Welfare

Wheels Versus Welfare

Ron Tang — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 02:36:00 -0400

With falling home prices, rising food and fuel costs and an unemployment rate well above the national average, the current economic downturn may push already vulnerable California families to the brink of financial destitution. Thousands of people may turn to welfare for support in the coming months. That's OK -- that's the purpose of temporary assistance. It's not as if this is the money-for-nothing welfare of the early 1990s; these folks are required to start looking for work the second they land on the rolls. Yet to qualify for assistance, many families may be forced to give up the most effective tool they have in the fight against poverty and unemployment: their car.

To be eligible for temporary cash assistance -- known as CalWORKS in California -- families must prove that they are both income and asset poor. To qualify for assistance, a single parent with two children, for example, can't earn more than about $12,000 a year or have more than $2,000 in other resources. In addition, the total fair-market value of all vehicles owned by a household cannot exceed $4,650 -- a figure that hasn't changed in more than a decade. In real terms, that means even a 10-year-old Honda Civic with 100,000 miles could disqualify a family from public assistance.

California is one of three states with such a restrictive vehicle limit -- Texas and Idaho are the others. Nationally, 12 states exclude all household vehicles when determining a family's eligibility for cash assistance; another 15 exclude at least one vehicle. Most other states exclude about $10,000 of the net or equity value of the vehicle; California's $4,650 limit counts the car's fair market value. This means that families may be deemed ineligible even if they still owe $5,500 on their $6,000 car.

The connection between car ownership and employment is clear. It's not very surprising that having a reliable automobile reduces absences from work and helps give workers access to a wider range of jobs and better-paying ones. This is especially true in a region as spread out as Southern California. A 2000 report by the County of Los Angeles -- the most recent data available -- found that 64% of welfare-to-work job seekers who had unlimited access to a car were gainfully employed, compared with only 44% of those who relied on public transit or ride-sharing. Another study -- of welfare recipients in Tennessee -- found that having a car leads to better-paying jobs, more hours worked and an increased probability of leaving welfare.

With the relationship between car ownership and employment so clearly documented, California should be working hard to provide low-income families access to a reliable car. And, in some areas, they do get help. Sacramento County, for example, is authorized to purchase 50 vehicles a year for county welfare recipients who lack access to public transit. If we're helping some families buy a car, wouldn't it make sense, then, to let people who have cars keep them?

And instead of investigating someone who owns a 10-year-old Honda, shouldn't district attorneys and others be concentrating their time and resources going after more costly types of fraud, such as identity theft? And shouldn't caseworkers spend more time connecting a family to vital social services than verifying the worth of its 2002 Toyota Corolla?

The County Welfare Directors Assn. thinks so, and that's why it's supporting AB 2368, a bill championed by Assemblyman Felipe Fuentes (D-Sylmar) -- and sponsored by the New America Foundation -- that would exclude household vehicles from consideration when determining eligibility for CalWORKS. The Assembly passed the bill and has sent it to the state Senate.

The reasoning is sound: Individuals with cars will be more likely to find a job, stay employed and move to self-sufficiency, the goal of California's welfare program. This reform will also increase efficiency by reducing paperwork and staff hours spent tracking down the value of vehicles, which the Assembly Appropriations Committee estimates would save the state more than $3 million a year.

It's about time California's welfare system catches up to the common-sense policies of states such as Kentucky, Alabama and Louisiana.

The War Over the War (cont.)

Ron Tang — Mon, 19 May 2008 08:05:00 -0400

There's the war in Iraq and then there is the war over the war in Iraq. The first is about gaining ground against the sectarian militias and terrorists who plague that country. The second is about storytelling.

Advocates of staying and fighting in Iraq are at a distinct disadvantage in the second war. The burden of the Iraq fighting falls on such a small number of military families that it is easy to portray the troops in the field as victims. This has proved an effective strategy for Virginia's junior senator, Jim Webb, a staunch opponent of the surge. Once seen as an irascible loose cannon, he has used his experience in the Pentagon -- he served as Ronald Reagan's assistant secretary of defense for reserve affairs and had a brief, controversial stint as secretary of the Navy -- to mount a disciplined attack on the Bush administration's personnel policy, what you might call the soft underbelly of the surge.

Politically speaking, advocates of withdrawal are in a bind. Though all depends on how the question is asked, a CNN poll conducted in late April found that only a third of Americans say they want all U.S. troops out of Iraq immediately. Another third want to withdraw some troops, and a fifth want troop levels to stay where they are. Despite the general unpopularity of the Iraq war, Cindy Sheehan-esque calls for bugging out aren't popular.

In 2007, Democrats failed in efforts to pull the plug on the war by denying the military the funds it needs to keep the troops on the battlefield. This is where Webb has proven adept. Rather than try to bring the troops home directly, Webb has focused on an advocacy campaign for the troops. And if that means we can't sustain U.S. efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, so be it.

Last year, Webb sponsored an amendment that aimed to give troops more "dwell time" between deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, especially a minimum of three years for National Guard and Reserve units. The measure had an obvious appeal as the strains of increased deployments have pushed many military families to the breaking point. But, as Webb surely understood, it also would have made the surge strategy impossible. At the last minute, Webb lost a key ally, Senator John Warner, and the measure died.

This year, Webb has built a broad coalition around his generous "Post-9/11 Veterans Educational Assistance Act," designed to dramatically increase G.I. educational benefits. All told, the measure has 56 cosponsors, including Senate Republicans like Warner and Chuck Hagel and Richard Lugar. By including the measure in its $195 billion emergency war-funding package, the Democratic congressional leadership has all but dared the White House to veto it.

The case for Webb's proposal is rooted in the extraordinary success of the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, better known as the G.I. Bill of Rights. Because men who managed to avoid the draft had made economic progress over the war years, there was a fear that veterans would have a hard time catching up -- and that resentment would build. The G.I. Bill offered a generous educational benefit that gave millions of veterans a foothold in the middle class and sparked a dramatic expansion of American higher education. At the time, the benefit was more than enough to cover the then-modest cost of a college education. The military emerged as an engine of opportunity.

Webb emphasizes that veterans' educational benefits haven't kept up with the increases in the costs of higher education, particularly when it comes to elite public and private colleges.

