Brookings Press Blog

Following the SOTU, Daniel Gitterman Analyzes the Democrats’ Dilemma on Tax Relief

The economy was the centerpiece of President Obama’s first State of the Union address, delivered on Wednesday. As the president noted, “This recession has compounded the burdens that America's families have been dealing with for decades–-the burden of working harder and longer for less; of being unable to save enough to retire or help kids with college.”

Later in his speech, the president explained some of his administration’s efforts to target this problem: “That's why last year I asked Vice President Biden to chair a task force on middle-class families. That's why we're nearly doubling the child care tax credit, and making it easier to save for retirement by giving access to every worker a retirement account and expanding the tax credit for those who start a nest egg. That's why we're working to lift the value of a family's single largest investment–-their home.”

These are likely to be popular proposals, but they also highlight the return of what Boosting Paychecks author Daniel Gitterman calls “the Democrats’ dilemma”—choosing between targeting tax relief to working poor families who need it most or targeting it to moderate- and middle-income families who make up a much larger share of the electorate and who are also facing tough times.

Commenting on Wednesday’s speech, Gitterman, who serves as a senior policy adviser to North Carolina Governor Bev Perdue, noted:

“In 1993, Clinton expanded the EITC for working poor and moderate income families; after the 1994 Republican takeover, it was all about middle-income families.

“Obama is walking the same walk: Obama ‘08 recognized that ensuring affordable child care is critical to helping working parents get ahead. His plan was to reform the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit by making it refundable and allowing low-income families to receive up to a 50 percent credit on the first $6,000 of child care expenses. This would benefit 7.5 million working mothers.

“Obama ‘10, in his State of the Union, called on Congress to nearly double the child care credit for families earning less than $85,000—which would lower by $900 the taxes such families owe to the government. But the credit would not be refundable, meaning that low-income families would not get cash payments if they owe no individual income taxes.

"It’s the Democrats’ dilemma redux.”

- See the full text of the State of the Union.

- Find more details on the administration’s middle-class agenda.

- Learn more about Boosting Paychecks.

Brookings Named Number One Think Tank

In the recently released 2009 Global Go-To Think Tank Rankings, the Brookings Institution was again rated as the number one think tank in both the United States and the world. Brookings also received the highest ranking in the categories of “Most Innovative Policy/Idea Proposal,” “Outstanding Policy Oriented–Public Policy Research Program,” “International Development,” and “Domestic Economic Policy” and finished near the top in almost every category. The think tank index is compiled by James G. McGann, director of the Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program at the University of Pennsylvania.

The Brookings Press is proud to disseminate the research of the top think tank through books and journals. The Press also distributes the books of a number of other top-rated think tanks including Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Center for Global Development, Centre for European Policy Studies, Chatham House, and Council on Foreign Relations.

- Check out the 2009 Global Go-To Think Tank Rankings.

- Read about the event where the rankings were released.

- Learn about the forthcoming books from the Brookings Press in our Spring 2010 catalog.

Counterinsurgency Expert Vanda Felbab-Brown Quoted in the New York Times

Should the Afghan government reach out to the Taliban? No, says, Shooting Up author and Brookings fellow Vanda Felbab-Brown: “The more there is talk of negotiation, the more the Taliban view it as a sign of weakness. How do you make sure the reconciliation process does not embolden the Taliban to go on the march?” But Richard C. Holbrooke, the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, is said to be "privately receptive" to the idea.

- Read the New York Times article.

- Listen to the podcast of a recent discussion of Shooting Up with Felbab-Brown, Brookings vice president Martin Indyk, and Wendy Chamberlin, former ambassador to Pakistan and president of the Middle East Institute.

- Learn more about Shooting Up.

"Wiki Government" Author Beth Noveck Appears in "Open Gov the Movie"

UK-based consultancy Delib has put together a short documentary featuring key players in the Obama administration’s Open Government initiative. Launched one year after President Obama issued his Memorandum to the Heads of Executive Department and Agencies on Transparency and Open Government, the 14-minute film is based on interviews conducted late last year by Delib founder Chris Quigley. The full four hours of interviews, including a sitdown with U.S. deputy chief technology officer Beth Noveck, can also be watched online.

- Watch "Open Gov the Movie."

- Learn more about Wiki Government.

David Brooks cites WHAT WORKS IN DEVELOPMENT?

In his New York Times column, David Brooks discussed the underlying causes of the tremendous destruction from the earthquake in Haiti. He referred to What Works in Development? edited by Jessica Cohen and William Easterly to back up his point that “we don’t know how to use aid to reduce poverty.” Countries have spent trillions of dollars in foreign aid worldwide, yet this assistance has not generated growth. According to the book:

The picture is grim. There are no policy levers that consistently correlate to increased growth. There is nearly zero correlation between how a developing economy does one decade and how it does the next. There is no consistently proven way to reduce corruption. Even improving governing institutions doesn’t seem to produce the expected results.

- Read the full New York Times column by David Brooks

- Learn more about What Works in Development?

National Parks Traveler interviews author Bill Lowry, author of "Repairing Paradise"

In a recent interview with Bill Lowry, National Parks Traveler calls Repairing Paradise "a book valuable for national park lovers who want to better understand how the parks' resources are both impacted and managed, and for advocacy groups seeking to affect change.” The article considers how politics affects the National Park Service and its ability to provide stewardship to the land it is mandated to protect. It also looks at the role that public support played in introducing wolves back into Yellowstone National Park.


