Millennial Pulse

What We’re Not Talking About When We Talk About Inequality

Oct 31, 2012Joelle Gamble

It's not enough to maintain a safety net that catches people when they fall. We have to keep them from falling in the first place.

It's not enough to maintain a safety net that catches people when they fall. We have to keep them from falling in the first place.

As a millennial, my generation has been told that if we simply work hard and go to college we will be able to achieve even greater economic gains than our parents. That promise now rings false. The gap between the economic have and have-nots is widening dramatically. Those of us who grow up in middle or low-income families may not have the opportunity to move up the socioeconomic ladder. With the widening gulf between rich and poor hampering economic opportunity so markedly that economist Alan Kreuger has named the phenomenon the Great Gatsby Curve, we need to ask ourselves if our political leadership is taking the right steps to address inequality in America.

The current election debate has focused on progressive tax policy and debt reduction as the central components of how government will both spur growth and reduce inequality in America. We only hear about how education, infrastructure, and health care play into the debate on specific occasions, such as when a question is directed toward one of those topics.

Meanwhile, the conversation around government priorities, outside of direct fiscal policy, has been limited to what programs people will lose if a particular candidate is elected. The two major presidential candidates, as well as many down ticket national candidates, regularly accuse each other of wanting to destroy social security “as it is” or restrict access to Medicare for seniors.

How we change tax rates on the middle class and how we continue to fund our social safety net are both important questions. Our government must ensure that the tax code is working fairly. It must make sure that social programs protect individuals when they fall. But the larger drivers of our economic growth and equality in the United States are being largely ignored in favor of these narrow topics. It is not enough to catch people when they fall. Government must, more importantly, ensure that its citizens have the equal access to resources that will make them less likely to fall in the first place. By providing equality and opportunity, we can spur long-term economic growth and prevent higher costs.

There are some investments that government can make that will do more for long-term economic growth and equality in America than others. Investing in education and job training, building a strong infrastructure of Internet access, and providing quality health care has been shown to not only reduce inequality but also promote economic growth.

Education and training are paramount in providing job opportunities. One of the largest factors affecting earnings inequality in the United States is technological change. Innovation has caused many modern companies and industries to become increasingly dependent on the availability of human capital found in the communities in which they are located. Areas with higher percentages of college-educated works are doing better at attracting and retaining business (and the jobs they bring) than areas with less educated populations. American workers need affordable access to education and skills training to be able to compete in the changing labor market.

Future worker competitiveness will also depend on building strong information infrastructure, especially increasing access to high-speed Internet, as Roosevelt Institute Fellow Susan Crawford rightly argues. Technology has created jobs that require workers to be able to work with large quantities of information and work collaboratively with partners who may not live in the same country, yet alone the same city. Even simple processes such as job applications or unemployment benefit applications now require access to a stable Internet connection. Currently, around one-third of Americans lack access to high-speed Internet.

As has been widely shown, access to quality, affordable health care reduces costs for individuals and their families, as well as American taxpayers as a whole. In the absence of access to affordable preventative care, only individuals with significant financial resources can pay for regular doctor visits, examinations and, potentially, long hospital stays. For those without large incomes, these basic health care needs can severely affect their ability to pay bills and sometimes send them into bankruptcy. Beyond basic care and insurance, affordable care for reproductive health services can serve as a step toward gender parity.

Not only do education, Internet access, and health care move us toward a more equal society, they also give taxpayers more for their tax-dollar. Individuals without access to quality schools and health care grow up to have fewer choices and opportunities to get high-skill, high-pay jobs that offer benefits. This makes them more likely to need social programs during the course of their lives. Making a stronger initial investment in programs such as education and heath care that give people opportunities is wiser than allowing the negative effects of failing to do so cripple the federal budget and the economy over the long run.

Making a stronger initial investment in opportunity via programs such as education and heath care is wiser than allowing the negative effects of not making those investments cripple the federal budget and the economy over the long run. None of this is to say that spending on defense, physical infrastructure, and our basic social safety net are not needed. But the United States needs to change its priorities and push for long-term planning with investments in long-term results. Education, information, and quality care are key to producing a more equitable society.

Joelle Gamble is Deputy Field Director of the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network.

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Standing Up for the 6 Million Americans Who Can’t Vote on November 6th

Oct 24, 2012Brandi Lupo

Voting is a fundamental right -- unless you're ensared in the penal system.

Voting is a fundamental right -- unless you're ensared in the penal system.

This November, the presidential election may hinge on a few thousand votes. This same November, nearly 6 million Americans will be kept from the polls, disenfranchised under a number of ever more aggressive state laws barring felons and ex-felons from the voting booth. This is detrimental to our justice system and a vicious threat to our democracy.

A report by The Sentencing Project estimates that these laws currently disenfranchise 5.85 million Americans. Of them, a whopping 75 percent are no longer inmates in prison or jail. Instead, they are serving parole, probation, or, in the case of 2.63 million individuals (nearly half of the entire population measured), are living in their communities freely, having already completed their sentences in full. Eleven states require a waiting period before voting after one’s sentence is complete; a lifetime ban awaits those with a felony record. The diagnosis is even grimmer when looked at by race. The report estimates that felony disenfranchisement laws in Florida, Kentucky, and Virginia each disenfranchise over 20 percent of their respective adult black American populations.