But it's also true that we've had an all-volunteer force for decades. Whereas the original G.I. Bill was understood as compensation for conscription -- for taking the best years of millions of young lives -- later versions of the legislation, including the 1985 Montgomery G.I. Bill that is the basis of current educational benefit, have served as a relatively small part of a broader incentive package for serving in the armed forces. Signing bonuses and reenlistment bonuses are what have skyrocketed post-9/11, and servicemen are free to use this bonus money as they choose -- a down payment on a house, to start a business, to finance their education.

Webb's proposal, though, goes well beyond even the most generous enlistment bonuses, provided the money is spent on education. Right now, active-duty veterans can receive up to $1,101 a month, an amount that is not quite adequate for room and board at the average in-state public school, let alone the most expensive. Webb would raise monthly benefits to match the most expensive in-state public school tuition and also provide a housing allowance at the military's E-5 standard -- generally understood to be enough to rent a two-bedroom townhouse.

The sponsors claim that the new approach will cost around $2 billion a year, a small share of the total cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a small price to pay for doing right by veterans. The more pressing concern is what effect the proposed legislation will have on our ability to sustain a long military campaign. In Webb's bill, the maximum benefit kicks in after 36 months of active duty. Assuming a large number of new recruits are drawn to service on the basis of the new benefit, which seems to be Webb's intent, keeping them in the ranks will require far higher reenlistment bonuses, according to a study sponsored by the Department of Defense.

As Webb told Military.com's Tom Philpott in March, the military relies heavily on "this one demographic group they keep pounding on and throwing money at. Yet there's a whole different demographic group that would be attracted to coming in and serving a term." He is right that the military leadership has a strong preference for a career force rather than a force defined by high rates of turnover, for the same reason that virtually all employers prefer experienced employees.

Last week, Senators Lindsey Graham, Richard Burr, and John McCain, taking a cue from Defense Department objections, introduced an alternative bill, which increases monthly G.I. educational benefits to $1,500 per month. For those who serve in active duty for 12 years or more, the benefit increases to $2,000 a month. The Graham-Burr-McCain bill also allows servicemen to transfer education benefits to a spouse or to children. Half of benefits can be transferred after 6 years of service and all benefits can be transferred after 12 years. Webb is strongly opposed to transferability -- perhaps because transferability is a way of turning spouses and children into reenlistment recruiters. Military families, as you can guess, like the idea.

Overall, the Graham-Burr-McCain approach seems more likely to yield an effective fighting force composed of women and men interested in making a long-term commitment. The Webb bill, in contrast, could lead to more college-bound Americans signing up, but it will also probably mean a higher number will leave the military once they reach the maximum benefit level. It's no surprise that McCain, who has a shot at being commander in chief, would rather not see reenlistment rates plummet. Webb, in contrast, who is always fighting the war over the war, is far less likely to have a philosophical objection to making wars like our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan far more expensive to fight.

This relatively minor legislative battle over whether and how the military should try to bring together Americans of different class backgrounds is really a major battle in the war over the war in Iraq.

Reihan Salam

Operations — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 17:02:00 -0500

Schwartz Fellow

Reihan Salam writes on politics, culture, and technology, and was previously an associate editor at The Atlantic, a producer for NBC News, a junior editor and editorial researcher at The New York Times, a research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a reporter-researcher at The New Republic. He is the co-author of… more

Steven Hill's NYT Letter to the Editor Regarding Krugman Column, Europe's Social Contract

adminn — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 11:22:00 -0500

Paul Krugman calls Europe the "comeback continent" because of its resurging economy, yet repeats another stereotype -- Americans pay less in taxes than Europeans. The situation actually is more complex.

For their taxes, Europeans receive many benefits for which most Americans must pay additional fees and payments out of pocket. Many Americans, if they have health care at all, are paying for escalating premiums and deductibles. Other Americans are saving $100,000 for each of their children's college education, yet European children attend for free or nearly free.

Millions of Americans are scraping to save the amount they will need for retirement beyond Social Security, but the European retirement system is much more generous. Many Americans pay extra for child care, or self-finance their own sick leave or parental leave after a birth, but Europeans receive all of these (and more) from their taxes.

When all these differences are added up, it turns out that many Americans are paying out as much as Europeans -- we just receive a lot less for our money. The "overtaxed European" is another stereotype used to scare Americans away from the European model, so it's unfortunate that Mr. Krugman reinforced that stereotype.

Steven Hill San Francisco

Life Chances

adminn — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 22:35:00 -0500

The blue-ribbon commission has an inauspicious history in American public policy. Most often, assembling a dozen or two bipartisan grandees to deliberate soberly about a problem for several years is merely a way of evading the problem.

But there are exceptions. Though it will probably pass unnoticed, Dec. 22 of this year will mark the 20th anniversary of the creation of one of the most successful policy commissions in modern U.S. history: The National Commission on Children. Chaired by Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, the esteemed group four years later issued a report, Beyond Rhetoric, which was most notable for its unanimity. Without dissent, though not without struggle, 32 members -- who ranged from former Health and Human Services official and abstinence advocate Wade Horn, Allan Carlson of the paleo-conservative Rockford Institute, and Kay Coles James (later of the Bush administration and Regent University) on the right, to Bill Clinton and Marian Wright Edelman on the left -- accepted recommendations for a $1,000 refundable tax credit for children, improvements to child-support enforcement, a health-care program for children and pregnant women, and more investment in child care and Head Start.

While the unanimity was impressive, the report's reception suggested that the title Beyond Rhetoric was meant ironically, since the recommendations, and their $52 billion annual price tag, seemed hopelessly unrealistic at the time. Rep. Patricia Schroeder dismissed the report, predicting that "people are going to cite it for about a month" before it would be forgotten, and Douglas Besharov of the American Enterprise Institute charged that it was "so unrealistic it threatens to divert attention from the incremental increases that were ready to happen this year."

But then a funny thing happened on the way to irrelevance: Almost every one of the commission's recommendations became law. The State Children's Health Insurance Program passed six years later. A child tax credit became law the same year, and later was expanded, and made partially refundable as of 2001 -- so that working families who don't pay income tax would get a benefit. All the recommendations for child-support enforcement passed, and have since contributed to dramatic increases in collections on behalf of American children. Today, child support lifts more than a million kids out of poverty annually. The commission's, and Rockefeller's, most notable achievement might not have been legislative, but in co-opting prominent social conservatives and forcing them to acknowledge that if they cared about families and children, they had to put the federal government's money where their mouths were. Much of what became the first President Bush's "kinder, gentler nation" and the second's "compassionate conservatism" stemmed from that moment of apparent consensus.

