Memories of the Soviet Union

March, 2020

Washington – Time to recall a trip to the Soviet Union in April, 1971.  I was living in Stuttgart, Germany, and joined with a dozen Germans and two other Americans for a fortnight's visit to Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev.  The Soviets were eager for hard currency and open to limited tourism.

We flew on Aeroflot from Frankfurt to Moscow, where we were assigned an Intourist guide and put up in the Bucharest, an old, musty hotel opposite Red Square, two to a room.  The guide advised us not to drink the water, as Moscow water was not safe.  Meals were served in a cavernous, mostly empty dining room, where we were not allowed to mix with a vacationing Communist group from East Germany.  I liked the food, especially the breakfasts of fish, black bread, and clabbered milk.

Our Intourist guide was a Russian man of about thirty-five who moved us around the city adeptly, often via the impressive new subways.  His German was excellent (according to the native speakers), as was his appreciation of the difficult historical relationship between the two countries.  Our German companions were impressed with his frankness and his thorough knowledge of what he showed us.  A highlight was his detailed tour of the Kremlin.

Although this was the height of the Cold War and much was off-limits, our guide did not try to keep track of us.  At the end of each day he let us loose on our own, asking us only to gather for him the next morning after breakfast at the hotel.  He knew I was an American, but told me to go wherever I wanted and to take pictures, too.  Intourist guides wanted to present the Soviet Union positively, although doubtless we were under some kind of surveillance.

In Leningrad (once and again St. Petersburg) we were met at the airport by another Intourist guide, put up in another threadbare hotel, the Astoria, but again given excellent tours and explanations of the city's history.  The Hermitage and the palace square in front of it, the center of the Russian Revolution, drew our fascination, as did the Peter and Paul Fortress, the Admiralty, and the storied cruiser Aurora.  Our guide took us to the magnificent palaces of the czars outside the city at Tsarskoye Selo.  I caught a city bus to the bridge over the Neva, behind the Winter Palace, to see where Rasputin was drowned, then traveled up and down Nevsky Prospekt toward the Finland Station and back, thinking about what the wide boulevard looked like in 1917 and during the WWII siege of 900 days.  

When we flew to Kiev, another American in our group made the point, before we met with our third Intourist guide, that Ukraine is not Russia.  Aline Naschansky, of Parma, Ohio, grew up proudly speaking Ukrainian and not-so-proudly Russian; she was studying German that year in Salzburg, Austria, so she served as translator and often made evening arrangements, getting us into many out-of-the way places but never into trouble.  She was particularly good at retrieving lost luggage from Soviet lost-and-found offices.

In Kiev we encountered a different atmosphere on the streets.  People came up to us and wanted to trade – currency, clothes, anything Western.  At an agricultural fairgrounds, I was surprised to see a statue of the pseudo-scientist Lysenko still standing.  He had been a favorite of Stalin and responsible for devastating famines.  I caught a bus to see the Great Gate of Kiev.  It is great only in the drawings of Hartmann and in the music of Mussorgsky; in reality it is small and in ruins.

In the old photos below: cathedrals within the Kremlin walls; our Intourist guide (facing) in Moscow; a painter rendering St. Basil's Cathedral at Red Square; two of our party on the Leningrad quay; the cruiser Aurora, which fired on the Winter Palace to start the Russian Revolution; the Hermitage at a washed-down Palace Square, with the Admiralty building's spire at left; Nevsky Prospekt; a memorial to the Siege of Leningrad; the palace of Catherine the Great at Tsarskoye Selo; a Leningrad canal, evidence of how Peter the Great built the city from a swamp to provide Russia with its window on the west; Kiev under Leninism; a Kiev street in early Spring; the "Great Gate of Kiev"; the Dnieper River at Kiev.

 

 

 

Hang On, Better Days May Be Coming

March, 2020

Washington –  Although these are the bleakest of times, better days may be coming when we get the worst of the coronavirus behind us.  It all depends on how well we learn from what we're going through.

If ever there was a reason to learn, it is now, because the lessons of this pandemic are so costly, especially to our health care workers who are trying to save us. 