Undeniably, the convicted felon and ex-felon populations are two of the least politically popular groups facing disenfranchisement, potentially making their case for participation in democracy the most difficult. Opponents deploy a number of arguments against this crucial step toward universal suffrage. Some argue that if someone chooses not to follow the law, then he does not have the right to help select those who make the laws. They say that the right to vote is one that can be taken away as punishment—even well after an individual has completed her sentence.

Yet since the nation’s founding, a key concept prevailed and proved fundamental to democracy: the idea, explicitly stated in the Declaration of Independence, that government must derive its power from the consent of the governed. Despite having committed a crime, most felons and ex-felons are citizens, governed and affected by the decisions made in Washington. As an essential protection from government tyranny, corruption, and unjust laws, it is crucial that all citizens can (and do) contribute to the discussion of what type of society they would like to live in and what the laws dictating that society are.

Laws against voting are not common sense measures promoting the public safety or welfare. For those worried that felons and ex-felons may unite into some powerful anti-criminal justice voting bloc, think again: there is no evidence to support such a unity amongst the group, such illicit views among felons in the criminal justice system, or such single-issue behavior. Like the rest of us, felons who choose to vote have a number of political ideas to balance in the booth.

On top of all of this, public opinion here leans in favor of universal suffrage. Recent studies show that a clear majority favor restoring voting rights specifically to people who have exited prison and have served their entire sentence, are on parole, or are under supervised probation.

Voting is essential to a valid democracy. It is both a right and a duty—not a privilege. It is fundamental to the rigorous and diverse discussion required by our society. Yet this November, nearly 6 million citizens will be barred from the voting booth, silenced and ostracized. This number begs the question: how can this be right? We at the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network want to ask this question through Government By and For Millennial America, our new initiative focused on identifying the current problems in our government and providing solutions to create a better, more equal, and more accountable framework. Our polished vision will be ready to be put in place by Inauguration Day this January. Stay tuned.

Brandi Lupo is the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network Senior Fellow for Equal Justice and a student at New York University.

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“We’re All in This Together” vs. “You’re on Your Own” Government

Oct 15, 2012Elizabeth Stokes

As the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network begins work on building a Government By and For Millennial America, Elizabeth Stokes defends the idea of government as a steward of the common good.

As the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network begins work on building a Government By and For Millennial America, Elizabeth Stokes defends the idea of government as a steward of the common good.

Despite no specifics on how they will slash taxes and also balance budgets, it is clear that the Romney-Ryan budget plan follows an ideology we've seen before. Seeking to block grant Medicaid and voucherize Medicare, the Ryan budget, endorsed by Romney, fundamentally warps the meaning and purpose of the social safety net. This ideology views government as important not for guaranteeing the collective success of all, but for protecting the individual’s right to make his own success. It views government as important not for creating a framework that meets the needs of all citizens, but for supporting and responding to the needs of the market. And it sees government, if it must offer public provisions, as an entity that works best when its services are farmed out to the private sector.

But this view of government completely ignores its role as steward of the common good. To see why this role is so important, just take a look at the recent financial crisis. It has shown us that macroeconomics is more complex and more unpredictable than our economics textbooks would have us believe. Restricting government’s scope as the precondition of a “freely” functioning market is not enough to make the market provide effectively and justly for all. As the Census Bureau recently reported, even though GDP has grown, 2011 saw huge income gains for the top 5 percent of income distribution, declines for the middle, and stagnation at the bottom. Evidently, the market alone cannot allocate resources in a way that a just democracy demands, nor can it be relied upon to stably ensure the wellbeing of our most vulnerable.

But this is the problem with the Romney-Ryan ideology: it completely misunderstands what a just democracy demands. As Jeff Weintraub puts it, the democratic ideal requires active participation in collective decision-making, carried out within a framework of fundamental solidarity and equality. The Romney-Ryan ideology severely jeopardizes this ideal. How can democracy be fully realized if 47 percent of citizens are viewed exclusively as rapacious moochers and not as fundamental equals in a shared political community? How can self-governance be possible when we fail to guarantee a fundamental baseline for all and let market-generated inequalities distort political equality?

The fundamental equality democracy requires cannot be satisfied by a handful of political rights (not that these mean much anyway given voter suppression efforts). Rather, government must also guarantee what T.H. Marshall would refer to as the social elements of citizenship: equal access to basic essentials that relieve people from the constant struggle for survival and thus provide them with the time and energy to participate in political society as engaged citizens. These basic essentials are not simply an assortment of handouts for the destitute, but are universal and based on generally shared rights of citizenship (the 96 percent know what I’m talking about). Ensuring such a baseline enables us to do away with the artificial distinctions of makers or takers, and instead binds us in a community of mutual sacrifice and success. 

