A House subcommittee is holding a hearing today to review guidance, issued by HHS last summer, on a federal statute that allows states to test “innovative strategies … that are designed to improve employment outcomes.” The guidance made clear that under t

865 days after Haiti’s cholera epidemic first began, with over 8,000 dead and some 650,000 sickened, the government of Haiti, with international support, officially launched a ten-year cholera eradication plan today after months of delays. The plan calls for an investment of $2.2 billion in clean water and sanitation infrastructure, with some $485.9 million needed for the next two years. Currently 31 percent of the population does not have access to potable water, while 83 percent lack access to adequate sanitation. By 2022, the plan aims to deliver potable water and improved sanitation services to 85 and 90 percent of the population, respectively.

The plan notes that in the short term, “actions will focus on preventing the transmission of cholera from one person to another through the use of drinking water disinfected with chlorine, and the promotion of hand washing, good sanitary practices, and food hygiene.” Resources will also go to capacity building and training for the relevant government agencies, in particular the health ministry (MSPP) and the water agency (DINEPA). Over the long-term, some $650 million will go to DINEPA to build water supply systems in the 21 largest cities in the country, though most of this would start after the next two years. A breakdown of funding needs by sector, program and time-frame can be seen below. Overall, about 70 percent of the needed funds are to go to water and sanitation provision, though just over 10 percent of that is planned to be spent in the first two years.

The objectives, in terms of cholera specifically, are to reduce the incidence rate to below 0.5 percent by 2014, below 0.1 percent in 2017 and below 0.01 percent by 2022. This compares to an incidence rate of over 1.1 percent in 2012, which translates to about 110,000 cases for that year.

The plan also envisions a strengthening of the public health sector and of the coordination between NGOs and the government. To this end, the government plans to “integrate their support into the national health system.” Through investments in training, capacity building and by channeling funds through the domestic institutions in charge of each sector, the plan aims to create a stronger public sector overall. This could be especially significant given that aid for the cholera response (and for the overall relief and reconstruction effort) has largely bypassed the Haitian government. According to data from the U.N. Special Envoy, only 2.5 percent of humanitarian spending for cholera went through the Haitian government. As noted in the plan, the “lack of investment coming directly from the country’s fiscal budget represents a threat to the stability of the” water and sanitation sector.

There are to be three evaluations of implementation done in 2014, 2017 and 2022 and an audit will be conducted at the half-way point and at the conclusion of the plan. Additionally, a technical committee made up of high-level representatives from relevant government agencies will meet quarterly to assess progress and propose remedies.

Plan Remains Woefully Underfunded

Responding to the plans’ launch today, implementing partner PAHO’s Director Carissa F. Etienne noted that, “For the plan to be implemented, Haiti’s friends in the international community must align their efforts and harmonize around this plan and provide the necessary financial resources.” Yet thus far, meaningful support has been hard to find.

Dan Beeton, Alexander Main y Jake JohnstonCommon Dreams, 27 de febrero, 2013

Dean Baker
The Guardian Unlimited, February 26, 2013

The first three entries in this series examined the need for better outreach, education and enforcement to ensure that all workers eligible for a job-protected leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act know about and have access to such leaves. The sec

On Friday, February 22, Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) Radio’s The Current aired a nearly half-hour story about the Honduras government’s plans to create private, so-called “charter cities.” The show’s featured guest was Honduras president Pepe Lobo’s chief of staff, Octavio Sánchez. For some background, just days after the 2009 coup, Sánchez penned an opinion piece for the Christian Science Monitor in which he argued that democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya’s exile at gunpoint was constitutional. More recently, Sánchez has worked feverishly to make the same case for charter cities.

As has been examined elsewhere, the charter cities concept is attributed to NYU economics professor Paul Romer, who envisions it as a path toward a rules-based, law-abiding society. In practice, though, the idea would take advantage of Honduras’ institutional breakdown to invite private corporations to build new cities on already-inhabited land, and to establish lax legal systems and tax codes to further attract foreign capital for low-cost production. Critics, such as economics professor and former Executive Director of the Institute for Fraud Prevention William K. Black, say the charter cities would lead to greater inequality. “Oligarchs . . . see this as yet another way to increase their wealth at the expense of other folks,” Black explained on Al Jazeera’s Inside Story Americas earlier this month.

Last September, Romer unexpectedly removed himself from the project after the Honduras government signed its first agreement with a group of private investors, a process which Romer claims should have first been approved by the transparency commission of which he was an appointed member (though the body was never formalized due to challenges in the Supreme Court). The NYU professor considered this an unforgivable affront and divorced himself from his nearly realized utopia.

Steven Davidoff really doesn't like financial transactions taxes (FTT) but is not honest enough to acknowledge this fact. Instead he tells readers that proponents of a tax haven't thought about its consequences and uncritically repeats every piece of nonsense produced by the financial industry to attack the idea.

