Latest News Clips 2016.08.22

                    

1.      Is Our Country as Good as Our Athletes Are?

The New York Times   AUG. 19, 2016

Pessimism has flavored this election campaign. America is in decline. The country is on the wrong track. We’re getting our clocks cleaned in global trade deals. We’re still suffering from the humiliation of Iraq.

The share of Americans who say that democracy is a “fairly bad” or “very bad” system of government is rising sharply. A quarter of young Americans feel that way, according to data drawn from the World Values Survey. A majority of young Americans believe that the United States should stay out of world affairs, according to a Chicago Council on Global Affairs report.

Yet when you watch the Olympics, we don’t seem like some sad-sack country in terminal decline. If anything, the coverage gets a little boring because we’re always winning! And the winners have such amazingly American stories and personality types (Biles, Ledecky, and, yes, Lochte).

American Olympic performance has been astoundingly consistent over the recent decades. With rare exception, we can be counted on to win between 101 and 110 medals Olympiad after Olympiad. The 2016 team seems on pace to win at least that many.

We’re not great when measured by medals per capita (New Zealand, Denmark, Hungary, Australia and Britain are the big winners there), but America does have more medals than any other nation in history, and that lead is widening.

Moreover, America doesn’t win because we have better athletes (talent must be distributed equally). America does well because it has such great systems for preparing athletes. Medals are won by institutions as much as by individuals. The Germans have a great system for training kayakers, equestrians and throwers — the discus or javelin. The U.S. has amazing institutions to prepare jumpers, swimmers, basketball players, gymnasts, runners and decathletes.

The big question is: Is the greatness of America’s sports institutions reflective of the country’s strong institutions generally, or is it more like the Soviet Union’s sports greatness, a Potemkin show masking national rot?

Well, if you step outside the pall of the angry campaign rhetoric, you see that America’s institutions are generally quite strong. Over the past decades, some developing countries, like Brazil, India and China, posted glitzy economic growth numbers. But those countries are now all being hampered by institutional weakness and growth is plummeting.

But America’s economic success is like our Olympic success, writ large. The nation’s troubles are evident, but our country has sound fundamentals. The American dollar is by far the world’s currency. The Food and Drug Administration is the benchmark for medical standards. The American patent system is the most important in the world.

Nine of Forbes’s 10 most valuable brands are American (Apple, Google, IBM and so on). The U.S. is the leading energy producer. We have 15 (at least!) of the world’s top 20 universities, while Hollywood is as dominant as ever.

2.      Turkey: Let's close the chapter of coups

The government should have a well-developed plan for dealing with the country's major issues.

Since the failed coup attempt, Turkey has been struggling to deal with the aftershock, grieving for the loss of more than 250 lives and caring for more than 2,000 who have been injured.

The country, however, has emerged more cohesive, with shows of unity across almost the entire spectrum of political and social classes.

Turkey's overcentralised administrative system creates an incentive for groups first to increase their presence within the state apparatus and then to dominate it

Political classes of all stripes have rejected the coup attempt by the rogue Gulenist network, which has been designated as a terrorist organisation by Turkey since 2014, and celebrated the nation's sense of ownership of Turkey's democracy, which contributed to the failure of the attempted coup.

All these are encouraging. The nation's sense of ownership and the maturity of the political classes underpin Turkey's democracy.

Overcentralisation

These are necessary but not sufficient conditions for permanently closing the door on the age of coups, and terminating the shady and illegal activities of rogue elements within the state. More is needed.

Three measures in particular are vital to achieving a coup-free political future for the country and disincentivising any rogue group seeking first to dominate state institutions, and then to abuse the power that it acquires through this domination for its own parochial group agenda.

Structurally, the overcentralised nature of the Turkish state makes it easier for the would-be coup plotters to achieve their goals and for a well-organised rogue element to exercise a disproportionate level of power.

Ideologically, Turkey's overcentralised and ideologically proactive state creates incentives for sociopolitical or religious groups to seek a presence within it and influence it through public institutions and state machinery in order to fulfil their sociopolitical designs for the state and society at large.

Politically - or in terms of political culture - the lack of proper political interaction, dialogue and problem-solving mechanisms between the ruling parties and other opposition groups has paved the way for actors to gain a non-democratic foothold in the political sphere and acquire political power, which they have invariably abused.

Whether out of necessity or by choice, whenever Turkey's current and previous governments have opted for a partner to deal with major challenges or impending crises, they have chosen their partner from outside the parliament and political sphere.