Guaranteeing these social elements of citizenship also entails containing the market and money’s influence so that a person’s life chances and engagement with democracy are not exclusively determined by market position. It is therefore important to have non-market institutions, such as government, direct the market in order to uphold the common good and redress market-generated inequalities. This does not simply mean redistribution policies that tax the rich and give to the poor – after the fact mop-ups via social spending are not enough to make up for the disempowering processes that lead to market-generated inequalities in the first place. Rather, we must also focus on predistribution, i.e. the way in which the market distributes its rewards to begin with (such as regulations that protect consumers and empower workers).

The concept of government as steward of the common good recasts its role in society, seeing it less as a third entity that runs alongside the market economy and the private household but more as a force in the service of the common good that is prior to both and directive of each. Government should act as the framework that both enables and is subject to democratic decision-making in society. It should ensure all people have the minimum they need to participate and engage as citizens and its fundamental direction should be shaped by public voice and societal goals that are collectively and consciously decided.  

Ryan lauds choice, competition, and self-sufficiency as the pillars of his social safety net, implying that marketization will enhance liberty as well as efficiency. However, these words are pure rhetoric and pretense. By putting the market in charge of the common good, he would fundamentally transform basic welfare goods, which are shared in common by all citizens, into commodities, which are bought by individual consumers in a volatile marketplace. While the ethos of social insurance is “we are all in this together, rain or shine,” marketization says to the citizen “here’s some money, you’re on your own.” The Romney-Ryan ideology not only severely undermines one of the most important pillars of government, but also bars those subsets of the population who are reliant on government benefits from the democratic community. 

Elizabeth Stokes is a Working Group Fellow for the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network's national initiative, Government by and for Millennial America, and a senior at the University of Pennsylvania.

 

Teamwork image via Shutterstock.com.

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Beyond Big or Small: Creating a Government That Fits Millennial America

Oct 5, 2012Taylor Jo Isenberg

Millennials are eager to work toward a more effective and inclusive public sector.

Two competing visions: it’s more than just the debate frame that the media chooses to use when describing how President Obama and Governor Romney see the role of government. Rarely has there been such a stark contrast between two candidates in how they view government’s broader purpose – and how that represents fundamental American values. Wednesday’s debate was no exception. The ‘role of government’ was a topic unto itself.

Millennials are eager to work toward a more effective and inclusive public sector.

Two competing visions: it’s more than just the debate frame that the media chooses to use when describing how President Obama and Governor Romney see the role of government. Rarely has there been such a stark contrast between two candidates in how they view government’s broader purpose – and how that represents fundamental American values. Wednesday’s debate was no exception. The ‘role of government’ was a topic unto itself.

In this clash of philosophies, the over-simplified yet vitriolic debate would seemingly have us pick from two options: big government or small government. No matter your political preferences, what our leaders and current national dialogue offer us when envisioning what our democracy can achieve leaves little room for imagination. And, little by little, as the core functions of our system are undermined through money in politics, voter suppression efforts, and crippling cuts to local and state budgets, it becomes more difficult to look to government as a force for positive change. 

Yet not everyone is ready to accept this paralysis. As the National Director for the largest student policy organization in the country, my team and I work with young people across the country who are deeply committed to solving some of our most pressing challenges in a time of uncertainty, gridlock, and a breakdown in a sense of common purpose among all Americans.

And even though the question of our government’s future is being described as the ‘fight of a generation,’ our voice is the one that is woefully absent from the conversation.  

Research by organizations such as the Pew Research Center and CIRCLE has highlighted that this generation is strongly progressive and believes in an activist government’s potential to drive bold social change. Yet they’re also not blind to the challenges the system faces. Less than 30 percent of young people believe their voice is represented in government today. But rather than surrender to that reality, Millennials are instead interested in how we can create a better system – one that is more inclusive, effective, and visionary.

Over the next few months, young people are convening across the country to examine the building blocks of our democratic experiment, identify the core values that drive our system, and then suggest how we can build an ideal government that empowers all to serve as active citizens. The initiative, Government by and for Millennial America, will include over a thousand young people articulating a blueprint and action plan for 21st century governance.

Government by and for Millennial America is a bold experiment to engage a generation in first envisioning and then working toward a participatory, democratic system that serves as a problem solving force. What is possible when we empower the public sector, as the representative of our collective voice, to achieve more? What can government do in the 21st century to rival President Teddy Roosevelt’s doubling of national park land, Eisenhower’s unprecedented highway system, and Franklin Roosevelt’s Social Security Act, a revolutionary program that continues to keep millions of Americans out of poverty?

The potential is both endless and exciting. It’s also a monumental challenge. We have to identify the main barriers to achieving our ideal democracy, tackling everything from the filibuster’s stranglehold on deliberative democracy to the inherent inequities in the voting system. We already see that young people don’t accept these challenges as intractable – only affirming why it’s critical for their ideas and solutions to be a part of our national debate.

