparrows Point and the Rise and Ruin of American Industrial Might (2005, rev. ed.).

by Mark Reutter

President Obama made a splash in Florida last month when he announced the award of federal stimulus money to start building a high-speed rail (HSR) line between Tampa and Orlando. “I’m excited. I’m going to come back down here and ride it,” he told a cheering audience at a town hall meeting.

The president certainly got it right when he said that we must break our dependence on the automobile and imported oil. Safe, reliable, and incredibly fast rail promises a breakthrough that people will be willing to pay for and private investors willing to operate. Passenger trains cruising at 150 miles per hour provide a decisive margin of superiority over highway travel and can compete effectively with commercial air in short- and medium-distance markets while cutting overall fuel consumption and greenhouse gases.

But for all the hype surrounding the president’s announcement, this exciting new mode of transportation won’t be arriving in America anytime soon unless the Obama administration and Congress make some “course corrections.” The crux of the problem is that the administration has begun a major civic work without laying down engineering and design protocols that match the standards of fast train lines built elsewhere in the world. Even worse, the distribution of funds from the stimulus package ensures that the most promising projects will remain underfunded.

Defining High-Speed Rail

One thing that’s been little understood by policy makers and the public is that HSR trains operate quite differently from conventional Amtrak trains. First and foremost, they cannot share tracks with much slower freight trains and must be walled off in their own protected corridors. They can climb steeper gradients than regular trains, allowing them to “hug” the landscape and minimize noise and environmental impacts. But in order to maintain top speeds, the lines they travel on must be built with the fewest possible curves. And where curves are unavoidable, they must use larger turning circles to change direction.

Trains running at more than 150 mph need to be far more powerful than conventional trains and use overhead electric lines for power rather than diesel engines. Trainsets are lightweight and based on aerodynamic designs that make for quicker acceleration and more economical braking.

A regular diesel-powered train running on track shared with freight trains is not high-speed rail. It never will be. It cannot and will not compete with highways and commercial air because it is stuck on a 19th-century right-of-way filled with curves and narrow clearances that reflect a period when trains ran no faster than 60 mph. And yet such projects, designated as “Emerging HSR” by the Obama administration, got far too much of the HSR stimulus pot last month.

A Smarter HSR Strategy Is Needed

Of the 29 rail projects that shared $8 billion in Recovery Act stimulus funds, only two – the Tampa-Orlando proposal in Florida and a projected San Diego-Sacramento line in California – qualify as high-speed rail by international standards. The rest can most accurately be called “higher speed rail” or “improving Amtrak on-time performance rail.”

The best of these projects, a $1.1 billion upgrade of the existing rail corridor between Chicago and St. Louis, will eventually permit Amtrak trains to achieve 110-mph maximums and 70-mph averages between the two cities. That’s far below the 150-mph standard set by the European Union. Several other corridor projects funded last month won’t even reach 100-mph speed maximums because they are limited by the curves and congestion on track they share with freight railroads.

The Florida and California proposals that we believed should have served as templates for an emerging HSR program got far fewer funds than they deserved. Both proposals call for lightweight, electrically propelled trains on dedicated guideways running at 150 to 220 mph. Each state got enough stimulus money ($1.25 billion for Florida and $2.25 billion for California) to begin construction, but without any assurance that a working segment can be finished and placed in revenue service. This is a big problem that needs to be remedied.

The Recovery Act provided the first-ever direct federal funds for passenger rail improvements outside of the Northeast Corridor. Responsibility for the program was handed to the Federal Railroad Administration, a small branch of the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) that deals primarily with railway safety. There was no precedent for what it had been tasked to do by President Obama. Awarding high-speed passenger projects was a new responsibility for which the agency was largely unprepared and unequipped.

Because it lacked personnel with backgrounds in HSR, the FRA fell back on what it knew best – conventional railway operations – to evaluate grant applications from the states. And the state applications were mostly dusted-off commuter-rail or incremental Amtrak projects, because most state DOTs have no more experience in executing HSR projects than the federal government.