The lessons to learn:

• We are all in this together, worldwide, across all social strata.  We must cooperate internationally and learn from the experiences of other nations.
• We must take much more seriously the warnings of our scientists and medical experts, and prepare ourselves accordingly.  Other democracies are leveraging their scientific talent better than we are.
• Pandemics are made worse by the failure to provide sick leave to the working class and a lack of universal health care coverage in some form.  Surely we can see that it has been shortsighted to widen gaps of income and health care inequality, as it endangers all Americans. 
• We must select our political leadership from those with credible experience in handling crises, and from those who can bring people together for the sake of great causes, not from media entertainers who divide us and exploit the fissures.  WWII was won by incredible feats of logistics by leaders and managers who knew how to deliver, selflessly, while simultaneously managing the economy. 

I look forward to perhaps a year from now, when these lessons have been learned and are being applied.  Better days may be coming if we act responsibly now.

Congress and the Third Coronavirus Bill

March 2020

Washington – As Congress prepares a third bill to deal with the coronavirus and its effect on the economy, here are some ideas to expand on those previously offered, dealing with student loans.

First, some context.  Congress and the country are looking for bipartisanship, so the most plausible actions will necessarily involve compromise.  Additionally, the bill must do its best to address the health care sector, which must take priority.  That means giving health care workers combat pay, so to speak, as they are putting their lives on the line.  It means supporting them with supplies and equipment above all else.

As for student loans, the focus should be on borrowers who need help and who will be essential to building back the economy.

Previous suggestions:

• Convert repayment forbearances to deferments for the duration of the emergency.  That will eliminate interest payments on subsidized loans.

• Allow borrowers to place their loans into deferment with conversion to forbearance at the end of the emergency.  That will give borrowers in repayment an option to pause if it makes sense for them.

• Cease debt collections and wage garnishments for the duration of the emergency.

New elaboration on a previous suggestion for a Tuition Premium Tax Credit:

• Put up to $10,000 into the hands of borrowers and others who have struggled to pay tuition, through a refundable tax credit based on full-time-equivalent years of undergraduate postsecondary education in the 21st Century.  A refundable tax credit means a check will be in the mail if the credit exceeds tax liability, and is therefore a means test to target the aid.  Basing the credit on years of tuition paid addresses issues of equity among borrowers, and between borrowers and non-borrowers.  It also addresses generational equity to recognize higher tuition burdens in the past two decades compared to earlier years.

This would achieve fairly wide coverage of many borrowers in distress.  More than two out of three students have borrowed to pay tuition.  The credit would be a maximum of $10,000 for a person with a full-time, four year postsecondary education, proportionately reduced for lesser time of enrollment.

The $10,000 figure comes from recent proposals in Congress to assist borrowers.  It also is a rough approximation of the average tuition premium paid by this generation compared to the previous one.

This approach is a way to overcome objections to distributing federal funds to those who don't need them, and to objections based on equity concerns between individuals' choices in paying for college.  It can stand on its own as sound policy as part of a coronavirus bill, or independently.

Convert Student-Loan Forbearance to Deferment in the Coronavirus Emergency

March, 2020

Washington – There is much confusion in the student-loan community about what action the federal government should take to help borrowers affected by the coronavirus pandemic.

The president announced as part of his coronavirus emergency declaration that interest on federal student-loans will be not be charged for six months.  But the Department of Education has apparently interpreted this to mean that a borrower's final bill, possibly years in the future, will be reduced accordingly.  That is not helpful now.

Suggestion:  convert loan payment forbearances to deferments for six months by recognizing the national coronavirus emergency as deferment-eligible.  Forbearances accrue interest, deferments on subsidized loans do not.

Such action would also target the relief more toward those who need it than those who don't.

Some have questioned the legality of giving relief at all.  Clearly, the secretary of education has the power under 20 USC 1082.  The secretary can compromise loans as necessary for the good of the program and the good of the country.  The secretary can issue emergency rules under the Administrative Procedures Act in the public interest, including public safety.

The secretary could also stop collections of defaulted loans temporarily.  There is a case for this beyond the coronavirus emergency, because some collections have been taking place illegally on loans that were already cancelled. 