As President Franklin D. Roosevelt so eloquently put it, “let us never forgot that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us.” Government, as the manifestation of our democracy, is the only entity that has the power to represent all of our voices, no matter our background, orientation, socioeconomic status, or political leaning. So here is the question: what can happen if we build a system that empowers all of us to step up, take ownership over the direction of this country, and serve as active citizens and arbiters of our future? It’s the question we are asking in Government by and for Millennial America, and it’s the question we will put to our leaders in the debates, at the voting booth, and into the next four years.

Join us as we build a blueprint for 21st century governance. 

Taylor Jo Isenberg is National Director of the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network.

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The Romney-Ryan Medicare Plan is Bad for Students and Seniors

Sep 21, 2012Rahul Rekhi

Shifting health care costs onto seniors will break a social compact that all Americans rely on.

Shifting health care costs onto seniors will break a social compact that all Americans rely on.

With Election Day finally in sight, the last few weeks have been brimming with slogans, speeches, and sound bites. But while Republicans and Democrats are working from a similar playbook, there’s a gaping chasm between their competing visions of the social safety net, and the future of Medicare hangs in the balance. In short, the Republicans claim their voucher plan would reduce health care costs, but the truth is that the seniors who depend on Medicare would be forced to pay the price.

The policy clash boils down to a single notion: vouchers. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are proposing a voucher-based Medicare system—one in which seniors are given vouchers to trade for insurance plans on a national exchange or market. The value of these vouchers is capped at a specific value, with the aim of curbing rising health care costs. And in fact, it is completely true that the Romney-Ryan voucher system will reduce Medicare costs, as promised. But it will do so by pushing those expenses onto Medicare enrollees, by forcing them to pay more out of pocket to cover their medical expenses as health care costs rise. What the GOP is proposing, in other words, is not exactly cost-cutting, but rather cost-shifting from government to seniors. If the yearly national allowance of vouchers has expired and your heart begins to fail, well, at least take solace in the fact that Mr. Ryan’s plan lowers Medicare costs by 20 percent.

If you’re only looking at the arithmetic, voucherizing Medicare is a clear and easy solution to bending the health care cost curve. Unlike, say, prevention and wellness campaigns, it’s not hard to project the level of cuts such vouchers will allow for. But this policy simplicity and straightforwardness mask an equally straightforward truth. Rather than attempt to extract amorphous, messy savings through biomedical innovation, electronic records, waste reduction, comparative effectiveness research, or incentivizing quality of care—in other words, achieving collective savings through progressive reforms—Romney and Ryan propose to gut Medicare and hand senior citizens the entrails. And this is hardly hyperbole; the nonpartisan CBO itself stated that the plan “could lead to reduced access to health care; diminished quality of care for Medicare beneficiaries…[and] less investment in new, high-cost technologies.”

That’s not to say that changes to the structure of Medicare are not needed, or will not require tradeoffs; they will. Real discussions, for instance, will have to be had over such hot-button topics as end-of-life care, or limits on the use of expensive, clinically unproven medical technologies. Refinements to these policies would bring Medicare into the 21st century, making it more nimble and in tune with technological advancement and social change. But they also preserve its central guarantee: that our nation’s retirees, having put in a lifetime of hard work and civic service, will receive quality, affordable health care to support them through their later years.

Fifty years ago, with the creation of Medicare under LBJ, thousands of soon-to-be enrollees—aunts, uncles, professors, my friends’ parents and my own—grew up trusting in this promise. And though, as a student, it will be nearly half a century before I qualify for the program, I recognize all too well the gravity of the decision we now face. It is one, after all, that will be borne most heavily by my peers, since the costs that are shifted to seniors today will be thrust upon us tomorrow as health care costs continue to rise. And young Americans will feel the consequences of voucherization well before we reach the age of eligibility, for the security that Medicare provides allows us to take risks when we're younger, to try to create the next Facebook or Instagram, rather than play it safe for fear that we'll be left destitute or denied care in our later years. To chip away at the heart and soul of our social safety net is, in a sense, to hinder innovation itself.

Ultimately, the choice we face is simple: to uphold this mandate or reject it fundamentally; to maintain the promise of health care access for our elderly or begin chipping away at the coverage we provide in the name of budget-balancing. This debate is about a decades-old American social compact, and its effects will reverberate, shaping the futures of not only my own generation but also the ones to come. For the health of our citizens and our safety net, there is only one right answer.

Rahul Rekhi is a student at Rice University and the Senior Fellow in Health Care Policy for the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network.

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Super PACs Aren't Just Swinging Elections -- They're Changing the Way We View Government

Aug 28, 2012Alan Smith

The wealthy donors behind right-wing ads want more than victory in November. They're trying to permanently reshape the political landscape.

The wealthy donors behind right-wing ads want more than victory in November. They're trying to permanently reshape the political landscape.

We’ve all seen the numbers; we know Super PAC politics is a slow-motion disaster unfolding before our eyes, and that a handful of rich people have the ability to dramatically swing elections. But beyond influencing individual races and shifting the way national campaigns must be run, Super PACs and the messages they are promoting may have a dramatic long-term effect on how we as a society view our government. 

