Posts tagged public policy

Quote 102
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Posted 1 year ago
In transportation, we are shying away from major new projects like high-speed rail because they do not fit in with contemporary American commuting trends — forgetting the fact that the U.S. car reliance is a constructed one. We spent massively to create the highway network, and the result is that it is now the backbone of most Americans’ daily commutes. There was nothing natural about that process, and no reason to think that it cannot be reversed if we thought differently about our transportation system development. We are adding population at such a quick rate that we could encourage different commuting trends if we want to, but only if we invest the resources to do so.
Yonah Freemark, “A Note on the Future of American Transportation”
Quote 34
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Posted 1 year ago
This brings us to the first of the three legacies of the Jacobsian turn: It diminished the disciplinary identity of planning. While the expanded range of scholarship and practice in the post-urban renewal era diversified the field, that diversification came at the expense of an established expertise — strong, centralized physical planning — that had given the profession visibility and identity both within academia and among “place” professions such as architecture and landscape architecture. My students are always astonished to learn just how toxic and stigmatized physical planning — today a popular concentration — had become by the 1970s. Like a well-meaning surgeon who botches an operation, planners were (correctly) blamed for the excesses of urban renewal and many other problems then facing American cities. But the planning baby was thrown out with the urban-renewal bathwater. And once the traditional focus of physical planning was lost, the profession was effectively without a keel. It became fragmented and balkanized, which has since created a kind of chronic identity crisis — a nagging uncertainty about purpose and relevance. Certainly in the popular imagination, physical planning was what planners did — they choreographed the buildings and infrastructure on the land. By the mid-1970s, however, even educated laypersons would have difficulty understanding what the profession was all about. Today, planners themselves often have a hard time explaining the purpose of their profession. By forgoing its traditional focus and expanding too quickly, planning became a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. And so it remains.
Thomas J. Campanella, “Jane Jacobs and the Death and Life of American Planning,” Design Observer

(Source: utnereader)

via utnereader
Link 105
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Posted 1 year ago

We're #1 -- Ten Depressing Ways America Is Exceptional

nosex:

Let me make it clear at the outset. I too believe in American exceptionalism, although I don’t think God has anything to do with it. But I suspect my perspective will find little favor among Republicans in general and Tea Party members in particular. For I believe that America is exceptional in the advantages we’ve had over other nations, not what we’ve done with those advantages.

Indeed, to me there are two American exceptionalisms. One is the exceptionally favorable circumstances the United States found itself in at its founding and over its first 200 years. The second is the exceptional way in which we have squandered those advantages, in the process creating a value system singularly antagonistic to the changes needed when those advantages disappeared.

via nosex
Link 72
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Posted 1 year ago

The City that Ended Hunger

nosex:

To begin to conceive of the possibility of a culture of empowered citizens making democracy work for them, real-life stories help—not models to adopt wholesale, but examples that capture key lessons. For me, the story of Brazil’s fourth largest city, Belo Horizonte, is a rich trove of such lessons. Belo, a city of 2.5 million people, once had 11 percent of its population living in absolute poverty, and almost 20 percent of its children going hungry. Then in 1993, a newly elected administration declared food a right of citizenship. The officials said, in effect: If you are too poor to buy food in the market—you are no less a citizen. I am still accountable to you.

“I knew we had so much hunger in the world. But what is so upsetting, what I didn’t know when I started this, is it’s so easy. It’s so easy to end it.”

services include: three large people’s restaurants that indiscriminately serve fifty-cent, high-quality meals, developing public spaces for subsidized and intelligently regulated local and fresh food markets, extensive school lunch programs, food and nutrition education, community gardens, consumer protection databases and leaflets, etc.

the cost: about $10 million annually, less than 2% of the city’s budget representing about a penny per day per belo residents.

Behind this dramatic, life-saving change is what Adriana calls a “new social mentality”—the realization that “everyone in our city benefits if all of us have access to good food, so—like health care or education—quality food for all is a public good.”

via nosex
Quote 26
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Posted 1 year ago

As some of us have tried to point out again and again, cutting Social Security would: (a) make only a minor contribution to reducing our long-run fiscal problems; (b) offer no useful template for dealing with the real problem, health care costs.

