New America in the News: 2008

With the presidential election still more than two months away, experts say it's too soon to tell how the law might be reformed.

But there's likely to be a continued march toward national academic standards, and one national test, said Michael Dannenberg, an education expert with the New America Foundation, a centrist nonprofit public policy institute. LINK

On a night when the convention’s stated theme was “securing America’s future,” speakers portrayed McCain as an unreconstructed hawk and Bush enabler, an outdated thinker who supported a war that distracted America from fighting al-Qaida in Afghanistan, empowered a hostile Iran and left the United States weaker instead of safer...

Steve Clemons, a director the Washington-based New America Foundation and among the first to tip Biden for the vice-presidential slot, is among those who argue that Biden's exercise of power in the White House would be similar to that of Cheney's. "The office of vice-president has changed forever," he said. "The office has explicit legal powers now. Maybe some will be rolled back but they can't be rolled back easily." LINK

The number of uninsured Americans decreased by 1.3 million from 2006 to 2007, a change largely attributable to an increase in government-sponsored coverage, the U.S. Census Bureau reported Aug. 26.

The Census Bureau's annual report on income, poverty, and health insurance found that the number of uninsured people decreased from 47 million in 2006 to 45.7 million in 2007, or 15.8 percent to 15.3 percent of Americans.

...[T]he economic slowdown means that more people who now are middle class could find themselves uninsured. It also means that more people are worried that they could lose jobs and their health insurance.

“It is a deep and growing -- and you could say even gnawing -- fear among the middle class,” said Len Nichols, director of the Health Policy Program at the New America Foundation, a public policy institute. LINK

The debate over who to blame for this war in Central Asia becomes less important if Russia has leverage over the NATO operation in Afghanistan. Russia is waiting to see how the Western alliance reacts to its withdrawal from Georgia before deciding what to do next. "It would depend on whether the Russians simply stop being positive, which probably wouldn't have much of an effect," James Dobbins, the former special envoy for Afghanistan, said last week at a New America Foundation event.

Democracy's only real competitor in the realm of ideas today is radical Islamism. Indeed, one of the world's most dangerous nation-states today is Iran, run by extremist Shiite mullahs. But as Peter Bergen pointed out in these pages last week, Sunni radicalism has been remarkably ineffective in actually taking control of a nation-state, due to its propensity to devour its own potential supporters.

In the first comprehensive analysis that reviews the budget policies of Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain from both the spending and taxing sides of the ledger, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) estimated that Mr. Obama's policies would transform the current base-line budget surplus of $70 billion for 2013 into a budget deficit of $317 billion. The 2013 fiscal shortfall in a McCain administration would range between $275 billion and $367 billion...

Maya MacGuineas, President of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, discusses today's release of the Fiscal Policy Budget Guide, which serves as a "roadmap" of the major tax and spending proposals of both Senators McCain and Obama. LINK to video