Super PAC spending has already hit $200 million this cycle, and with the big players reporting plenty in their reserves, the top of this mountain of cash is not yet in sight. We’re not talking about an even layer of money covering the political landscape, either. This money is going to support conservative causes at a disproportionately high rate. Not only does Open Secrets identify three-quarters of the Super PAC funds as being raised and spent by conservative groups, but ProPublica has tracked media buys and reported that “conservative social-welfare groups” have already spent some $70 million on television ads, compared to $1.6 million spent by liberal groups.

Because so much of this cash is hard to track, we don’t know exactly where dollars are going, but those estimates still paint a clear image of a democracy radically remaking itself. David Axelrod summed up the blight nicely (even accounting for the sour grapes that come from being on the wrong side of the ledger) in a recent New Yorker article:

If your party serves the powerful and well-funded interests, and there’s no limit to what you can spend, you have a permanent, structural advantage. We’re averaging fifty-dollar checks in our campaign, and trying to ward off these seven- or even eight-figure checks on the other side. That disparity is pretty striking, and so are the implications. In many ways, we’re back in the Gilded Age. We have robber barons buying the government.

It’s been clear from the beginning that many on the right have been tepid about Mitt Romney as a candidate. I would argue that this ambivalence shows up in donors’ spending habits as well: when it comes to the actual campaign apparatus, President Obama is running sizably ahead of Romney in fundraising. This raises an interesting question: legal limits aside, what other reasons do big-ticket donors have to avoid going straight to the party apparatus? Super PACS give these donors a way to swing elections, but more importantly, they provide a way to control their messaging directly in ways that donating to Romney’s camp would not. Lost in the election-focused discussion of ground game versus ad game is the potential long-term result of the one-sided messaging that is currently blaring from our television sets and computer screens.

Through funding these Super PACs, 30 or so billionaires are running a nation-wide advertising campaign. While the focus is on attacking Obama, this brain trust is playing a simultaneous long game. The reality of issue advertising is that there are subliminal long-term effects on the audience and their associations with political stances and phrases. That’s how advertising works with Lexus or Gatorade, and that’s how it is working here. Sure, it helps Mitt Romney in November if “Obama” is associated with “bureaucracy” and “taxes” and “waste,” but what about the fact that the ads are also connecting “government” with “bureaucracy,” “tax burden,” and “waste,” independent of the candidate?

Check out this ad, brought to you by Americans for Prosperity, one of many targeting a specific candidate in a swing state: 

The point of the ad is clear: Donnelly, and through him “sitting government,” are bureaucratic spenders, and they sure don’t have your best interest at heart. It's not a new message. But the scope of these targeted issue ads is new. Even if this is not a calculated right-wing attempt at moving the needle on how citizens view the role of government, that will surely be a side effect. 

Regardless of whether you favor Democrats or Republicans, the larger concern is with the way we conduct democracy in this country. The root problem here is that a small cabal of wealthy people can fundamentally affect our view of government and how it functions. This new front in the war of ideas will not end with a single battle in November; Super PACs are a giant new tool designed to drive a wedge between the people and their government even more effectively than the right’s “welfare queen” rhetoric of yesteryear. Their messaging makes the case that government is something foreign, alien, and other. On the other side, there are no ads making the case for Medicare, public education, or government as a vehicle for social change. 

One could make the argument that Super PAC supporters see attacking the roots of government as a lucky side benefit to helping the Romney campaign, but that seems naïve. And considering the past 30 years of intentional Frank Luntz-style messaging from the right, I find it impossible to believe that this barrage is merely a philosophical case for greater “freedom.” Rather, it is a calculated attempt to further erode Americans’ sense of government as a positive actor and, with that, the chance for a publicly held good in our society. While it is true that our relationship with government is a complex and evolving one, it must not be defined by such a black-and-white campaign against government in all forms. 

Alan Smith is National Policy & Program Director for the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network.

 

Finance law image via Shutterstock.com.

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Misleading Advertising is On the Rise: Four Ways the FTC Can Fight Back

Aug 22, 2012Asha M. Fereydouni

Consumers need regulators to step up yet again to protect them from risks in the marketplace.

Consumers need regulators to step up yet again to protect them from risks in the marketplace.

Last year, President Obama created the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, a new agency to protect American consumers with the explicit purpose of preventing some of the risky practices that led to the crisis of 2008. It took one of the greatest financial disasters in history to initiate regulatory change. But there were a number of small failures leading up to the disaster that indicated things were going poorly. Had the CFPB existed at any one of these smaller junctures, much of the disaster could have been averted.

Today, the United States is at a similar juncture: consumers need additional protection, misleading advertising is on the rise, and the current agency responsible for regulation—the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)—is not doing enough.