The commission on children was the centerpiece of what might be called the first wave of kids-first politics. Beginning in 1985, when Arizona governor Bruce Babbitt devoted his entire State of the State speech to children, earning ridicule from the state's leading paper for talking about "quiche" rather than the "meat and potatoes" of Arizona politics, the idea began to take hold that children could lead us to the restoration of the promise of liberal politics. Just as Social Security and Medicare set the stage for activist government by protecting the elderly, supports for children would restore the sense of cooperation and mutual obligation that had been lost in the Reagan era.

A couple of years later, a memo from pollster Stanley Greenberg entitled "Kids as Politics" argued that despite the temptation to "view kids as soft, secondary and timeless... 'kids' in the present period are different. ... When candidates talk about kids," he contended, "they are talking about the fundamental economic and social terrain on which Democrats must run." Improvement in the living conditions and future prospects for children was not the only or even the primary goal. Rather, kids would help Americans "rediscover government": "Kids bring the Democrats back into the homes of average voters, speaking about economic issues of a fundamental sort. ... Kids and public policy are a natural and credible combination."

Twenty years later, while kids-first politics has been a policy success, it has not quite lived up to Greenberg's expectations. Rather, conservatives who understood the political power of children supported certain children's programs, such as S-CHIP, in isolation, cutting around them like paper dolls. Meanwhile, they continued to push successfully the agendas of tax-cutting and economic individualism that narrow the reach of such programs. Despite an increase in investment in kids' programs -- a study by the Congressional Budget Office in 1999 found that the tax credits, health-care expansion, and other benefits amounted to an increase of $45 billion in annual spending on kids in working families since 1984 -- and significant improvements in child poverty and other measures of well-being, child poverty rates began to crawl back up in this decade. The children who benefit from such programs live in the very families that are the victims of the economic insecurity conservative policies promote.

The failure to date of kids-first politics to transform the politics of social investment or help Americans "rediscover government" is not merely a problem for partisan Democrats or liberals. It is a problem for kids, since Head Start and quality child care cannot make up for the consequences for children of widening inequality and deepening insecurity for the families in which children are raised.

But the first wave of kids-first politics ended some time ago, with President Bush's veto of the expansion of S-CHIP marking its last rites. The choice between continued tax-cutting and positive government support for families with children can no longer be avoided. Yet faced with that choice, all of the Republican presidential candidates (including former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who sometimes talks a good game but puts no policy substance behind his rhetoric) have chosen tax cuts. The social conservatives like Wade Horn have retreated to promoting abstinence and marriage. The "Sam's Club Republicans" that the young conservative writers Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam predicted in The Weekly Standard would marry social conservatism with activist government, in order to support the struggling families of the GOP base, have somehow not yet shown up.

So we now have the opportunity to relaunch a second wave of more robust kids-first politics. And as we do, we should ask what lessons the first wave -- the one bookended, roughly, by Babbitt's speech and the Bush S-CHIP veto -- offers for a renewed effort.

First, consensus isn't always helpful. Let's not be afraid of a fight. Rockefeller won unanimity only by paring back his commission's recommendations, particularly by watering down his health-care proposal. A high price was paid to enlist the hardcore social conservatives. But now that they have left the field, we have more flexibility to talk about a real, comprehensive vision for the future of children, one that might not win the support of everyone, but one that can command an enthusiastic majority.

Indeed, if the politics of children is going to have real purchase as politics, as Greenberg foresaw, it has to connect to the conflictual nature of politics. If everyone is for kids, then there is no real kids' politics -- it's not an issue in contested political space. Bush's veto of the S-CHIP bill, while obviously disappointing as policy, at least makes the lines clear: There are politicians who see children as a priority, and there are those who don't. (At the moment, these lines closely follow party lines, but that has not always been the case and will not be in the future.) Real kids-first politics should be unafraid of forcing that choice, with a confidence that in a high-stakes fight between tax cuts and children, children will prevail.

Second, kids-first politics has to be integrated with a broad vision of economic opportunity and the family. All research on education from early childhood through college shows that family income is the single most important variable in a child's success. No single programmatic intervention, whether it is first-rate child care or preschool or reform of elementary schools, compensates for the effects of poverty.

In his recent book, The Sandbox Investment, David Kirp highlights as an alternative to the preschool-focused campaign in the U.S. the British Labour Party's approach of setting a "galvanizing objective" -- the complete elimination of child poverty -- and orienting all policy around that goal. Once such a goal wins broad acceptance, the range of policies that would accompany it fall naturally into place. Under Tony Blair's government, spending on children tripled, and preschool quickly and quietly became nearly universal.

There would be limits to such an approach in the U.S., however. One is that the poverty line is too low: Lifting the income of a family of three to slightly over $17,000 is not going to dramatically change their children's life chances. (Poverty in the U.K. is measured relative to the median income, rather than as an absolute minimum, so the poverty line there for a family of three is more than $23,000 at current exchange rates.) More importantly, as Dalton Conley argued in a recent essay in The Boston Review, "The Geography of Poverty," it isn't income itself that has the biggest impact on kids, but the geography of concentrated poverty and the inability of parents who work long hours and make long commutes to spend enough time with their children. Money is time, and Conley suggests that the best ways to help kids would be by giving their parents higher wages or wage subsidies so they can work fewer hours, by providing paid leave, or by changing the geographic incentives that result in the poorest workers having the longest commutes to work. None of these are alternatives to high-quality child care and early education, but without them, those programs are pushing back against a social and economic trend that hinders their efficacy.