States are not without their own police powers in these matters, with responsibility to protect the health, safety, and welfare of their residents.  Governors and state attorney generals, acting under their consumer protection authorities, could suspend garnishments and other draconian collections temporarily.  As the recent decision in Nelson v. Great Lakes indicates, states are not preempted by the federal Higher Education Act from acting on student-loans.

This is not to say more doesn't need to be done, perhaps along the lines of the previous post, only that there needs to be more clarity and action on what has already been announced. 

All Too Predictable: Debt and Disease

March, 2020

Washington – Anyone who has been trying seriously to stay well-informed in recent years (as opposed to seeing public affairs as entertainment) knows that a global pandemic was possible and even probable.  Now we have one.

Likewise, it was all too predictable that the nation's student-loan crisis will not be solved by  government cancellation of the enormous debt, regardless of its overall positive economic effects.  That idea, proposed by several candidates for public office, has met with strong opposition from those who see inequities in it between those who borrowed heavily and those who did not, and between those who can well afford to repay loans and those who cannot. 

The challenge is to come up with a way to ease the student-loan crisis significantly, but in a way that will meet equity expectations so as to win broad public support.

I offer again the idea of relief for those who have been adversely affected by increasingly unaffordable college tuition in the past two decades, whether they borrowed or not.  Congress could pass a Tuition Premium Tax Credit based not on amounts borrowed, but on college and vocational credits earned.  The credit would be refundable and means-tested.  To establish a premium baseline, the U.S. Department of Education would calculate a national average tuition premium for each year in the 21st century representing the additional burden faced by this century's learners compared to the previous generation.  The IRS would publish a tax table showing yearly premiums against college credits earned to determine tax credit amounts.

This federal tax credit would provide equity between generations, between borrowers and non-borrowers, between attendance at low priced institutions versus those higher priced, and, because the tax credit would be means-tested, between recipients and taxpayers.  Borrowers could use their tax credits to pay down loan balances.

Congress should also pass student loan bankruptcy reform (S.1414 and H.R.770), so student debt is treated as are other kinds of debt.  Republican John Katko leads the effort in the House, Democrat Dick Durbin leads it in the Senate.

A refundable Tuition Premium Tax Credit established immediately would inject resources into our pandemic-weakened economy, helping both the employed and the unemployed while simultaneously alleviating the student-loan crisis that weighs heavily on millions who are now being doubly squeezed by both debt and disease.  This tax credit would be preferable to a payroll tax cut, as it would reach better into the interstices of the huge gig and loan-forbearance economies, as well as be better targeted because of its means test.  It could win bipartisan support.

Controlling Eastern Red Cedars

March, 2020

Lincoln – Last year I cut out over 750 Eastern Red Cedars from our grasslands; last week I eliminated over 600 more.  These are young cedars, from 6" to 6', still small enough to take out with loppers.  The larger ones require an axe or chain saw, but we'll get them under control, too.

Managers of the neighboring Alexis pasture took out hundreds of cedars last year with a tractor-mounted saw.  Nearby, UNL managers burned cedars and brush on historic Nine Mile Prairie.  Most other neighbors are also working at cedar control.

If the cedars are not controlled they will take over the grasslands, creating dense forests inhospitable to the abundant flora and fauna of native and restored prairies.

Chelsea Forehead, Hubbard Fellow at The Nature Conservancy's prairie in Aurora, Nebraska, writes:

The magnitude of cedar invasion across Nebraska and surrounding states is daunting.

One of her suggestions is to eliminate female cedars from planted windbreaks.  Apparently Nebraska nurseries distribute huge numbers of cedars for such purposes, both male and female.

There is an average of 850,000 eastern red cedar trees cultivated for distribution in Nebraska each year- more than any other state in the region.

Nurseries could help in the effort by selling only males, if it is possible to identify them as seedlings.  If not, perhaps researchers could develop ways to do so.

Saving remaining grasslands from forestation will require the concerted efforts of landowners and conservation organizations alike. For those efforts to be successful, stakeholders will have to take a multi-faceted approach and consider all possible measures of combating cedar spread.