In the course of a 1300 word essay, we get assessments of the tax from Credit Suisse, Blackrock, and the Partnership for the City of New York, which is effectively the New York City Chamber of Commerce. All of these accounts are presented uncritically, as though the purveyors of this information had no interest other than conveying the truth. We are also told that the New York Stock Exchange "threatened to jump across the Hudson River to New Jersey" in reaction to a plan to increase the city's stock tax in the 1966 (interesting image). Davidoff apparently has never heard of businesses making threats to extract concessions from governments. 

The NYT running a column like Davidoff's is like the Iowa City Press Citizen running a column on a plan to cut back farm subsidies where the views of the state's leading wheat and corn farmers are presented as unquestioned truth, along with a study from the corn growers trade organization. I suspect that the Press Citizen has higher standards.

Meanwhile when it comes to the proponents of the tax, Davidoff lectures:

"advocates of this neat idea conveniently ignore the century of less-than-successful experience with this tax, including New York State’s own failed attempt."

This comment is more than a little bizarre. Davidoff writes as though proponents of the tax are completely ignorant of economics and have not done research into the history of financial transaction taxes.

In a full page ad in today's Politico, the conservative Employment Policies Institute (not to be confused with the progressive Economic Policy Institute) claims that “85 percent of the most credible economic research from the last 20 years” demonstrates t

The U.N.’s claim of immunity in response to the legal complaint filed against it on behalf of over 6,000 cholera victims has provoked outrage. Author Kathie Klarreich called it “unconscionable and immoral” in a Miami Herald op-ed yesterday, saying the U.N

A new op-ed in the Guardian by Ricardo Hausmann portrays a dystopian fictional Venezuela, one in which the Venezuelan government has run the economy into the ground despite abundant oil wealth, but yet its charismatic president continues to be re-elected through some sort of sinister trickery.

Sound familiar? It should: it’s the same tired story repeated in the U.S. and U.K. media almost every day, but in this case Hausmann was apparently given free rein to present his own set of “facts.” It isn’t surprising that Hausmann would write something so divorced from reality; he went to elaborate lengths to invent a conspiracy theory about supposed fraud in Venezuela’s 2004 recall referendum by relying on fake exit polls. An independent panel of statisticians selected by the Carter Center determined that Hausmann and his colleague Roberto Rigobón had in fact found no evidence of fraud. [PDF]

But let’s get back to Hausmann’s latest Guardian piece, starting with the economy. Hausmann writes, "Since 1999, the year [Chávez] took over the presidency, Venezuela has had the lowest average GDP growth rate and the highest inflation of any Latin American country except Haiti."

The source for this “lowest average GDP growth rate” to which Hausmann links is a highly opinionated BBC article which in turn quotes a colleague of Hausmann’s from the Center for International Development at Harvard University who has a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics. Had Hausmann consulted official government data, or growth numbers for the region from the IMF, he would have found a very different set of facts.

February 26, 2013

February 26, 2013 (Housing Market Monitor)

After all, that is what real Democrats are supposed to do. (It's not sufficient in David Brooksland to have just one party that openly advocates redistributing money to rich people.) Of course Brooks doesn't put the agenda he imagines as bold in these terms, but these are two of his three big points.

On taxes he proposes replacing the income tax with a value added tax for people earning less than $100,000 and reducing the corporate income tax to 15 percent. Brooks asserts that this will increase fairness while boosting growth.

Really? We have been redistributing the tax burden downward for most of the last three decades. It is certainly possible that growth would be even worse had we not lowered marginal tax rates, but it is not easy to find the growth dividend in this picture.

Brooks associates this shift with eliminating unnecessary income tax forms. It is not clear that his preferred plan would lessen the need for forms, since it would require tens of millions of rebates if it were not to be horribly regressive compared to the current system.

However, the idea of getting rid of tax returns is an interesting one. The United States could get rid of most returns even under the current system. It could follow the example of several European countries where the IRS would compile tax returns for people and send the returns to them for their inspection. Taxpayers would then either accept the calculated tax liability or file the forms to show why the government's calculation is in error.

The reason for not going this route is that H&R Block doesn't want the government to save people the time and money involved in tax preparation. David Brooks doesn't talk about beating up on the tax preparation industry, because his hero president doesn't do things like that.

On Medicare, Brooks continues the myth about the affluent elderly suggesting that:

"Obama would take spending that currently goes to the affluent elderly and redirect it to the young and the struggling."

That's a great line, too bad Brooks has no clue about income distribution among the elderly. We just had a big debate over tax rates on the wealthy. The cutoff for this category was put at $400,000 for a single individual. If we used the same cutoff for defining "affluent" among the elderly, it would net us less than 0.5 percent of Medicare beneficiaries. This means that using this income level as a strict cutoff (as opposed to a phase-out) would save us less than 0.5 percent of benefits with a strict means-test at this point. Even if we made the cutoff $200,000, or less than half of this level, we would save much less than 1.0 percent of benefits with a strict cutoff.