Issues of work and family, and time with one's children, have a political advantage in that they are relevant to the middle class as well as those near poverty, even if the problems of a two-professional couple and a single parent working two low-wage jobs are very different. Like child-support enforcement and preschool, this cluster of issues lends itself to universalist policies that benefit almost everyone. But not all the policies that help kids will be equally universal, and that is a third lesson of kids-first politics. The doctrine that the only programs that can win broad and lasting political support are those that, like Social Security and Medicare, benefit "a huge cross-class constituency," in the words of Harvard's Theda Skocpol, is a severe constraint on policies for kids. The result is often programs that offer a little something to everyone, and not enough to anyone to significantly improve economic security or open new opportunities. Tax credits of a few hundred dollars (which if they are not made refundable, actually disproportionately benefit the well-off) provide too little benefit to families who need them and too much to those who don't. But as Christopher Howard argues in The Welfare State Nobody Knows, the credo that "programs for the poor are poor programs," lacking public support or funding, is not borne out by recent events, such as the creation or expansion of S-CHIP or the steady and quiet expansion of Medicaid and the Earned Income Tax Credit to support low-income working families. While Bush's veto of the S-CHIP expansion remains hugely unpopular, polls suggest that the Republican argument that the public benefit should not extend to middle-income families resonated with many voters. Freed from the compulsion to offer only universal benefits, no matter how watery, policy-makers will be liberated to design programs that truly lift up the kids who most need help. Such policies need to be coupled with a language of both moral obligation and the economic promise -- not just for the immediate beneficiaries, but for the economy as a whole -- of investing in children. (The companion piece in this issue on Illinois demonstrates how that state is moving toward universal, high-quality pre-K while giving priority to the poor.)

The first wave of kids-first politics led with silver-bullet programs and policies. The assumption was that individual policies that won broad elite support would succeed, and thus lead to a broader and more supportive politics for kids and families. A lesson from the partial success of that experiment is that you can win some policy changes without having much effect on the overall political or economic climate, or national priorities.

The next wave should start not with individual policies that win broad bipartisan consent, but with a comprehensive vision. The vision should be aspirational, not safe. A "galvanizing objective," such as the U.K.'s child-poverty goal, would certainly help. In the American case, perhaps a goal that all children should reach first grade ready to read would help organize all the key initiatives, from Head Start and universal pre-K, to nutrition and health care.

A further advantage of starting from a comprehensive goal such as poverty reduction or school readiness is that it addresses children as members of families. This counters the public anxiety, nurtured by the right, that liberals view public programs as alternatives to the family, and has the additional advantage, of course, that it is exactly the right approach to policy. Kids are not independent economic actors interacting with S-CHIP or Head Start. Family income (higher wages, Earned Income Tax Credit, child support, and programs to help non-custodial parents train and find work), family time (paid leave, expansion of unemployment insurance to cover family leave), family savings and economic security (baby bonds or individual development accounts), and the supports available to families within communities (such as the Harlem Children's Zone initiative) should all be priorities, whether the overall objective is poverty or readiness, in part because they make the other programs go further. Children's advocates should resist worrying that some of the dollars in such programs might support adults or support children only indirectly. It is adults who, indispensably, nurture children.

For all the investment generated by the last wave of kids-first politics, the U.S. social contract still socializes old age and privatizes childhood. Children bear the deepest scars from the "you're on your own" economy and society promoted by the last 30 years of public policy. Putting childhood itself -- and not just a few small programs -- at the center of political debate can serve to turn around that debilitating political assumption, for all of us.

Five Myths About Sick Old Europe

Cecille Isidro — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 04:22:00 -0400

In the global economy, today's winners can become tomorrow's losers in a twinkling, and vice versa. Not so long ago, American pundits and economic analysts were snidely touting U.S. economic superiority to the "sick old man" of Europe. What a difference a few months can make. Today, with the stock market jittery over Iraq, the mortgage crisis, huge budget and trade deficits, and declining growth in productivity, investors are wringing their hands about the U.S. economy. Meanwhile, analysts point to the roaring economies of China and India as the only bright spots on the global horizon.

But what about Europe? You may be surprised to learn how our estranged transatlantic partner has been faring during these roller-coaster times -- and how successfully it has been knocking down the Europessimist myths about it.

1. The sclerotic European economy is incapable of leading the world.

Who're you calling sclerotic? The European Union's $16 trillion economy has been quietly surging for some time and has emerged as the largest trading bloc in the world, producing nearly a third of the global economy. That's more than the U.S. economy (27 percent) or Japan's (9 percent). Despite all the hype, China is still an economic dwarf, accounting for less than 6 percent of the world's economy. India is smaller still.

The European economy was never as bad as the Europessimists made it out to be. From 2000 to 2005, when the much-heralded U.S. economic recovery was being fueled by easy credit and a speculative housing market, the 15 core nations of the European Union had per capita economic growth rates equal to that of the United States. In late 2006, they surpassed us. Europe added jobs at a faster rate, had a much lower budget deficit than the United States and is now posting higher productivity gains and a $3 billion trade surplus.

2. Nobody wants to invest in European companies and economies because lack of competitiveness makes them a poor bet.

Wrong again. Between 2000 and 2005, foreign direct investment in the E.U. 15 was almost half the global total, and investment returns in Europe outperformed those in the United States. "Old Europe is an investment magnet because it is the most lucrative market in the world in which to operate," says Dan O'Brien of the Economist. In fact, corporate America is a huge investor in Europe; U.S. companies' affiliates in the E.U. 15 showed profits of $85 billion in 2005, far more than in any other region of the world and 26 times more than the $3.3 billion they made in China.

And forget that old canard about economic competitiveness. According to the World Economic Forum's measure of national competitiveness, European countries took the top four spots, seven of the top 10 spots and 12 of the top 20 spots in 2006-07. The United States ranked sixth. India ranked 43rd and mainland China 54th.

3. Europe is the land of double-digit unemployment.

Not anymore. Half of the E.U. 15 nations have experienced effective full employment during this decade, and unemployment rates have been the same as or lower than the rate in the United States. Unemployment for the entire European Union, including the still-emerging nations of Central and Eastern Europe, stands at a historic low of 6.7 percent. Even France, at 8 percent, is at its lowest rate in 25 years.

That's still higher than U.S. unemployment, which is 4.6 percent, but let's not forget that many of the jobs created here pay low wages and include no benefits. In Europe, the jobless still have access to health care, generous replacement wages, job-retraining programs, housing subsidies and other benefits. In the United States, by contrast, the unemployed can end up destitute and marginalized.

4. The European "welfare state" hamstrings businesses and hurts the economy.

Beware of stereotypes based on ideological assumptions. As Europe's economy has surged, it has maintained fairness and equality. Unlike in the United States, with its rampant inequality and lack of universal access to affordable health care and higher education, Europeans have harnessed their economic engine to create wealth that is broadly distributed.