Turkey's overcentralised administrative system creates an incentive for groups first to increase their presence within the state apparatus and then to dominate it.

In most indicators of centralisation, Turkey is far above the OECD average. For instance, the central government collects almost 70 percent of total revenues, far more than the OECD average of 58 percent (PDF).

Even more strikingly, 85 percent of public servants work for the central governmentin Turkey, while only 15 percent work in local government. This is the highest ratio among OECD countries.

Disproportionate power

In an overcentralised system, it is relatively easier for certain groups to wield disproportionate power over the system.

Once you control key positions in some of the key institutions, you can project influence incommensurate with your actual size or support. The case of the Gulenist network and its actions within the state machinery confirm this point.

As a corollary, decentralisation will by default tame the ambition of groups seeking to infiltrate and dominate the system, as the number of institutions, and the geographic and administrative distribution of these institutions, will be more numerous and wider. The state's power will not be concentrated in the centre. Instead, it will be more defuse.

Moreover, this overcentralised state is also extremely proactive in attempting to influence the identity and ideology of its society through social engineering.

For a long time, the Turkish state encouraged a preferred identity of secular,Western-oriented nationalism, while securitising the Kurdish and Islamist identities.

Those whose identity was securitised believed that the only way to change this was through gaining access to the levers of power within the state structure.

Such a belief - coupled with the nature of the state - gave the state apparatus a strong pull factor for any group that aspired to make its imprint on public life.

In this respect, the Gulenist network was partially the product of Turkey's authoritarian, overly centralised Kemalist state. The government should take a lesson from this experience, and strive to make the state blind to identities and remainideologically neutral.

3.      How to Make Child Care Affordable

The Bloomberg    AUG 19, 2016

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton agree on this much: The federal government should do more to help families pay for child care.

They’re surely right. In many parts of the U.S., putting children in a day-care center has become the single greatest expense parents face, exceeding the cost of housing. And it’s growing: From 2009 to 2016, the cost of child care and nursery school jumped 21 percent, nearly twice the rate of inflation overall.

Trump’s proposed solution is to allow parents to deduct the average cost of child care from their taxes. That may sound like a generous offer, and it would indeed be expensive. The trouble is, it would do nothing for families most in need of help. After all, the median household pays just $9,000 in federal taxes; 45 percent pay no federal income tax at all. (Trump’s campaign says he will also extend the deduction to half of payroll taxes, and will provide details about this plan later on.)

In theory, Clinton’s strategy would help many more families. She promises to limit the amount parents pay for child care to 10 percent of their income. But her campaign hasn’t said how she would achieve that goal, or at what cost.

Some expansion in federal assistance is certainly needed. The existing income-tax credit for child care costs is limited to $600 to $1,050 per child, depending on income.

Yet the average price of home day care for an infant ranges from almost $5,000 a year in Tennessee and South Carolina to twice that in Florida, New York and Massachusetts. Child-care centers are typically even more expensive: In many states, the annual cost to cover an infant and a four-year-old together is more than $20,000.

Beyond enlarging the tax credits, the federal government should pay them in advance -- much as Obamacare provides subsidies for health insurance premiums at the time they need to be paid. And as with Obamacare subsidies, child-care tax credits should be paid directly from the government to child-care centers.

The Center for American Progress has proposed such an approach. Its plan would offer tax credits of as much as $14,000 per child, and limit families’ spending on child care to 12 percent of their income.

Any changes in federal policy would do well to also raise the qualityof child care. The country’s 285,000 child care workers earn less than $21,000 a year on average; even so, only a third of infant care settings meet the staffing ratios that experts recommend. And more than one-third of workers at home-based child care centers have only a high school degree or less. While a four-year college degree isn’t always required, workers ideally should study child development and early childhood education -- courses offered at many community colleges.

Trump’s child-care tax deduction wouldn’t directly affect quality. Clinton says she would improve things with a separate effort to subsidize the pay of child care workers. A better approach would be to also give day care centers an incentive to perform well. Louisiana, for example, gives them a tax credit tied to their state quality rating. It also gives child care workers a separate credit that increases with the amount of training they complete.

Another approach is to make it easier for parents to get information about staff training before enrolling their children in a day-care center.

Of course, none of these strategies would be cheap. CAP says its tax credit proposal would cost taxpayers $40 billion annually. But kids who get quality day care at an early age often do better in school, and their parents are more likely to work. These benefits could be well worth the price.