In May 2012, POM Wonderful lost a lawsuit to the FTC for misleading advertising. Two days later, the company released an ad campaign selectively quoting from the judge’s ruling. The advertisements read, "Competent and reliable scientific evidence supports the conclusion that the consumption of pomegranate juice and pomegranate extract supports prostate health." But in the very next line of the ruling (which POM did not advertise) the judge states that while it might want to think that its product has the advertised health benefits, "the greater weight of the persuasive expert testimony shows that the evidence relied upon by [POM Wonderful] is not adequate to substantiate claims that the POM products treat, prevent or reduce the risk of prostate cancer."

The FTC tried its best, but it was unable to do a thing—the ads are still running, and POM has not paid a cent in fines.

But it’s not just POM. From Sketchers to CVS, each has been subject to misleading advertisement suits in just the last six months. If things aren’t changed, and companies are able to follow POM’s example in getting away with repeated instances of false ads, consumers will pay the price. We face the risk of purchasing a product, thinking that it has certain benefits, then realizing that our money has gone to waste. We may not be able to trust what is right in front of our very eyes. 

So what can the FTC do to strengthen its efforts in combating misleading advertising? Here are four places it can start:

1. The FTC can impose monetary punishments on companies the second a judge rules them in violation. Currently, companies that are sued for misleading advertising only face a monetary penalty if three conditions are met. First, the company must continue false ads after the judge’s ruling; second, the FTC must get those ads admitted to the record; and finally, the judge must find it guilty of committing a “double violation.”

The punishment for a double violation is steep. The FTC fines companies $16,000 PER advertisement, PER day—that’s no joke, even for a multimillion dollar company. The penalty works great as a deterrent for double violations, but there needs to also be a deterrent for a single violation. Fines ought to apply for any advertisement that, after being tried in court and ruled by a judge, is found to be misleading the American people.

2. The FTC can institute more stringent requirements as to what kinds of clinical studies are required before health claims are made. With the POM case, the FTC tried to set a new precedent of requiring double-blind studies and FDA pre-approval before POM (and, potentially, other companies) could make claims about the health benefits of its products. While the FTC’s efforts must be commended, it was ultimately unsuccessful in adding the new requirements. Further, the FDA by no means has the capacity to pre-approve and substantiate the medical claims for every company that presents health-related advertisements.

A plausible compromise would be for the FTC to implement requirements for certain standards in clinical studies. Among other things, the FTC could require companies to present studies that have a control group (a non-trial, comparable group to ensure that the products are actually having an impact) and the repeated achievement of stated results in at least three instances. In doing so, the FTC can begin to rein in how companies substantiate the medical claims behind their products.

3. The FTC can request more transparency in how companies advertise the medical benefits of their products. Currently, there exist loose standards as to what companies must disclose to consumers. The FTC ought to require that companies disclose on some part of the advertisement the funding source and basic information about the clinical trial that occurred to substantiate the product’s health claims.

4. The FTC can be internally consistent when it comes to measures to improve existing regulations. In July of 2011, the FTC announced that it would review each and every existing regulation. The goal of this comprehensive review was to “promote greater efficiency, transparency, and public participation.” In conjunction with this internal review, the FTC also asked for public comment and publicized its criteria for evaluating the existing regulations. It asked for comments on the rule's economic impact, its necessity, whether it conflicts with local laws, and if it's outdated.

Notice that there is no question of efficacy. On initial glance, it would seem as if the FTC doesn’t care whether the regulations actually work. However, after taking a closer look at the briefs released for each specific regulation, it would seem that the FTC did in fact care about how the regulations were working. It also asked, “What modifications, if any, should the Commission make to the Rule to increase its benefits or reduce its costs to consumers?”

While the detailed brief shows that the FTC does in fact care about the efficacy of its regulations, this desire ought to have been a component of its initial press release. A comment made by the Heritage Foundation is most illustrative of this lack of clarity. Heritage lists the FTC’s four criteria that were released in the initial press release and structures its analysis based on those criteria. It had no idea that there were expanded requirements. By not clearly asking what it wanted to know, the FTC was unable to get complete answers and left itself short-changed.

The FTC can take these steps now to combat misleading advertising. In doing so, it can take a proactive position, stand up to large companies, and protect American consumers. 

Asha M. Fereydouni is a member of the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network who is a senior at the University of California, Davis and is currently doing research on the FTC in Washington, DC.

Billboard image via Shutterstock

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How Turning the Public School System into a Market Undermines Democracy

Jul 25, 2012Elizabeth Stokes

Citizens shouldn't be seen as merely consumers choosing from an array of options, but active participants in collective decision-making.

Citizens shouldn't be seen as merely consumers choosing from an array of options, but active participants in collective decision-making.

Backing Governor Chris Christie and Commissioner Chris Cerf’s unrelenting push for more “high-quality school options” in New Jersey, the Department of Education recently approved nine charter schools to open in September, bringing the total number of charter schools in New Jersey to 86. This move is part of a broader trend toward the marketization of education policy – the incorporation of market principles into the management and structure of public schools, as well as voucher programs to subsidize alternatives to public schools. These market principles include deregulation, competition, and the unqualified celebration of “choice,” all of which are embodied in the charter school movement. Despite claims of greater efficiency, innovativeness, and responsiveness, however, the growing rhetoric around choice needs to be more closely scrutinized before we wholeheartedly jump on the charter school bandwagon.