Europeans still enjoy universal cradle-to-grave social benefits in many areas. They get quality health care, paid parental leave, affordable childcare, paid sick leave, free or nearly free higher education, generous retirement pensions and quality mass transit. They have an average of five weeks of paid vacation (compared with two for Americans) and a shorter work week. In some European countries, workers put in one full day less per week than Americans do, yet enjoy the same standard of living.

Europe is more of a "workfare state" than a welfare state. As one British political analyst said to me recently: "Europe doesn't so much have a welfare society as a comprehensive system of institutions geared toward keeping everyone healthy and working." Properly understood, Europe's economy and social system are two halves of a well-designed "social capitalism" -- an ingenious framework in which the economy finances the social system to support families and employees in an age of globalized capitalism that threatens to turn us all into internationally disposable workers. Europeans' social system contributes to their prosperity, rather than detracting from it, and even the continent's conservative political leaders agree that it is the best way.

5. Europe is likely to be held hostage to its dependence on Russia and the Middle East for most of its energy needs.

Crystal-ball gazing on this front is risky. Europe may rely on energy from Russia and the Middle East for some time, but it is also leading the world in reducing its energy dependence and in taking action to counteract global climate change. In March, the heads of all 27 E.U. nations agreed to make renewable energy sources 20 percent of the union's energy mix by 2020 and to cut carbon emissions by 20 percent.

In pursuit of these goals, the continent's landscape is slowly being transformed by high-tech windmills, massive solar arrays, tidal power stations, hydrogen fuel cells and energy-saving "green" buildings. Europe has gone high- and low-tech: It's developing not only mass public transit and fuel-efficient vehicles but also thousands of kilometers of bicycle and pedestrian paths to be used by people of all ages. Europe's ecological "footprint," the amount of the Earth's capacity that a population consumes, is about half that of the United States.

So much for the sick old man.

Mixed Messages Inhibit Escape From Welfare

Cecille Isidro — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 21:50:00 -0400

The recent 10-year anniversary of welfare reform provided an opportunity for both Democrats and Republicans to claim victory. President Clinton recently described how political compromise by both parties led to one of the crowning achievements of his Administration.

There’s one problem with this assessment -- the work’s not done. Despite the lauded overhaul of 1996, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) policies are failing to promote the primary goals of welfare reform in two important ways: economic independence and personal responsibility. This is because TANF rules across the country send a series of mixed messages that make it harder for many families to chart a path out of poverty.

The main culprit is a rule that links program eligibility to a family’s savings. If a family has assets that exceed the defined limit, they can’t qualify for benefits. In theory this makes sense -- you don’t want well-off families taking a share of limited resources when there are others with real need. Yet the work requirements and time limits that characterize TANF are enough to deter anyone with other options: in fact, state administrators report they don’t even need the rule. The continued presence of asset limit rules on the books has become not only an unnecessary administrative burden to the state agencies that enact the rules; there is reason to believe it also actively discourages saving -- one of the truest paths to economic independence.

In interviews with welfare recipients in the D.C. area, these men and women made clear their aspirations to take part in an ownership society, sharing dreams of homeownership and saving for retirement. As these individuals make the difficult first steps from assistance to independence -- from welfare to work -- low-income families are presented with a confusing ultimatum: they can either 1) save money and forfeit future public assistance or 2) spend their money and remain eligible for benefits. In the face of a weak economy, there is little incentive for families to begin saving at all.

Without savings, there is no chance families transitioning off welfare can successfully weather income shocks due to illness or unemployment. The slightest setback will plunge these hard working families back into poverty and back on the rolls. If TANF were to instead encourage saving and investment -- while giving the assurance of a government safety net -- families could start to create their own nest egg, and move one step closer to their dreams of financial security.

Since 1996, a few states have taken action to correct this policy contradiction by increasing the asset limit governing TANF and other income support programs. Some, including Virginia and Ohio, have gone a step further in completely eliminating asset tests for the TANF program. Not only have these states reported no "horror stories" of wealthy individuals receiving assistance; public officials note that repealing asset limits has actually reduced administrative costs, saving states money in a time of escalating deficits.

To complete welfare reforms, the District and states like Maryland should eliminate asset tests for TANF, food stamps, and related income support programs. This can be done through legislation or, as seen in some states, directly by state administrators. What’s more, states should work to actively encourage saving by providing financial education and assistance in opening a bank account.

Eliminating asset limits for income support programs is a simple, cost-effective way to make welfare policy align with the goal of promoting self-sufficiency. Taking these unnecessary, punitive regulations off the books is an important step in validating welfare’s message ten years later -- ensuring that individuals who get a job, work hard, and save for the future will enjoy the American dream of economic independence.

New Urgency for Early-20s Single Moms

adminn — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 16:41:21 -0400

America made teen pregnancy prevention a national priority, and progress on this front is remarkable. However, increasingly, women are avoiding pregnancy as teens, only to become single mothers in their early 20s. Often their entry into parenthood is just as ill-prepared and perilous to child well-being, yet the policy response is far less adequate.

In 1995, President Clinton pronounced teen pregnancy an epidemic, and, following his call for action, the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy was formed. Congress made teen pregnancy prevention a focus of welfare reform in 1996, and President Bush furthered this commitment with policies emphasizing sexual abstinence and family values.

Prevention efforts now extend to both men and women, and to approaches such as media campaigns, mentoring, youth development, and relationship skills. Although the appropriate mix of abstinence, contraception, and other services remains strongly debated, teen childbearing clearly has fallen dramatically since its reduction became a national priority -- by 33 percent since 1991 -- and all efforts likely played some role.

However, society is trading one set of at-risk parents for another. In 2003, more than 1.4 million children were born to single mothers, a record 36 percent. Roughly 40 percent of those births were to single mothers in their early 20s -- young adults -- and about three-quarters of these young single mothers had only a high school education or less.

Childbearing by singles has grown by over one-quarter since 1990, and young adults account for roughly 60 percent of this increase.

Reducing teen childbearing must remain a national priority, with nearly 415,000 births annually (42 per 1,000 teen women); however, births to young, single adults surpass even "epidemic" levels of teen childbearing, with 550,000 births annually (71 per 1,000 single women ages 20-24).

This new epidemic fails to register as a national priority even though research shows that nearly half the children of single mothers live in poverty (four times the rate for children with married parents), and their rates of substance abuse, male incarceration, and teen pregnancy are two to three times greater.