Out of this confluence of modest state applications chasing humble FRA guidelines came a welter of small-scale upgrades – fixing signal systems here and adding a new siding there – that collectively do little to advance a new mode of intercity travel in America.

We have to do better. Minor upgrades of low-speed freight systems will give government critics a perfect target to paint HSR as a “runaway spending train” (as the Wall Street Journal dubbed it) that benefits only a small group of people. If the public’s current enthusiasm for HSR turns into disappointment, there will be little political support for the expenditure of hundreds of billions needed to construct real high-speed networks.

Getting it Right

To rectify this situation, we make the following policy recommendations to the administration and Congress:

  • use the $2.5 billion that Congress has authorized for HSR in 2010 to fully fund the Tampa-Orlando project and provide enough aid to the California project so that a segment of the system can be operational by 2015.
  • provide HSR funds only to projects that feature a dedicated, electric-powered system operating at 150 mph or higher. Adopt international standards for HSR design and construction to guarantee the highest-quality engineering.
  • define upgraded rail corridors as “CSR,” or conventional-speed rail, which could be funded by a separate aid program.
  • develop a sustained source for both HSR and CSR funding, such as a national infrastructure bank advocated by PPI, to ensure a regular and predicable source of funds outside of annual congressional appropriations.
  • set up a Federal HSR Administration, distinct from the FRA and comparable in staff and technical expertise to the Federal Highway Administration. An agency with a specified infrastructure-building mandate is necessary to move the program forward.
  • locate high-speed rail lines, wherever feasible, along highway corridors instead of privately owned freight railroads. The Florida HSR line will use an alignment alongside I-4 between Tampa and Orlando. In other areas, interstates pass through land that is often owned by the federal government, so land-acquisition costs are minimal.
  • encourage the private sector to invest in HSR-building by offering real-estate opportunities along the rights-of-way, such as reserving land near HSR terminals for companies that help underwrite rail projects.
  • open HSR train and station services to bids from private contractors to enhance the revenue stream from ticket sales.
  • encourage domestic manufacture of HSR cars and locomotives through well-targeted tax credits and “green” credits.

Moving Forward

There is no doubt that President Obama is committed to upgrading intercity passenger rail. But last month his administration failed to exert optimal leadership by spreading federal stimulus funds far and wide rather than concentrating on two or three corridors that would give us trains equal to those in Europe and China.

No one said that building a passenger rail network worthy of the 21st century would be easy or cheap. But neither was the transcontinental railroad nor the interstate highway system that transformed overland travel in America in the past. Each required a bold vision accompanied by smart planning, perseverance, and sustained financial support.

The administration’s current plans for HSR represent a welcome change from the neglect of years past. But unless improvements to our HSR strategy are made, we risk squandering the renewed momentum for building a true high-speed network.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mujitra/ / CC BY 2.0

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Posted in Clean Energy and Modern Infrastructure, Daily Fix, Policy Memo | 5 Comments »

Missing from the Budget: High-Speed Rail

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010
Mark Reutter


PPI Fellow Mark Reutter is the former editor of Railroad History and author of Making Steel: Sparrows Point and the Rise and Ruin of American Industrial Might (2005, rev. ed.).

by Mark Reutter

What happened to high-speed rail in President Obama’s new budget? You will recall the president sweeping down to Florida after his State of the Union address to announce $8 billion in federal stimulus awards for rail projects that, he promised, will spark jobs and prosperity. Vice President Biden described the awards as “seed money” for developing a high-speed passenger rail system throughout the country.

That was last week. This week the administration unveiled its 2011 budget, which includes a miniscule $1 billion for high-speed rail (HSR). There are several ways to think about this request:

  • It’s 2.4% of the $41.3 billion the administration requested for highways.
  • It’s 0.026% of the overall budget and 0.08% of the projected deficit.
  • It’s not enough even to help Florida complete the proposed Tampa-Orlando high-speed line that the president enthused about last week, not to speak of laying the foundation for a nationwide network of high-speed trains promised by the vice president.