Market-based school reform is focused on the idea that by structuring schools like business enterprises, we can inject them with stereotypical private sector virtues like innovation and efficiency. According to this view, this is sorely needed because “traditional” public schools are supposedly ineffective. By removing barriers to entry for different types of educational organizations, market-based reformers believe we can incorporate some healthy competition into the state-run system and overcome drawbacks allegedly caused by the state’s monopoly control. This approach positions parents and students as consumers of education, free to choose which types of schools best meet their individual needs and preferences. The rhetoric of “choice” implies that marketization will enhance liberty as well as efficiency.

This approach reconfigures our understanding of what is “public.” While traditional conceptions of public education define “public” according to who funds, owns, and governs the system, under the marketized model public education is considered “public” to the extent that a public made up of individual consumers is provided for. Indeed, this is considered to be one of the great advantages of the marketized model. Whereas public schools are forced to be all things to all people, which requires using what Milton Friedman once called "cumbrous political channels" to try to reach agreement, marketized models will supposedly eliminate messy conflicts and streamline the process into a neat consumer-provider relationship that better responds to individual needs.

There are several problems with this model from the perspective of both efficacy and, more importantly, democracy. First, despite the grand intentions behind marketized programs, they do not get better results on average than traditional public schools. A study conducted by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University found that 17 percent of charter schools reported academic gains that were significantly better than traditional public schools, 46 percent showed no difference from public schools, and 37 percent were significantly worse. Additionally, introducing supposedly tough-minded material incentives to improve teacher performance, such as giving higher "merit" pay to more successful teachers and threatening to fire less successful ones, has yielded no measurable benefits for children and, instead, tends to divide and demoralize teachers.

Other studies have found that the competitive incentives designed to drive innovation in the classroom are not operating as intended. Instead of improving teaching and learning practices, market incentives have driven an increase in schools’ marketing and promotional activities – that is, advertisements that better sell their products. And as marketing is most effective when aimed at specified groups, schools usually beef up their academic achievement statistics by targeting families of higher-achieving students, thereby contributing to increased student selectivity, sorting, and segregation.

Efficiency considerations aside, the real problem with championing marketized models in education and other areas is the damage it does to democracy. We should not be upholding a model based on turning citizens into consumers. Democratic citizenship does not simply involve an individual’s choice from a platter of options. Rather, it requires active participation in collective decisionmaking.

The problem with marketized models is that in the process of providing individuals with private “choice,” citizens are necessarily deprived of public choice – that is, the opportunity to discuss, deliberate, and act in concert with others. While advocates of marketization claim that it eliminates many of the protracted disputes that currently impede the effectiveness of schools, disputes aren’t always such a bad thing from the standpoint of democracy – especially when they deal with matters of genuine common concern like the education of future generations. Even if conflicts do arise, the opportunity to debate and engage in a democratic give-and-take with neighbors is a vital aspect of political education and empowerment. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in the 1830s, it is only through participation in the exercise of power over collective outcomes, and the practice of thinking about and acting on public issues in public arenas, that people can develop the skills and commitments necessary to be citizens. Removing public education as a site for political education simultaneously removes yet another stake citizens have in our democracy.

Of course, this is not to say that there is no place for anything that is not a “traditional” public school. On the contrary, a variety of independent alternatives can certainly complement a healthy public school system and contribute to diversity and innovation. That’s particularly true when they represent initiatives led by local community members rather than corporate franchises. But that is very different than using public money to undermine and dismantle public education itself as a genuinely public enterprise.

The trend toward increasing privatization and marketization means the increasing disempowerment of citizens. The reconfigured version of “public” advanced by marketized models of education is severely truncated and distorts our understanding of why public education is important. Public education is not simply service delivery. It is also an expression of community and shared responsibility that helps shape the character of a society. We should value public schools not only for educating our children, but also for their role as local institutions where citizens can congregate and practice democracy.

Elizabeth Stokes is a Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network Summer Academy Fellow, co-leading its newest project, "Government By and For Millennial America.

 

School hallway image via Shutterstock.com.

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Millennial Pulse

While the House Deadlocks Over the Food Bill, Millennials Offer Up Ideas for Food and Farming

Jul 18, 2012Rajiv Narayan

Republicans are bickering over how much to cut from the program, while Millennials want to make food accessibility a right for every American.

Republicans are bickering over how much to cut from the program, while Millennials want to make food accessibility a right for every American.

Last week, House Republicans voted to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act for the 33rd time. Yet it seems they can’t be bothered to take on a hugely important bill waiting for their attention. While the Senate voted a surprisingly bipartisan 64-35 in favor of the 2012 Food Bill on June 21st, it is unclear whether the House version will now make it to the floor.