Unmarried, cohabiting mothers do not fare much better. They are twice as likely to break up within five years compared with married mothers, and their children have more than twice the poverty rate, poorer school and behavioral outcomes, and dramatically higher exposure to abuse than children with married parents.

This probably follows from young women's frequently disconnected entry into parenthood. Low-income single mothers portrayed in Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas's groundbreaking book, Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage describe many of their pregnancies as neither intended nor prevented. Motherhood is a natural part of their early 20s, a focal point that will bring love and purpose to their lives.

But because they often see the men fathering their children as unfit or even dangerous, they reserve marriage as a lofty goal for later life. Many enter motherhood with high aspirations for their children and a belief that their love will overcome all serious obstacles, but soon replace such hopes with a quest for basic survival, accepting that their children may follow the same paths into single parenthood, drugs, and incarceration, and redefining success to mean loving their children no matter what.

Public policy largely overlooks single childbearing among young adults, citing a lack of programmatic approaches. However, there are clear steps within our grasp. Declining trends in the accessibility of contraceptive services must be reversed. Recently reported findings from the Alan Guttmacher Institute ("Unintended Pregnancies Rise for Poor Women" and "Unintended Pregnancy Linked to State Funding Cuts") indicate that 33 states made it more difficult or more expensive for poor women to obtain contraceptive services between 1994 and 2001, corresponding to a 30 percent increase in unintended pregnancies among poor women during the same period. Title X, the only public funding going directly to family-planning clinics, has fallen by two-thirds since 1980.

However, our vision of family planning for young adults must extend beyond simply providing contraceptives. It must address underlying changes in behaviors and attitudes toward parenthood. Innovations are needed that reach young adults effectively, focus on the value of stable, two-parent families and the risks to children raised outside of that structure, and impart a greater sense of responsibility. What's needed most is the same sense of national priority and urgency that accompanied efforts to prevent teen pregnancy.

Without greater attention focused on the pathways into parenthood, society's important efforts to help bring parents into healthy marriages, to help parents support their families through work, and to help keep children from falling through the cracks will continue to be undermined.

Ready or Not?

Cecille Isidro — Sun, 04 Jun 2006 16:20:02 -0400

Victor slouches into a bustling courtroom at Los Angeles County Children's Court. He would be tall, if he stood up straight, and broad, if his shoulders didn't follow his eyes to the floor. He doesn't look sullen or defiant. He just looks like a big kid, humble and out of place in this room full of busy grown-ups. When the judge glances up from her papers and smiles at him, he smiles back, just a bit.

At 19, Victor has already lived a life that takes a few tellings to get straight. His father has been in prison. His mother struggled with schizophrenia and the burdens of single parenthood, lost her children and eventually moved back to Guatemala. Since he started high school, Victor has been in eight different foster care placements. He has missed so much class moving from one school to another, and seen so many course credits fail to transfer, he would only be a freshman in high school if he were still enrolled.

Critics are quick to look at a case like Victor's and condemn the foster care system, with its overburdened caseworkers and overstretched resources. Victor's feelings are more complicated. He has had tangles with his foster parents, and plenty have been his fault (he is a teenager, after all). He is sick of his social worker (and Victor's case file, as thick as a dictionary, suggests the feeling is mutual). But in the quiet of court meeting rooms, away from guardians and social workers and friends, he has confessed to his lawyer: He is afraid to be on his own. He has given up on a diploma, but he wants to get a GED and a job. If the Department of Children and Family Services ended his foster care today, he would have no degree, no work experience, nowhere to live and no adult to fall back on. But in California, foster care ends at 18, unless the county makes an exception or a judge orders one, and Victor is on the clock. He looks up at the bench.

"Are you going to close my case?" he asks, so softly you can hardly hear him.

*****

Foster care in California is state supervised but county administered. That means that all counties in California have to follow the same basic rules, but they have room to interpret -- including how and when they push foster kids out of their sometimes imperfect nests. The feds and the state team up to fund foster kids until they turn 18 (in some cases extending that funding when a child is working toward a high school diploma). But the law allows a county to hold a kid in care until he or she is 21. Not surprisingly, most California counties keep only a small number of kids in care once the money stops, and many counties keep none.

But Los Angeles County is different. Since 2001, when the state Department of Social Services began keeping reliable case data, Los Angeles has appeared as much as twice as likely as the rest of the state to hold foster kids in care after they turn 18, and as much as 10 times more likely to keep those kids in care after they turn 19.

The biggest reason for this is Michael Nash.

Nash has thick white hair, intense brown eyes and a gruff but warm manner. His resume is typical for a judge of children and families. In the early 1980s, as a young public prosecutor, he helped convict the Hillside Strangler. Later, he was a criminal court judge in Hollywood. ("He was so mean," laughs Lisa Mandel, former legal director at the Children's Law Center of Los Angeles. "They would do these sweeps and pick up all the prostitutes and drug dealers, and he would put everyone away.") All of which is to say, he had no experience with kids and the law. When Nash was appointed to dependency court in 1990, he had never even heard of it. "Seriously," he says. "I didn't know what it was."

Dependency court is where a judge decides which parents are fit, which households are safe, which social services are necessary and which teenagers are ready to be independent. Yet few judges want to be there -- presiding over thousands of obscure, low-status cases, where every decision could break up a family or put a child's life in danger, and there is no jury to share the blame if a decision goes bad. In some counties, judges are actually assigned to "kiddie court" as punishment. When the state conducted a survey of dependency court officers in 2004, the average judge had only three years of experience there.

Now in his 17th year, more than 10 of those as supervising judge of the dependency court or presiding judge of the Juvenile Court, Nash is a rarity: a steady presence on the bench. The walls of his chambers are covered with crayon drawings. Teddy bears nearly outnumber file folders. "Judge Nash has been fantastic," says Judge Emily Stevens, a 15-year veteran of the dependency court. "He gave us continuity in our leadership."

With that has come a new approach to the question of when it's appropriate to release kids from the system, one that is being closely studied across the country. After all, one in five of the nation's 500,000 foster kids live in California, and Los Angeles minds the largest share, about 22,000 kids in any given month.

"It had become increasingly clear that kids were leaving the system at 18 just because they were 18," Nash says. He remembers one emancipation ceremony at the Kodak Theatre, honoring high-achieving kids who were about to leave foster care. The host asked the kids in the audience to raise their hands if they knew where they were going to live now.