What’s going on? Timidity appears to have struck the administration as it moves from soaring promises to hard decisions about how to develop and finance a major civic work that could take decades to complete.

To get high-speed rail up and running, PPI has advocated a program that focuses on two or three corridors with dedicated rights of way. We specifically recommended funding the Tampa-Orlando line as a demonstration project of the speed and convenience of modern trains operating at twice the speed of conventional Amtrak service.

Although the administration did give some stimulus funds to Florida ($1.25 billion), it did not give enough ($2.6 billion) to fund the construction cost of the 88-mile Tampa-Orlando segment. Florida DOT is now trying to figure out how to plug the gap, which also threatens private investment in the project.

Instead of concentrating on a few select corridors, the administration sprinkled rail stimulus grants across 22 states, mostly for new sidings and signals that will marginally improve passenger train speeds on shared track with freight railroads.

One could argue that spending money on such upgrades would lay the groundwork for later HSR corridors, but the administration hasn’t bothered to make such a claim.

Rather, in its budget report to Congress, the administration blithely states that $1 billion of HSR spending will “sustain large-scale, multi-year support for high-speed rail” and is sufficient “to fund promising and transformative projects.”

That’s bunk. Most experts believe that developing a high-speed rail infrastructure serving key intercity corridors in the Midwest, California, the Northeast, and elsewhere will cost $200-300 billion over the next 30 years.

This would require a funding source of about $7 billion to $10 billion a year, with contributions coming from federal, state, and local governments, together with private investment from companies seeking to service and operate the lines.

Last year, Congress realized that developing high-speed rail requires more than the administration’s lowball figure. That’s why the House and Senate rejected the White House’s $1 billion request for high-speed rail in the 2010 budget and instead authorized $2.5 billion in spending.

The additional rail funds represented one of the few times last year that bipartisan support was found in Congress. One would think that the White House would take the hint and request at least $2.5 billion in the new 2011 budget.

In our HSR policy memo, we wrote that “the administration needs to remain engaged, proactive, and forward-thinking in shepherding high-speed rail to completion.” It’s frustrating that the administration is not exerting leadership in this vital piece of infrastructure-building that promises the very thing that’s at the top of voters’ minds – jobs.

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Posted in Clean Energy and Modern Infrastructure, Daily Fix | 2 Comments »

Translating Growth into Jobs

Monday, February 1st, 2010
Will Marshall


Will Marshall is the president of the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Will Marshall

The U.S. economy ended 2009 with a bang, growing at a torrid pace of 5.7 percent in the final quarter of the year. That’s an impressive number at any time, but the Obama administration isn’t popping corks because, with at least 10 percent of Americans out of work, the nation’s mood is still in recession.

Many economists attribute the expansion to a one-time surge in business purchases of goods and equipment. Take away this “inventory bounce,” and growth was only around 2.2 percent, the same as the third quarter. And they worry that growth will sag when the government runs out of stimulus money this year.

In normal times, economic growth eventually translates into more jobs. But these are not normal times, and with the midterm election looming on the horizon, President Obama wants to goose the pace of recovery. His new budget for 2010 includes $100 billion to stimulate job creation.

In his State of the Union address, the president outlined a bundle of sensible if modest steps to induce community banks to lend to small business, speed up business investment in new plant and equipment, and encourage U.S. companies to create jobs at home instead of shifting operations overseas. All this could help on the margins, but in reality there is little that this or any president can do to plug the jobs gap.

According to Brookings Institute economist Gary Burtless, we need more than eight million more jobs to bring the unemployment rate down to 4.5 percent, or close to what economists define as “full employment.” Given the scale of the challenge, and the risk of a “double dip recession” as federal spending ebbs, some liberals are clamoring for another big stimulus package.

But the White House also has to keep an eye on America’s unprecedented run-up of debt. That’s why the president has called for freezing domestic spending in 2011 and endorsed a bipartisan commission to tackle entitlement reform.