Let’s assume that we’re not talking about expropriating the money people have paid in, that we’re only talking about restoring actuarial balance. Well, on the conservative estimates of the Social Security trustees, we’re talking about 0.6 percent of GDP over the next 75 years. That’s not enough to make a major difference –certainly not enough to make any difference whatsoever to market confidence in US solvency.

All you would do is undermine a key part of the US social safety net — and, of course, offer Republicans a big fat target.

So what on earth is going on here?

Paul Krugman, on reports that the Obama administration is considering cutting Social Security benefits. (via lancecore)

“What on earth is going on here?” Class warfare, Dr. Krugman.

via politicore
Photo 68
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Posted 1 year ago
Zoom
Photo 11
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Posted 1 year ago
The invisible American welfare state Suzanne Mettler’s piece in Perspectives on Politics (free access to PDF) has many fascinating arguments about the political consequences of public ignorance about the benefits that people receive from the state. But this table is jawdropping. It shows the percentage of people who (a) benefit from various programs, and (b) claim in response to a government survey that they ‘have not used a government social program.’ Mettler’s basic argument is that because the US welfare state is ‘submerged’ and sliced up among a variety of different programs, many of which operate indirectly rather than directly, it is mostly invisible to US citizens. This has obvious political consequences - ‘government social programs’ are equated to ‘welfare’ and stigmatized. The fact that nearly half of Social Security recipients do not believe that they have benefited from a government social program, and that the same is true of some 40% of G.I. Bill beneficiaries and Medicare recipients is a rather extraordinary one.

The invisible American welfare state

Suzanne Mettler’s piece in Perspectives on Politics (free access to PDF) has many fascinating arguments about the political consequences of public ignorance about the benefits that people receive from the state. But this table is jawdropping. It shows the percentage of people who (a) benefit from various programs, and (b) claim in response to a government survey that they ‘have not used a government social program.’

Mettler’s basic argument is that because the US welfare state is ‘submerged’ and sliced up among a variety of different programs, many of which operate indirectly rather than directly, it is mostly invisible to US citizens. This has obvious political consequences - ‘government social programs’ are equated to ‘welfare’ and stigmatized. The fact that nearly half of Social Security recipients do not believe that they have benefited from a government social program, and that the same is true of some 40% of G.I. Bill beneficiaries and Medicare recipients is a rather extraordinary one.

Answer 10
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Posted 1 year ago
Your quote concerning Obama's brief comments after Mubarak's departure seem a little cynical, Obama is trapped by his office, I believe in his heart he supported the people of Egypt. Do you disagree?
Anonymous asked

Yes.

But even if I believed that Obama supported the people of Egypt ‘in his heart,’ that would not stop me from criticizing him. Politicians are defined almost entirely by policy and actions. If his intentions are not reflected in his actions, then what’s the point in referring to them? Even if Obama turns out to be a ‘good guy’ on the inside, trapped by the limitations of the presidency, it shouldn’t matter to our assessment of his administration unless he actively tries to change or overcome those limitations in a positive way. Since he’s not doing that, I really don’t see the value in speculating as to what his internal motivations are.

Photo 13
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Posted 1 year ago
tsparks: SPATIAL INFORMATION DESIGN LAB Million Dollar Blocks The United States currently has more than 2 million people locked up in jails and prisons. A disproportionate number of them come from a very few neighborhoods in the country’s biggest cities. In many places the concentration is so dense that states are spending in excess of a million dollars a year to incarcerate the residents of single city blocks. When these people are released and reenter their communities, roughly forty percent do not stay more than three years before they are reincarcerated. via:Ethan Zuckerman

tsparks:

SPATIAL INFORMATION DESIGN LAB

Million Dollar Blocks

The United States currently has more than 2 million people locked up in jails and prisons. A disproportionate number of them come from a very few neighborhoods in the country’s biggest cities. In many places the concentration is so dense that states are spending in excess of a million dollars a year to incarcerate the residents of single city blocks. When these people are released and reenter their communities, roughly forty percent do not stay more than three years before they are reincarcerated.

via:Ethan Zuckerman

via tsparks
Quote 15
Notes
Posted 1 year ago
Officials have not yet worked out the cost of the program, but they expect no increase in spending, since most of the money was diverted from the justice system to the public health service.
Portugal’s Drug Policy Pays Off; US Eyes Lessons