"I was surprised," Nash says, "at the number of kids who didn't know."

*****

Until recently, most foster care reformers focused on getting kids out of the system, not leaving them in for longer. It seemed to make sense. Social workers can be too quick to pluck kids from their real families, judges can be too quick to terminate parental rights and hundreds of thousands of kids -- especially minority kids -- languish in care that leaves them ill-equipped for adulthood.

But a growing body of research suggests that a quick exit from the system may not, in fact, be the best answer.

Four years ago, the University of Chicago's Chapin Hall Center for Children embarked on the first rigorous study to determine what happens to kids when they leave foster care at 18. Researchers interviewed hundreds of them after a year on their own, and the results were ugly.

Nearly 70% had dropped out of high school, while only about 4% had gone on to a four-year college. (Another 8% enrolled in a two-year college.) Only 47% were employed, and three-quarters earned $5,000 or less annually. About half lost their health insurance, and one in five went untreated when they needed a doctor. Forty-four percent of the girls had gotten pregnant. Seventeen percent had moved back to the troubled home they left for foster care. More than 10% reported "sometimes or often" not having food to eat, and nearly 15% had been homeless. One in five had spent at least a night in jail.

When the Chapin Hall researchers compared those 19-year-olds out of foster care with the experience of 19-year-olds still in care, the difference was startling: One extra year of foster care nearly halved the high school dropout rate and almost tripled the likelihood that the kids would go to a four-year college.

"If you look at kids at 18," Nash says, "they're still pretty young."

*****

When Nash arrived at the dependency court, lawyers from the Department of Children and Family Services represented both the department and its foster kids (who were given a legal status akin to disputed property). Child advocates began drawing attention to this built-in conflict of interest, and dependency court officials tended to agree.

Nash wrote a local court rule, enacted in 1996, that had wide repercussions. All children must have independent counsel, the order declared. After the county took the matter to a higher court and lost, the Legislature stepped in and made the rule a statewide policy.

But the subsequent shift in judicial culture may have been more important than any shift in the law. Just as everything else about foster care varies from county to county (including the local budget), independent counsel means different things in different places.

In Los Angeles, most foster kids get an attorney from the nonprofit Children's Law Center and stick with the same lawyer for years. Caseloads are held to a relatively manageable 150 to 170 cases per attorney, compared with 500 or more in some corners of the state.

Courts also differ over how often kids should appear. Some counties all but ban kids from their hearings, and discourage them from showing up when the county proposes to end their time in care. Some judges believe kids slow down an impossibly full docket. And some experts believe a visit to court is simply too traumatic.

But Nash's judges and the Children's Law Center encourage kids to appear at every court date, usually one every six months, and when they show up they often find the same person behind the bench.

In a life with few constants, Victor has seen only one judge since elementary school, longer than he has known his current social worker or any of his foster guardians.

"You get to know what they want," Nash explains. "The report from the social worker may say, 'Johnny is OK with this,' but you don't know how it was presented to Johnny. You start asking all these questions: 'Do you know where you're going to live? Did you know you can have access to these services if you stay?'"

Even if an 18-year-old's social worker is recommending closure, Nash and the 20 judicial officers in the dependency court are inclined to be patient if the kid doesn't appear ready to handle life on his or her own. "We tell the department to take a hike," he says. "We're not giving up jurisdiction until there is a plan in place."

And if the county has to cover the expense? "It doesn't matter to me if the funding comes from the feds, the county, the state," Nash says curtly. "That's irrelevant."

Keeping kids in care does come at a cost -- and that is usually the justification for closing cases at 18 in all but the most extreme circumstances. Yet Nash's calculus may turn out to be a bargain in the end if an extra year or two of foster care helps reduce incarceration, poverty, unwanted pregnancy, emergency room care and homelessness.

*****

Victor is still waiting for an answer. Will the system spit him out?

"No," says his judge. "I want to keep your case open. I want you to stay with us."

She asks him questions about his life, more like a parent than an officer of the court. "We need to get you back on track," she says. His medical and dental care have lapsed. She orders the Department of Children and Family Services to help. She asks him if he has a Social Security card or certain other forms of ID. He shakes his head no, and she adds more tasks to a list.

"Have you thought about getting a job while you're getting your education back on track?" she asks. When he mumbles something about picking up applications, she chides him. "I don't mean picking up applications. You have to fill those applications out. You can also practice talking to people, asking about work. Looking for a job is a full-time job." He nods. She schedules another hearing in a month to check on everyone's progress.

"Some kids, the concerns are always the same," she says after Victor shuffles out. "With young people, we can be talking to a wall for 15 years. They may not be processing it at the time, but at least they're listening. And then one day, they'll think about it. One day a kid will come to court, and he's started to turn it around.

"Victor's not there yet," she says. "He's still going through some tough times."

But nowhere does the law tell her to give up on him. And Judge Nash wouldn't. So why should she give up? Why should anyone?

Duncan's Three-Pointer

Cecille Isidro — Thu, 11 May 2006 16:20:01 -0400

Alan Duncan, a Conservative MP, is your typical British politician. Which is to say, if he were an American he'd be atypical. He reads a lot, writes a lot, thinks a lot; he seems motivated by ideas, as opposed to just personal ambition. And he has ideas aplenty, on the future of the British Conservative Party, on the future of the conservative movement worldwide, and on the future of freedom in general. And since the Conservatives are now ahead of Labour -- eight points, according to a poll in The Times of London -- it's time to pay more attention to them; they might soon be in charge again.

Yet there's one thing about Duncan that might never come up, not because he keeps it a secret, but because as far as he's concerned, it's a non-issue. But of course, since I'm a journalist, I had to ask -- more on that later.

Last week, Duncan gave a talk at the Cato Institute; his topic was an important one: the erosion of freedom in the United Kingdom, after nearly a decade of Tony Blair -- and, frankly, after a century of the welfare state. In 1995, two years before Blair was elected, Duncan wrote a jeremiad, the title of which says it all: Saturn's Children: How the State Devours Liberty, Prosperity and Virtue.

A decade later, these concerns about statism are still well-founded; indeed, many of the same freedom-devouring trends are visible, too, here in the US. It's a bi-national, bipartisan phenomenon.

