1. Adam J. White is the author on energy. Mostly it’s “Fracking. Woo-hoo!” Not much in terms of policy specifics.
2. James Pethokoukis writes on regulatory and financial reforms. He berates “too big to fail” and cites two approaches for dealing with it: restricting deposit insurance to banks that do not engage in securities trading or more exotic businesses; or requiring large banks to hold more capital, perhaps more like 15 percent, compared with the 6 percent or less that they can hold under current rules.
He also mentions copyright and patent reform, including Alex Tabarrok’s idea of having patents with different terms: shorter terms for innovations that are not expensive to arrive at (think of innovations in software) with longer terms for innovations that are expensive to arrive at (think of drugs that require hundreds of millions of dollars of research and testing).
What he fails to mention are reform of the FCC and the FDA, both of which are long overdue given new technological realities.
3. Carrie Lukas talks about policies related to work-family balance.
the Government Accountability Office estimates that in 2012 the federal government administered 45 programs related to early learning and child care, which cost taxpayers roughly $14.2 billion per year. In addition, there are five tax provisions to support individual spending on child-care services, which reduce tax receipts by approximately $3.1 billion annually. These resources solely benefit families using formal, paid child-care arrangements–overwhelmingly center-based care. Rather than favoring these choices, policymakers ought to make that support available to all families witih children under the age of five…since many of the current programs, like Head Start, are geared to assist low-income women, a new mechanism for support should be allocated on a means-based scale to help those with lower incomes most.
That makes sense. But, again, there is no integration with other chapters in the book. We saw that Scott Winship touted something like the “universal credit.” Are we going to fold support for child care into a sort of universal credit, or are we going to continue to take a fragmented approach to policies?
4. W. Bradford Wilcox talks about policies to provide incentives (or at least remove disincentives) for marriage.
the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) program could be transformed. Instead of depending on household size and household earnings–which creates the potential for a marriage penalty–it could become a wage subsidy for individual low earners.
…for other means-tested tax and transfer policies targeting low- and moderate-income families, couples could receive a refundable tax credit for the amount of money that they lose by marrying.
the marriage penalty associated with Medicaid should be eliminated
So far, in the various chapters of Room to Grow, I have seen three different Medicaid reforms, three different suggestions for changing the EITC, and new tax credits for health insurance, families with children, childless workers, and child care. Obviously, that does not bother the editors of this volume as much as it bother me. They might make an argument that the more ideas, the merrier. But I do not think that you can govern on the basis of solutions that are mutually incompatible.
I’d add the FAA to your list of regulatory-agencies-in-need-of-a-shakeup-whose-name-starts-with-F. It’s a less serious case than the FDA and the FCC from a utilitarian perspective.
Nonetheless, a fairly urgent reform — which could easily be achieved by congress — is to get them out of the drone-regulation business. (See, for example, http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/05/23/314915583/episode-541-who-owns-the-air.) I would envision a 1-page bill along the lines of, “In accordance with judicial precedent, Congress hereby confirms that the FAA shall have no jurisdiction to regulate or license the activities of any aircraft flying below 500 feet and at least N miles from an airport.” Here N should be a small number at most 5.
Note that this leaves state and local lawmakers free to regulate drone flights to accommodate privacy concerns and other issues, in response to their citizens’ favored degree of tradeoff between potential gains from innovation and adherence to traditional conceptions of property/privacy rights. The notion that the FAA can balance these tradeoffs in a nimble and sensitive way through national regulations is — to me — laughable.
The reason this case has some urgency is that (according to the NPR podcast I linked above), the agency has been twiddling its thumbs for 7 long years on the drone question, which has had demonstrable economic costs for those seeking to build business around the new technology. Similarly, but much less seriously, they took forever to let people read their Kindles during takeoff and landing (something other countries have been slow to copy, probably because FAA regulations from the 1950s ended up setting precedents for other countries’ rules).
An equally serious concern, though, is that the FAA will write rules that are far too *lax* when it comes to privacy from drone surveillance. If they retain jurisdiction over drone regulation, I worry this will muddy the waters when some localities try to restrict non-consensual operation of drones in airspace over private property, including by state and federal law enforcement. The “default” regulatory policy for drones should not, I think, be the one that expands the scope of 4th amendment protections the least.
I wonder why people don’t see research on solar and nuclear as the energy solution.
Is frakking good because a lot of infrastructure already exists?