Another Blockbuster Report on College Affordability

March, 2020

Washington – Last month, Stephen Burd at New America described how many public universities are failing in their mission to provide affordable higher education. This month, Third Way is stepping up with a similar analysis and a similar prescription:      

[P]ublic flagship universities may expend substantial resources recruiting and offering “merit” aid to mediocre out-of-state students who are rejected from public universities in their own state, while high- achieving, low-income in-state students are neglected and often funneled to community colleges that dramatically reduce their chances of ultimately obtaining a bachelor’s degree. This is not a meritocracy. Nor is it an evil plot by universities. It is a rational response to incentives created by government disinvestment in public higher education. Policymakers at both the federal and state levels should give consideration to how they can apply policy levers to provide sustainable financial pathways that enable public research universities to flourish by serving the mission of social mobility that they were founded to serve. (emphasis added)

Both reports show how government disinvestment incentives have created this remarkably bad situation.

But the question of the moment is whether Congress is paying attention, or indeed, if it comprehends what it has done.

Even as four congressional committees work on higher education appropriations and reauthorizations this month, there are no signs that Congress wants to re-think the incentives it has created that are counterproductive to the purposes of the Higher Education Act.

The major reason for this, I believe, is that the higher education lobby sees changing any "policy levers" as regulation and oversight.  It wants money, no strings.  And the for-profit industries that benefit from the status quo (student loan companies and for-profit colleges) are adamantly opposed to disrupting their lucrative business models that are based on student borrowing.  Collectively, they have the ear of Congress.

There is another way to tackle this, which has never been tried but should be an option for any secretary of education who really cares about higher education affordability and attainment.  Monies appropriated by Congress must be spent for purposes authorized by statute.  Congress has never authorized dumping federal money into financial-aid-packaging maws invented by enrollment management consultants so as to emerge as merit aid for the non-needy and larger student loan burdens for the needy.  A secretary should therefore dispatch program review teams to a few selected universities to determine if federal funds are properly aiding those for which they are intended and, if not, the institutions would be put into limitation, suspension, or termination (LS&T) status until their enrollment management plans can conform to HEA statutorily expressed purposes.

If Congress remains blind to the unfortunate incentives it has created, a secretary of education can and must act, nevertheless.  With two excellent reports from New America and Third Way, excuses like "we didn't know how our programs worked" are running out.

Congress and "Crisis Point" in Public Higher Education

February, 2020

Washington – This month, New America released Stephen Burd's latest work, "Crisis Point: How Enrollment Management and the Merit-Aid Arms Race Are Derailing Public Higher Education."

It is a sobering look at how too many colleges and universities have willfully failed in their mission to provide, as best they can, affordable higher education.  They have allowed themselves to be distracted by institutional prestige rankings and other baubles antithetical to the purposes for which they were established.

Two passages in the report stand out in particular.  The first shows how the distorted priorities of the institutions have contributed to the nation's student loan crisis: 

[T]he data suggest that a substantially larger share of students take out student loans at schools that spend their aid primarily on non-needy students than at those that devote most of their aid to meeting financial need, and they take out far heavier debt loads. In 2016– 2017, for instance, an average of 69 percent of seniors graduated with an average debt load of $27,893 at schools that devoted 90 percent or more of their aid to non-needy students. In contrast, an average of 55 percent of seniors graduated with an average debt load of $22,214 at schools that spent 10 percent or less of their aid budgets on non-needy students that school year.

The second suggests what might be done about it:  prioritize federal appropriations to student-aid programs that "make demands on the colleges...to do their part in helping [low-income] students."

[F]ederal intervention is needed to rein in the enrollment management industry and put the brakes on the merit-aid arms race for good.  The federal government clearly has an extremely compelling interest in curbing these harmful practices. It spends tens of billions of dollars annually through the federal Pell Grant program trying to keep college accessible and affordable for low-income students. But the Pell Grant program has a major design flaw. It makes no demands on the colleges that receive the funds to do their part in helping these students. The federal campus-based aid programs—the Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant program (SEOG) and Federal Work-Study—are many magnitudes smaller than the Pell Grant program. But they do not contain its design flaw. They require colleges to at least partially match the money they receive from these programs.