So as Duncan spoke, I found myself thinking that each of his three points had an American doppelganger.

First, he was extremely critical of the incumbent, Tony Blair. Given that Duncan is a member of the Loyal Opposition, the Shadow Secretary for Trade and Industry, the fact that he didn't like the Labour Prime Minister was hardly a total shock. And while some of his word-digs about Blair bespoke partisanship -- "he is not a principled person," "he governs by propaganda," "the headline matters more than the deed" -- Duncan wasn't necessarily wrong in what he was saying. Indeed, an American can observe many of the same behavior patterns in the US, from presidents of both parties.

Perhaps Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian theorist, was right when he said that "the medium is the message." That is, it might just be that television puts a premium on smooth talk and reassuring buzzwords -- reality be damned. And so long as the pictures "work," maybe the prime minister, or the president, can get away with whatever "truthiness" he is attempting to project.

Because as Duncan explained, the rise of television, and televised spin, has been accompanied by a simultaneous decline in the ability of most politicians, especially legislators, to follow complex issues. That is, if the chief executive makes a proposal, Parliament/Congress will react to it, pro or con. But what they won't do is read it; lawmakers prefer to operate on the basis of dumbed-down talking points. And this talking-point-ization of policy discourse invariably degrades the governing process, because the discoursers are using lowest-common-denominator material.

Sometimes, such LCD-ing hits rock bottom, as happened in the US last week, when Senate Republicans tried to boil down complicated concerns about energy and gas prices into a simple talking-point "deliverable": a $100 rebate to consumers. Yet the thinking behind this rebate-proposal was so half-baked that it was quickly laughed out of town, and that's saying something when the town is Washington, DC. But the McLuhanesque point is that if the medium is television, then the message has to be so dumbed down that the thought-process behind the message has to be dumbed down -- mental form follows function.

Lamentably, Republicans in Congress are still at it. Rather than trying actually to unravel the supply constraints that are keeping prices high, for example, lawmakers are now talking about criminal investigations for "price gouging" -- that's the politically charged synonym for "supply and demand."

OK, back to Duncan.

The Briton's second point flowed naturally from the first. The war on terror, Duncan said, had accelerated a trend that was visible even before 9-11: the short-circuiting of due process. That is, raison d'etat was displacing the rights of Englishmen. Under Blair, the same powerful state apparatus, erected to deal with the likes of Al-Qaeda, is now being used to chase after economic violations.

And the same thing is happening in the US. A couple of years ago, Cato's own Gene Healy wrote a book about this, Go Directly To Jail: The Criminalization of Almost Everything, in which he argued that prosecutors were zealously turning civil violations into criminal violations, in part to extort plea bargains, in part because, well, this is a prison-happy culture, where nearly one percent of the US population is locked up. More recently, The Wall Street Journal editorial page has taken note of this same phenomenon; prosecutors now have the legal equivalent of Abrams tanks, which they can use to run over anybody, accused of just about anything. When non-violent suspects are threatened with prison terms that stretch for decades, or even centuries (and when employers are terrorized into cutting accused employees loose, financially, leaving them with no hope of paying their legal bills), well, then, of course, the accused take the plea, and justice, of course, is traduced.

Finally, to Duncan's third point: For all the new powers of the government -- to bamboozle, to intimidate -- there's a dirty secret at the base of all that state power: It doesn't work very well. The state has feet of clay.

As the Tory told us, for all the state's efforts to channel behavior in certain socially approved directions, it usually achieves the opposite. That is, if the state sets out to make people better off, it ends up making them worse off. As Duncan said, Britons end up, "less rich, less free, and less moral." The welfare system encourages "social collapse," and the schools "don't teach." And the net effect is visible across the country: The United Kingdom, once renowned for its politeness and good behavior, now, by some measures, has a higher crime rate than the United States.

And Duncan made another good point: The effect of such misgovernance is actually to increase inequality.

This is a point worth pausing over: The redistributionist welfare state was created to narrow inequalities, but in fact, in the way that it works, it ends up widening those inequalities. That is, if people are rendered ill-equipped to work, they will likely end up with even less earning power. And oh, by the way, they will end up suffering at the low end of other kinds of equality, too, including poor health and lousy educational attainment. So yes, as Duncan says, the Saturn-state devours its own children.

So is there hope? Of course there's hope. The situation today, in either the UK or the US, isn't anywhere near as dire as it was in the 70s, before the ascension of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. So the daily struggle against statism and its behavioral side-effects continues, even we search the horizon for heroic saviors.

But in the meantime, there're a few complications.

One such complication is environmental policy. If Duncan truly speaks for the Tory Party -- and he's a Tory elder, first elected to Parliament in 1987 -- when he embraces the Kyoto Treaty, then many American conservatives will be unpleasantly surprised to learn that Margaret Thatcher's party has become "hard green."

One American in the audience for Duncan's speech was Fred Smith, president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute; Smith spluttered that the British Conservatives were covering heavy-handed statist mechanisms in "green paint instead of red paint." That is to say, the old authoritarian policies associated with "red" socialists and communists are now being used by the Greens. But of course, Smith suggested, it doesn't matter what color the paint is, if it kills the golden goose. Yet the American then declared "Blair is better" -- perhaps because, as first noted here at TCS, Blair has shown serious willingness to reconsider Kyoto, in light of the basic infeasibility of greenhouse gas emission-controls as currently envisioned. To this observer, acknowledging that global warming is occurring is easy enough; the hard part is figuring out how to stop it.

But for all the frank talk, one issue didn't come up: Duncan is gay. He came "out" four years ago; he makes no secret of it, but he also didn't bring it up in his talk to Cato -- which, of course, is a libertarian stronghold, so nobody in the audience seemed to care.

But homosexuality is a hot political issue in the US, and so I felt duty-bound to ask: "How has your life changed since you came out?" His immediate answer: "For the better!" Amplifying, he said that in making his declaration, and suffering no ill effect inside the Conservative Party, he had demonstrated that his political coalition, too, had transcended kneejerk homophobia. It just wasn't an issue -- no special privileges, no special penalties. Everybody minds their own business.

And while Duncan didn't say so -- he's too polite to offer unsolicited advice -- he clearly thinks that "live and let live" is a good model for the US, as well. As his talk reminded everyone in the audience, there are plenty of really serious issues bearing down upon us.