- Read the article by National Parks Traveler

- Learn more about Repairing Paradise

Beth Noveck’s Work on Peer-to-Patent Inspires New Effort to Help the Federal Government Use Crowdsourcing

The American Association for the Advancement of Science recently launched Expert Labs, “a new, non-profit independent lab, with a mandate to help policy makers in the U.S. Federal Government tap into the expertise of their fellow citizens.” In the news release announcing the project, which is backed by a $500,000 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Expert Labs director Anil Dash observed, “There has been a lot of attention on how the government is using new technology to talk to citizens. Expert Labs is about making technology that helps government listen to citizens.”

In an interview with “The Morning News,” Dash explained that Expert Labs was inspired by Peer-to-Patent, a pilot project at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office headed by Wiki Government author Beth Noveck. Peer-to-Patent created a system for allowing members of the public to comment on patent applications and has inspired similar efforts in the United Kingdom and Japan. Now the deputy chief technology officer for open government, Noveck was recently mentioned as a possible candidate for appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

- Read TMN’s interview with Anil Dash.

- See CNET’s profile of Noveck.

- Learn more about Wiki Government.

Grading the President’s Afghanistan Policy: Vanda Felbab-Brown Gives the Administration a B

As part of The Status Report, a daily series of commentary with video from Brookings scholars to be featured in POLITICO's The Arena, Vanda Felbab-Brown gives President Obama a B for laying out the right strategy on Afghanistan and Pakistan but taking too much time to decide on a plan. Felbab-Brown, an expert on counterinsurgency and the author of Shooting Up, writes, “Unfortunately 2009 turned out to be a year of lost opportunities in Afghanistan during which momentum continued to be lost to the insurgency, corruption, and apathy.” The amount of time required for the fall policy review, she argues, “further weakened the already fragile confidence in the United States, abroad and among the Afghan population. With respect to the objective of improving governance and thus harnessing the aspirations of Afghan people, expectations were also dashed. The international community was unprepared for the widespread corruption that plagued the Afghan presidential elections and the background dealing among Afghan powerbrokers that characterized months of the presidential campaign. And the subsequent bashing of President-Elect Hamid Karzai in the international community for corruption did little to establish the needed foundation for improved governance in Afghanistan.”

- Read more of Felbab-Brown’s analysis.

- See her December 2008 memo to the president on policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

- Learn more about Shooting Up.

Bruce Riedel (THE SEARCH FOR AL QAEDA) on defeating al Qaeda in Yemen

In The Daily Beast, Bruce Riedel, author of The Search for al Qaeda, looks at the challenges facing the Obama administration as it tries to defeat al Qaeda in Yemen after the failed Christmas Day attack on the Amsterdam–Detroit flight.

The mission will be exceedingly difficult to accomplish, as Yemen has always been one of the world’s least-governed spaces, is deeply divided on complex and confusing sectarian and regional grounds, is armed to the teeth, and has a ruling government that is a weak partner in the fight. To make matters worse, several decades of bad U.S.-Yemeni relations have soured most Yemenis on America and made many sympathetic to al Qaeda.

Although the United States can provide military and economic assistance, Riedel writes that dealing with al Qaeda operatives in the country will depend upon assistance from the Yemeni government.

In a post on Up Front, the blog of the Brookings Institution, Riedel offers an overview of how al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has grown to become a player in the global Islamic jihad in the last year.

Al Qaeda has always found weak and failing states like Yemen to be its best staging bases and sanctuaries. Along with Pakistan, Afghanistan and Somalia, Yemen offers an ideal location to operate with little outside interference. The president has been right to focus additional resources on combating AQAP, but the battle has just begun. If the Yemeni state becomes further destabilized, bin Laden’s cadre in the Arabian Peninsula will have more room to operate.

- Read the full article on The Daily Beast.

- Read the full post on Up Front.

- Learn more about The Search for al Qaeda.

Going Bananas: SELF-ENFORCING TRADE offers primer on recently settled WTO dispute between EU and Latin American countries over bananas

In mid-December, the EU reached accord with Latin American countries on the banana tax. This was the longest-running WTO dispute and is the subject of Chapter 3 in Chad Bown's Self-Enforcing Trade. In “An Introduction to WTO Dispute Settlement,” Bown uses the EC–Bananas III dispute to introduce the WTO’s formal trade dispute resolution process:

The fundamental economic interest that boiled over into a formal trade dispute in the early 1990s involved foreign access to the European import market for bananas—the world’s largest banana market with imports of roughly $2.5 billion per year. While the trade dispute on which I focus erupted in the early 1990s, the issue of EC banana imports has been politically contentious on the domestic front (that is, between EC member states) dating back to the 1950s and the Treaty of Rome. Until the early 1990s, member states had different and divergent external trade policies toward bananas. . . . The different trade policies of EC member states toward the same product managed to coexist until 1993 when, after politically rancorous internal negotiations, the members finally converged on a single, European Community–wide import regime for bananas. The new import policy, known as Regulation 404, was essentially a tariff rate quota. The quota divvied up the EC import market and established one quantitative import limit allocated to ACP producers and another to non-ACP producers (mainly Latin American exporters). Bananas coming in under the quota available to Latin American exporters would be subject to an import tariff that was not applied to imports from the ACP countries.

According to Bloomberg News, Latin American countries are the clear winners of the dispute. As a result of the settlement, banana prices in the EU will drop and exports from Latin America will rise.

- Read more about the settlement of the banana case from Bloomberg and the Financial Times

- Learn more about Self-Enforcing Trade

- Download Chapter 3 of Self-Enforcing Trade to learn the background on this issue