Despite the commendable analyses and the insightful policy prescriptions contained in "Crisis Point," Congress seems bent on continuing only more of the same that has resulted in the crisis.  This week, House appropriators will begin hearings on FY 21 higher education spending.  The first hearing questions to testifiers should be in reference to this new Stephen Burd report, to start to move public policy back in a direction to decrease student loan burdens and to make sure institutions are doing their part in the effort. 

The Coming National Breakups, 2021-2025

February, 2020

Washington – Barring some unforeseen stroke of good fortune, the months and years immediately ahead look grim around the globe.  Breakups of nations are increasingly likely.  The United Kingdom is under strain as never before, what with Scotland pressing for independence and Northern Ireland in an untenable situation after Brexit.  Australia faces an economic breakup with its fossil fuel industries. The European Union will have difficulty holding together without a strong successor to German Chancellor Merkel.  The continent of Antarctica is literally breaking up as record temperatures cause its ice shelves to collapse into the sea.

In the United States, the prospective re-election of Donald Trump as president, a divisive destroyer of democratic norms, will cause many states firmly under opposition party control to re-examine their roles in our country's federal system.  The states of the Northeast and West Coast in particular may look at asserting what remaining sovereignty they have left to fend off a national government led by an increasingly autocratic president unconstrained by traditional checks and balances.  Areas of likely conflict:  environmental protection and climate change, judicial process, consumer protection, immigration, and health and education.

States have sovereignty, sometimes called police powers, to establish and enforce laws protecting the health, welfare, and safety of their populations.  These powers are confirmed in the U.S. Constitution's Tenth Amendment.  States also have their own constitutions, many of which guarantee rights similar to those in the U.S. Constitution.  States have their own statutes, courts, and jurisprudence.

State sovereignty is limited by the U.S. Constitution's supremacy clause, but that clause is itself limited to situations in which there is conflict between national and state governments.  There is much waxing and waning of states' sovereign powers over more than two centuries.  In recent decades, state sovereignty has been strengthening under federal judges who, looking backward rather than forward, associate it with political conservatism and not with a growing need for a check and balance against an autocratic chief executive.

How would states exercise their sovereignty as a check on the president?  States do not have powers of "nullification" of national laws or executive orders, but neither are they bound to use their tax support or law enforcement personnel to support them.  This describes the case in so-called sanctuary cities where state and local law enforcement entities do not carry out the directions of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, in part out of concern that they violate the rights of persons under state constitutions.

The principle can be applied to other situations where health and safety of state populations are at risk from federal agency directives.  As the president relaxes or eliminates controls on dangerous pesticides, for example, states can step in with their own statutory and executive measures, backed by their own law enforcement.

The nation's student loan crisis provides an example wherein state interests in providing consumer protections override the attempts of the U.S. Department of Education to "preempt" the student loan field.  The department has argued in federal court, unsuccessfully, that students loans are under sole federal jurisdiction even as they are egregiously mismanaged.  The federal supremacy clause is not applicable to this or other areas where the federal government's powers under the U.S. Constitution must yield to state sovereignty. 

Some states are looking now at which areas they believe their populations are most threatened by a Trump re-election, and what actions they can take to protect themselves.  One answer is interstate compacts, authorized by the U.S. Constitution.  An example might be uniform state emission standards for fossil fuels.  Although some interstate compacts are subject to approval by Congress and to a veto by the president, they are not if they do not encroach or interfere with the "just supremacy" of the United States.

Therein lies the potential for conflict, even armed conflict.  Suppose several states join together in an interstate compact to abide by the Paris agreement on emissions and a governor shuts down a methane-emitting, fossil fuel facility in his or her state, only to see the president try to nationalize the State Guard or use local law enforcement in order to keep the facility open.   What would the governor do, allow it or oppose it on grounds of the state's own police powers?

Or suppose the president attempted to nationalize a State Guard to operate detention camps of asylum seekers, whose confinement was a violation of the state's own constitutional protections, which in turn were modeled after the U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights.  This would test the limits of "just supremacy" of the federal government over the states, inasmuch as individuals' rights against the government were themselves developed by a federal jurisprudence that has recognized the importance of state sovereignty as a check and balance in our division-of-powers system of government. 

