Ted Halstead: All Related Content

The Board of Directors of the New America Foundation announced today the appointment of Steve Coll as the Foundation’s next President & CEO. Coll will succeed New America’s founding President & CEO, Ted Halstead, who will remain on New America’s Board.

Steve Coll, whose résumé as a journalist includes two Pulitzer Prizes, a stint as managing editor of The Washington Post and a job as a staff writer at The New Yorker, is now ready to try his hand at something else: a Washington public policy institute.

U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton, a Democrat from New York, and Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, were the keynote speakers at a conference this week unveiling a number of radical ideas meant to inspire change in U.S. policy on areas such as health care, climate change, and energy efficiency. Both senators, who say they are good friends despite political differences, said they believe the country needs courage and compromise to make the radical changes they say are needed to solve some long-standing problems. VOA's Marissa Melton reports from Washington.

Although it had been billed as one of the most important speeches of his presidency, there were few signs on Wednesday that George W. Bush’s State of the Union address had succeeded in stemming the rapid haemorrhaging of his authority.

A number of leading Democrats, including Barack Obama, a front-runner for the 2008 presidential campaign, evinced cautious welcomes for Mr Bush’s modest proposals to address global warming and healthcare reform.

The United States owes much of its status as the first mass middle-class society to enlightened social policy designed to broaden asset ownership. To this day, a quarter of all adult Americans enjoy a legacy of asset ownership traceable to the Homestead Act of 1862, which awarded 60 acres of land in the American West to families who lived on the land for five years. Likewise, the GI Bill, the Federal Housing Administration, and mortgage deduction policies paved the way for one of the highest home-ownership rates in the world.

Could a reformed public pension system give citizens more control over their retirement savings, as conservatives want, without undermining security in old age, as liberals fear? Here is a proposal that does just that in the American context, although it could apply equally well to any public pension system struggling with long-term debts and an ageing population.

John Kerry not only has a message problem, he seems to have conflicting economic priorities. Kerry wants to make job creation and helping the middle class the central theme of his campaign, but he has yet to offer any bold or compelling ideas to back up the rhetoric. At the same time, he has been unable to find a way to square his broader jobs agenda with his commitment to fiscal prudence. Allow us to suggest a solution to both problems: abolishing the payroll tax.

A bold theme is circulating among America's chattering class -- the ownership society. The idea is to increase the number of citizens who own financial assets such as stocks, bonds and property in order to spread the benefits of wealth accumulation. Even President George W. Bush has started using the phrase and spoke in his State of the Union address this week about broadening ownership. It is a pity the administration's current proposals do no justice to what may be the most promising social policy breakthrough of the early 21st century.

Last week Sen. John Edwards became the first presidential candidate in U.S. history to propose solving the problem of the uninsured by making health insurance mandatory. Although his proposed health care mandate is limited to children and young people -- all those under the age of 21 -- it offers the most promising way forward for eventually covering all 41 million uninsured Americans, and it marks a major turning point in our nation's health care debate.

Few social and economic crises are as predictable as those posed by rapidly aging populations in the industrialized nations.

The interaction of falling birth rates and increased longevity in western countries and Japan threatens a downward spiral of fiscal insolvency, labour shortages, economic stagnation, fraying social safety nets and generational warfare.

Among President Bush's top priorities, he said in the State of the Union address, is "high quality, affordable health care for all Americans." Yet he offered precious few specifics. With nearly three million Americans losing their health insurance in the last two years alone and health care costs rising at the highest rate in a decade, America needs a bold plan.

"Americans of all ages, all stations in life, and all types of disposition, are forever forming associations," the French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville observed in his famous 1835 tract, Democracy in America. "There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types -- religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large and very minute