Great Ideas

Today, it appears that we are on the verge of the Federal Reserve Bank taking a major step to control inflation, which remains the number one topic on Americans’ minds after setting a 40-year high in February.  But what exactly is the Fed doing, and why? Why is their step today different from anything they have tried before?  And what will the consequences be?  Our guest is Steve Robinson, the chief economist at the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to educating the public and finding common sense solutions to our nation’s fiscal policy challenges.

There are 13,000 different school districts in this country and 13,000 different ways to try to tackle learning, especially during the pandemic.  One approach that has taken off in the past two years is "microschooling." America has a long history of small-school environments, such as one-room schoolhouses and homeschools. But the Covid pandemic kicked the search for new or revived models of school into high gear.  All of which begs the question, is this back to the future approach better? Is it scalable? And who does it serve better than the current way we do school? Andy Smarick is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, where his work focuses on education and civil society. He’s previously served as the chair of the Maryland Higher Education Commission and as president of the Maryland State Board of Education.  He's just released three case studies that describe how Idaho, New York, and Arizona have handled microschools, and he joins us to explain whether this really is the wave of the future.

Today, scars on America…though maybe not the kind you’re thinking about. This is a story about how economics, technology, and arrogance changed the face of America, and how some cities are now trying to unwind that complicated history. Our guest is Eric Kober, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and former director of housing, economic and infrastructure planning at the New York City Department of City Planning.

Moundsville, directed by David Bernabo and John W. Miller and currently playing on PBS, is the biography of a classic American town: Moundsville, WV (pop. 8,400), on the Ohio River, where Appalachia hits the Midwest. Told through the voices of residents, the film diverts from the well-trod paths – opioids, coal, Trump – to trace the many forces that have buffeted this proud town, diminishing it but also offering new promise and opportunities. In this crossover episode with the Beyond Politics Podcast, director and former Wall Street Journal reporter John Miller joins the show to tell us what he learned after a year talking to the people of Moundsville, and what they can teach all of us about the future of America. 

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.

Dr. Kevin R. Kosar is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he studies the US Congress, the administrative state, American politics, election reform, and the US Postal Service. Dr. Kosar spent more than a decade working for the Congressional Research Service, where he focused on a wide range of public administration issues. He has taught public policy at New York University and lectured on public administration at Metropolitan College of New York. He’s written numerous books including “Moonshine: A Global History” (Reaktion Books, 2017) and “Whiskey: A Global History” (Reaktion Books, 2010). 

In this crossover episode that appeared on the Beyond Politics Podcast, with the eyes of the world on Ukraine, we look at why Russia has  pushed the world to the brink of war.  Max Bergmann is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, where he focuses on Europe, Russia,  and U.S. security cooperation. From 2011 to 2017, he served in the U.S.  Department of State in a number of different positions, including as a member of the secretary of state’s policy planning staff, where he focused on political-military affairs and nonproliferation; special assistant to the undersecretary for arms control and international security; speechwriter to then-Secretary of State John Kerry; and senior adviser to the assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs.He helps us understand why there is a brewing conflict, what the options are, and what the path ahead should be.

Today, understanding poverty, and particularly child poverty, in America.  An expansion of the child tax credit or earlier this year shone a bright light on the nature of poverty particularly among America's children. The American Rescue Plan raised the maximum child tax credit to $3,000 or $3,600 per kid, depending on age. That’s up from $2,000. During 2021 estimates began to pour in about the number of American children who had been lifted out of poverty. Estimates ranged from 3 million up to a potential of even 5 million. But what was really stunning was the understanding that in America, nearly 11 million children are poor. That’s 1 in 7 kids, who make up almost one-third of all people living in poverty in this country. This number should be unimaginable in one of the world’s wealthiest countries.

Kathryn Anne Edwards is an economist at the RAND Corporation and a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. Her research spans diverse areas of public policy, including unemployment insurance (UI); the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education pipeline and labor market; women's labor supply; the challenges in retirement facing older Americans; and labor market issues for workers without a college degree.

Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash

This week, Democrats are desperately trying to figure out how to fix Senate rules in order to pass two election and voting reform bills – the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act — that they believe could be all that stands between us and a total meltdown of our system of government in the next two years. So how big a threat is there to democracy, really? And how would these bills help? 

Today, top election reform expert Alex Tausanovitch of the Center for American Progress answers both questions, and describes what we need to do long term to protect our freedom.

In the last two years, former NASA engineer Casey Handmer has written a series of articles that come to a startling conclusion: Elon Musk's "Starship" project at SpaceX has a real chance of changing everything about space travel, and with it, the world.  It could revolutionize major industries, the economy, the technology we live with in the world around us, and the future of humankind.  Sound like a stretch?  Perhaps...but if even just a bit of this revolution comes to pass, Starship could make the world of ten or twenty years from now very different.  So, today on Great Ideas, what is Starship, what does it mean, and why are the implications so profound?

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.

Photo by AJ Colores on Unsplash