When the House Agriculture Committee returned from recess to release the draft version of the nearly 600-page bill, its cuts predictably outshone the Senate version. Where the Senate voted to cut $23 billion over 10 years of the omnibus bill, the House version would slash $35 billion, nearly quadrupling the Senate's $4.5 billion cut to food stamps in the process. This is despite the fact that the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is now helping more Americans than ever to put food on the table. Nearly one in seven Americans—over 46 million people—receive aid from SNAP. 

The House may be having trouble starting the conversation, but students at the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network are already well underway. Millennials care deeply about our agriculture and nutrition systems and are taking measures to make their voices heard.

Since the beginning of June, we've been passing around a survey that elicits policy values and priorities from young people all over the country on this issue. We've gotten over a hundred responses, many of which strongly contrast with the likely platitudes from floor discussions on legislation worth nearly a trillion dollars. 

The current discourse is marked by legislative inertia. On food stamps, for example, legislators are stuck on the binary of cutting the program and keeping it intact. The respondents to our survey see things differently. They see food accessibility not as a privilege, but as one comment noted, a “caloric right.” Therefore, discussions about food accessibility move beyond keeping SNAP from getting cut, and instead focus on how to optimize the dollars we assign to the program for health and wellness. One frustrated millennial writes, “The nutrition title has nothing to do with real nutrition. It is about getting people calories. Big difference. That needs to be changed.”

Writing on other issues, a student from Williams College calls for “diversifying food production to help include more regions of the United States and utilize land better suited to particular crops.” Another student from Appalachian State wants to invest in “food literacy.” A recent alumni of Linfield College ties together the disaster preparedness title of the bill to its subsidies title, arguing that it's important to "maintain a safety net so that our farmers feel secure and supported, but also train them so they can avoid loss to as great a degree as possible." We want your input next.

The responses we’re receiving reflect the range of experiences with food and farming in this country. Some have no background in farming; they come from urban or suburban areas removed from the realities of food production. Many of their responses move toward closing the gap by way of local food sourcing, amplified farmers markets, and food as a pillar of health education. Other respondents are steeped deeply in agriculture, many of them hailing from farming communities, some even desiring to go into farming themselves. These responses signal a sober pragmatism for the future of farming for a country of massive population and salvaging arable land from decades of agribusiness.

With ideas like these, how can our representatives manage to be so tongue-tied?

Rajiv Narayan is the Senior Fellow for Health Care Policy at the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network.

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Millennial Pulse

Growing a Better Farm Bill From the Roots Up

May 17, 2012Rajiv Narayan

A project that will fight the power of special interests and craft a truly democratic Farm Bill.

Dear Majority Leader Reid and Minority Leader McConnell,

A project that will fight the power of special interests and craft a truly democratic Farm Bill.

Dear Majority Leader Reid and Minority Leader McConnell,

Nearly half the Senate delivered a letter to you both on Tuesday urging you to bring the Agriculture Reform, Food and Jobs Act of 2012 to floor consideration "as soon as possible." Better known as the Farm Bill, and what really ought to be known as the Food Bill, this legislation is projected to cost a half trillion dollars over five years. With the current iteration of the bill set to expire in September, this letter heralds itself as a model for action, a "bipartisan way to craft meaningful, yet fiscally responsible, policy."

But the bipartisan way is no substitute for the democratic way.

While this letter says the Senate can consider the bill in a "fair and open manner," it is unclear that anything about this process has been so. A handful of legislators have sent members of their staff to constituent listening sessions, and many of these sessions are currently underway. But because the Senate Agriculture Committee has already released its version of the bill, the best the public can hope for (should their opinions be heeded at these sessions) is tinkering with a nearly finished product.

Furthermore, public comment is generally only sought from particular groups. While the letter points out that the bill impacts more than just farmers and farming communities, it still devotes most of its attention to the legislation's impact on agricultural jobs. Less than a third of the bill's budget directly impacts this sector. The lion's share of the funding (about 70 percent) is allocated in precisely the place where the larger public would have the most to say: nutrition.

This is not to say that farmers and what the letter calls "other stakeholders" are at odds. Limited listening sessions and strategic framing that targets one group over others are tactics to reduce overall discussion and debate, tactics of expediency rather than good governance. There's great benefit in having all the parties at the table so that they can learn from each other.

Students at the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network are trying to craft this bill the right way. We're on a mission to build a Food Bill from the ground up instead of through closed-door sessions that only invite a select few. We'll be talking to students and young people across the country, asking them to share their values and priorities in an initial survey, and inviting them to participate in work groups with professionals and policy experts to draft a better plan for spending hundreds of billions of dollars over five years. Through this process we'll be searching for students from all regional, socioeconomic, professional, and educational backgrounds. Once we have their responses, our workgroups will outline a series of recommendations ready for discussion. Then we'll take it to farmers, policy experts, and budget analysts. Because our political leadership has not come to us, we're going to create our own seat at the table and bring youth policy priorities to them.

A legislative package so large that it will impact the food process from sowed seed to second serving deserves better than both sides of the aisle.

Sincerely,

Rajiv Narayan 

 

Rajiv Narayan is the Senior Fellow for Health Care Policy at the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network and a graduating senior at the University of California, Davis.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.com.

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