Unlike his critics, Obama has to balance competing national priorities, not simply pick one at the expense of another. Given the economy’s hopeful trajectory, his decision to tweak job creation rather than massively expand government spending is the right one, and it deserves progressives’ support.

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Posted in A New Framework for Growth and Equity, Daily Fix, Fiscal Responsibility | No Comments »

Obama Announces High-Speed Rail Projects

Friday, January 29th, 2010
Steven Chlapecka


Steven K. Chlapecka is the director of public affairs for the Progressive Policy Institute.

by Steven Chlapecka

PPI Contributing Expert Mark Reutter is interviewed by NPR’s Greg Allen for All Things Considered about President Obama’s announcement in Florida of stimulus funds for high-speed rail projects.

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Posted in Clean Energy and Modern Infrastructure, Daily Fix, PPI in the News | No Comments »

The Administration’s Missed Opportunity on High-Speed Rail

Friday, January 29th, 2010
Mark Reutter


PPI Fellow Mark Reutter is the former editor of Railroad History and author of Making Steel: Sparrows Point and the Rise and Ruin of American Industrial Might (2005, rev. ed.).

by Mark Reutter

President Obama flew down to Tampa, Florida, yesterday to wield his stimulus bat for “transformative” passenger train development and struck a mighty bunt for high-speed rail.

All the hoopla by the administration (e.g., DOT Secretary Ray LaHood describing the $8 billion in grants as “an absolute game-changer in American transportation”) doesn’t change the fact that of the 29 projects awarded, only two – in Florida and California – qualify as high-speed rail by world standards.

Call the rest by what they really are – “higher speed rail” or “improving Amtrak on-time-performance rail.” The best of those projects, a $1.1 billion upgrade of the existing rail corridor between Chicago and St. Louis, will permit Amtrak trains to achieve 110-mph maximums and 70-mph averages between the two cities – far below the 125-200 mph standard set by the International Union of Railways.

Several corridor projects funded yesterday won’t even achieve 100-mph speed maximums because they are limited by the curves and grades of existing railroad rights of way that cannot easily, or cheaply, be modified for HSR service.

A Tiny Step Toward True HSR

Let’s look first at the two projects that PPI recently argued should have served as templates for the administration’s HSR program.

Florida may actually get by 2015 what is running daily in Europe and Asia – “bullet trains” on dedicated track that rocket between major cities. The administration awarded the Florida Department of Transportation $1.25 billion to start a long-planned line between Tampa, Lakeland, Disney World and Orlando. Utilizing a new right of way and electrically propelled trainsets, the line is expected to operate at 168-mph top speed. Construction of the railway later this year would employ at least 15,000 workers.

But with the apparent aim of spreading stimulus cash to all corners of the country, the administration handed Florida less than half of the $2.6 billion needed to complete the 88-mile line. It is unclear how this funding gap will be overcome. One possibility is that Florida will receive funds from the $2.5 billion in HSR projects allocated by Congress for fiscal year 2010.

California’s HSR project was the other big winner yesterday, with $2.25 billion (of $4.7 billion requested) to purchase land and complete environmental reviews for a 200-mph line between San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco/Sacramento. The overall cost for this project is estimated at around $50 billion. Even though California voters approved the sale of $9 billion in bonds for construction, the project needs a lot more money to come to fruition. Does the Obama administration have a plan to make sure the project is sustainable over the long term and that some segments are opened for revenue service in the near term?

If properly funded, the Florida and California projects hold promise of starting a true HSR infrastructure, with all of the economic and environmental benefits described in the PPI policy memo. But instead of insisting on advanced rail technology elsewhere, the Obama administration has settled for modest state projects with humble goals.

Aiming Low

Take the $598 million awarded to the states of Washington and Oregon to add sidings and improve signaling on the rail line between Seattle and Portland, which is owned jointly by freight carriers Union Pacific and Burlington Northern Santa Fe.

