Michael E. OHanlon - Brookings Big Ideas for America
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BROOKINGS BIG IDEAS FOR AMERICA
MICHAEL E. OHANLON
EDITOR
BROOKINGS INSTITUTION PRESS
Washington, D.C.
Copyright 2017
THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTION
1775 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036
www.brookings.edu
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the Brookings Institution Press.
The Brookings Institution is a private nonprofit organization devoted to research, education, and publication on important issues of domestic and foreign policy. Its principal purpose is to bring the highest quality independent research and analysis to bear on current and emerging policy problems. Interpretations or conclusions in Brookings publications should be understood to be solely those of the authors.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data are available.
ISBN 978-0-8157-3131-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8157-3132-0 (ebook)
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Typeset in Minion Pro
Composition by Elliott Beard
Contents
Foreword
STROBE TALBOTT
President, Brookings Institution
T he prospect of a new administration taking office has always inspired Brookings scholars to come up with ideas for the consideration of the nations new president and his advisers, cabinet secretaries, and agency heads. We and our predecessors have focused on the challenges and opportunities facing an incoming chief executive 19 times, starting with Woodrow Wilsons handover to Warren Harding in 1921, five years after our founding. Like all Brookings products, these suggestions for policymakers have reflected our scholars fact-based research, intellectual rigor, political independence, and the overall goal of improving governance.
We have also used our convening power, partnerships with other organizations, and publishing facilities to share our ideas with a wide audience. That includes, of course, outreach to the U.S. Congress and elected officials at the state and metropolitan levels, as well as the American people at large.
At the core of our mission is a commitment to engage the public in civil debate and adhere to Thomas Jeffersons injunction that a healthy democracy requires an informed citizenry.
Presidential campaigns are often a trial in that regard. These quadrennial contests between opposing parties for power frequently shed more heat than light. Because the stakes are so high and the rivalries so fierce, civility is often a casualty. So is respect for facts. In the midst of the race to the White House, the complex and urgent issues of policy waiting there for the winner are often eclipsed by the passion of the fray.
The campaign of 2016 was an extreme example of this aspect of Americas democratic process. That did not stop our scholars from doing their professional and civic duty throughout the primaries and the general election. Now that Donald Trump is preparing to govern, my colleagues have been in contact with several of his transition teams.
The contents of this book, under the organizational and editorial guidance of Mike OHanlon, were delivered to the incoming administration. The Institution does not have a party line on any issue. As you will see in the pages that follow, our scholars have strong, diverse, and debatable views in the realms of their expertise. We hope these big ideas will contribute to elevating public discourse and illuminate areas where the American government can better serve its own constituents and reinforce its leadership in the world.
An Agenda for America
MICHAEL E. OHANLON
D espite all the innuendo and intrigue, the 2016 presidential race actually delivered some serious policy debates. Donald Trump directly challenged the long-standing, bipartisan support for American internationalism, most of all trade and immigration policy. Hillary Clinton, borrowing in part from Bernie Sanders, questioned certain trade agreements herself while championing a higher minimum wage, free community college, gender equity in the workplace, more generous child care for the middle class and working poor, and needed repairs to the Affordable Care Act.
However, as in most campaigns, these issues and policy positions were arguably caricatured and sloganeered more than they were discussed, debated, and analyzed. At Brookings, we have sought to develop more detailed proposals for moving the nation forward that could be of use to the future President Trump and new Congress. There is no single Brookings view or institutional plan of action. Many of the ideas could plausibly be labeled either left or right, and might be of interest to both political parties going forward.
I have had the privilege of helping coordinate and edit some three dozen essays on big issues facing the country written by a range of colleagues in the immediate as well as what might be called the extended family at Brookings. I hope you will read many of them, for the background material they provide as well as for their prescriptions, which are often big and bold but are always smart and judicious.
In the rest of my brief introduction to this volume, I will focus only on a subset of the essays that could together help form an overall agenda that might be loosely entitled Restoring the American Dream. Other essays focus on matters such as Americas role in the broader world. On that subject, it is safe to say that most authors favor shoring up U.S. alliances and the global order to ensure the prosperity and security of Americans going forward, and to avoid the risk of throwing ourselves back to a more dangerous period of history.
This is not an institutional agenda, but if one were to attempt to construct a unified plan out of much of the wisdom that appears in the rest of this book, one could devise seven broad approaches that could be interwoven into an agenda for America and its middle class:
- Dont obsess too much about the deficit and the debt. The United States has not been a great steward of fiscal policy in recent decades, allowing publicly held debt to rise to 75 percent of GDP. In one sense, this is not good, of course, and leaves us vulnerable to future fiscal shocks or higher interest rates. But as essays by Doug Elmendorf and others argue, given todays low interest rates, perhaps an even higher priority than driving down the debt is to invest in the future, while reorienting expenditures. We should spend more on infrastructure and education, while protecting benefits for the working poor and low-income children and elderly. We can pay for this by steps such as reducing or taxing the Social Security benefits of higher-income Americans, who have tended to benefit from the very trends in automation and globalization that have worsened the prospects of many other American citizens.
- Simplify tax policy. Whether we use reforms to drive down tax rates, drive down the deficit, or both, some steps make good sense, as Bill Gale and others argue. For example, capping deductions at a certain percent of total income while also raising the earned-income tax credit would tend to help the poor and middle classes without unduly punishing the wealthyand without attempting a wholesale revision of the tax code that would probably bog down in partisan gridlock.
- Fix (and possibly rename) Obamacare, largely through the states. The Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, has been a partial success, but only partial, as Alice Rivlin and Bob Reischauer acknowledge. While it presents far too partisan an issue to expect easy resolution, or to allow much likelihood of a major fix like creation of a public option, there are natural paths forward for partial reform. Perhaps the central one is to encourage more states to opt out of Obamacare (or its successor), as existing law allows, provided that they devise health care reforms of their own that would achieve similar standards of coverage and (relative) affordability. Some other ideas such as facilitating the import of cheaper pharmaceuticals could help too.
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