It is a very real possibility that the United States could divide over such questions in the next few months and years.  It is plausible in the 2020 elections that, as in 2016, President Trump would lose the popular vote but win the electoral vote and, as in 2018, Democrats would retain power in many large states.  This could precipitate movement of populations among states if people begin to feel that the rights and benefits they enjoyed under the federal government are now best protected by the laws and enforcement powers of states that are comparatively more life-affirming than those (many in the heartland) characterized by vicious cycles of deaths of despair.

In recent days, the president has given a glimpse of what his second term may portend: a federal justice system directed by whim and grudge, a federal bureaucracy cowed by fear of reprisals, and an approach to climate and environmental challenges that is nothing if not an existential danger.   

Voters in 2020 should think about these matters and ask candidates at all levels of government for their positions on them.  So should the news media, which are so attuned to a 24-hour news cycle that they cannot conceive of a possible fracturing of the country only months ahead. 

Remedies for Three Democratic Blunders (Part II)

February, 2020

Washington – In the previous post, I identified three huge mistakes by Democrats since 2016.  They were truly unforced errors that now require immediate remediation if Democrats are going to have better outcomes in 2020.

First, Democratic presidential candidates must recognize that voters overwhelmingly prefer less divisiveness in our polity and are poised to reward candidates who offer it in a believable way.  A Democratic candidate who would commit to working with responsible Republicans to repair our international alliances, for example, would show the kind of leadership and courage voters are hungry for.

I'd recommend that a candidate commit now to naming bi-partisan envoys, immediately upon inauguration, to all U.S. strategic partners to re-assure them of our international goodwill.  For Republican envoys, none would be better suited than James Mattis and H.R. McMaster, formerly of the Trump Administration but doubtless patriots.  The candidate would make the equivalent commitment for domestic issues, to restore our Constitution's checks and balances.

Note that these commitments are not ideological, so there is no movement left, center, or right.  That's also what many voters yearn for: less ideological strife.

Second, Democratic candidates at all levels need to pay attention to what voters are saying in rural areas and heartland states.  There are many reasons why so many Obama voters chose Trump in 2016, and they are not going to come back to Democrats through condescension.  Voters want believable policies to offer hope to rural America.

Actually, almost all Democratic candidates now have impressive rural policy platforms on which to run, but they are still lacking emphasis on what should be an obvious connection: agricultural production and healthy food.   As a Democratic friend of mine sarcastically put it, "Who'd ever think that agriculture was connected to food?"  Democrats need to talk not only about completely re-writing the Farm Bill to provide for carbon sequestration, but to demand healthy food to curb our nation's diabetes and obesity epidemics.  Democrats must not only talk about prescription drug prices and insurance coverage for pre-existing conditions – treatments of symptoms – but go after the obvious causes of the declining health of millions.

The absence of a strong rural policy effort cost Democrats the Senate in 2018 (see Part 1) and Democrats are behind the eight-ball for 2020 as well.  Republicans are participating in secret meetings about the need for huge changes in the way we approach agriculture. But Democrats, so far, have not chosen to lead, even as they see rural America votes slipping away once again in the upcoming elections.

Third, Democrats must not give up on holding Trump accountable for his indecency, corruption, and wrongdoing.  The House missed the opportunity for censure, but there is still time for completing the historical record for impeachment out of the sentiment first expressed in the Declaration of Independence, for a "decent respect to the opinions of mankind."

This need not get in the way of other House business, such as pressing the Senate – hard – for consideration of the hundreds of bills that the House has passed and the Senate has ignored.  Voters are not happy with the Senate for denying documents and witnesses in the impeachment trial.  Conviction and removal of the president from office are no longer viable options, but the book is still open on lessons learned, and by whom.  Voters, whether they supported conviction or not, do not like an outcome in which cheating the trial process out of witnesses is rewarded.

Above all, most voters want to be "for" something, not just against.  They want a positive pull.  Democratic candidates who offer (1) less divisiveness, (2) positive policies that address real issues, and (3) governance rooted in our country's founding documents, will do well.  Unfortunately, that's not the way many of them are heading.