The administration’s fact sheet reports that passenger train travel time “will be reduced by at least 5 percent and on-time performance will increase substantially, from 62 to 88 percent.” Currently, Amtrak trains require 3½ hours to cover the 186 miles, a pokey 53 mph average. Reducing train time by 5 percent means saving all of 10 minutes.

Likewise, the $400 million in stimulus funds going to establish train service between Cleveland and Cincinnati would permit “speeds of up to 79 mph,” according to the administration’s fact sheet, while track upgrades between Raleigh and Charlotte, N.C., will “increase top train speeds to 90 mph.”

There is no doubt that President Obama is committed to upgrading intercity passenger rail. But yesterday he placed his feet squarely in both the visionary camp and the slow-speed Amtrak camp, spreading federal funds far and wide rather than focusing on two or three corridors that would give us trains equal to those in Europe and China.

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Posted in Clean Energy and Modern Infrastructure, Daily Fix | 3 Comments »

State of the Union: A Litany of Solid, Progressive Proposals

Thursday, January 28th, 2010
Mike Derham


Mike Derham is chair of PPI's Innovative Economy Project.

by Mike Derham

Facing almost as much uncertainty about the economy one year into his mandate as he did at the outset, President Obama gave his State of the Union address the way we’ve come to expect him to – sticking to his guns with cool determination while acknowledging that not everyone agrees with him. His speech highlighted what he has accomplished and promised to the American people, but didn’t propose any sweeping new changes.

With unemployment at 10 percent and Wall Street banks handing out record bonuses (Goldman Sachs’ bonuses are reported to match 2007′s record levels), and pundits reading doom for the administration in the tea leaves of the Massachusetts election, the political temptation to go populist would be strong. But Obama decided instead to reassert his progressive program for addressing the economy. Obama highlighted not grand industrial policy, but accomplishments that have helped the American people face a truly global recession. The stimulus bill helped us avoid falling off the economic precipice, and unemployment protection and COBRA extensions make a meaningful difference to people looking for work in a changing economy.

Obama’s call to Democrats to not “run for the hills” on issues such as health care suggests that the talk of that reform’s demise was premature. The embrace of centrist – and even Republican – proposals on energy, including nuclear power and offshore drilling, might offer some hope on a climate change bill making it’s way through the Senate. But until politicians spell out what sacrifices will come with addressing climate change, it may be a campaign promise that remains unfulfilled.

Disappointingly, the president soft-pedalled trade and immigration priorities. While they were mentioned, it’s notable that the president didn’t call on Congress to pass free trade agreements with South Korea, Panama and Colombia. And the reference to the Doha global trade round and immigration reform were pro forma at best, not promising any results.

Obama was laying the foundation for significant payoff from his education initiatives, however. Student loan subsidies to banks are an easily overlooked handout to Wall Street that the president was smart to put an end to. The investment in K-12 education reform, community colleges, and Pell grants will help prepare the next generation of Americans for the 21st-century economy. Incentives for debt forgiveness for public sector workers will mean that our best and brightest — who go to very expensive colleges and graduate schools — can now afford to look at public service, and can be used to limit some of the demand for a revolving door between the public and private sectors.

The president didn’t break new ground, or lay out a visionary mandate for change. But he reassured us that he was going to govern as he was elected, looking for progressive solutions to the challenges the country faces.

One last point — at last week’s “banking limits” announcement, beltway Kremlinologists were reading volumes into the fact that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was off to one side, while presidential economic adviser Paul Volcker was front and center. (Simon Johnson said: “Where you stand at major White House announcements is never an accident.”) Last night was Geithner’s chance to stand front-and-center — shoulder to shoulder with Bob Gates. With Larry Summers way off to the right — and I didn’t see Volcker in the audience — the handshake the president gave Geithner on his way in would seem to be sending the message that the secretary continues to be the president’s man.

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Posted in A New Framework for Growth and Equity, Clean Energy and Modern Infrastructure, Daily Fix, New Schools for the 21st Century | 1 Comment »

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