Articles and Op-Eds: 2012

Articles and op-eds by New America fellows and staff are available below. To jump to another year's archives, please use the links at right.

It's Time to Tax Happiness

  • By
  • Charles Kenny,
  • New America Foundation
May 21, 2012 |

As the presidential campaign kicks off, both Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are looking for popular ways to reduce a still-ballooning deficit. However sensible, proposing deep cuts in Medicare or defense spending has little political appeal. Raising the income tax rate—at least on anyone earning less than a million a year—appears equally unpalatable. There is, however, at least one revenue-generating tool that’s simple, fair, and very efficient, at least in theory: a tax on happiness.

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The Partner

  • By
  • Noam Scheiber,
  • New America Foundation
May 21, 2012 |

Any taxonomy of first friends includes a few familiar types. There’s the amiable glad-hander destined for the outer Cabinet, like George W. Bush crony Don Evans. There’s the scheming, scandal-prone loyalist, like the Clinton hanger-on Harry Thomason, of Travelgate infamy. And then there’s the discreet consigliere who serves alternatively as fixer, sounding board, chief surrogate, and all-around defender of the faith.

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Has Obama Given Up On One America?

  • By
  • Andrés Martinez,
  • New America Foundation
May 21, 2012 |
The debate over gay marriage pits two visions of America against each other, and I worry that the least enlightened one, bolstered by President Obama, is carrying the day.
 
I am not talking about the issue of whether marriage should be limited to heterosexual couples, mind you, but about the timeless question of whether we are to be one cohesive nation whose citizens enjoy the same “privileges and immunities” throughout—or whether, by contrast, we are to be a patchwork of states and communities whose residents’ individual rights vary according to their local comm
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Giving Hydrogen Fuel-Cell Cars Another Chance

  • By
  • Steve LeVine,
  • New America Foundation
May 17, 2012 |

Three years ago, the Obama administration abandoned another of its predecessor's central tenets—that the future of vehicle propulsion was zero-emission hydrogen fuel cells. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, backed by Obama, instead launched an aggressive program to develop a new generation of high-performance batteries, the factories in which to manufacture them, and the vehicles they would power.

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What Economists Get Wrong About Science and Technology

  • By
  • Konstantin Kakaes,
  • New America Foundation
May 17, 2012 |

Robert Solow, winner of the 1987 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, is famous for, in the recent words of a high-ranking State Department official, “showing that technological innovation was responsible for over 80 percent of economic growth in the United States between 1909 and 1949.” Or as Frank Lichtenberg of Columbia University’s business school has written, “In his seminal 1956 paper, Robert Solow showed that technical progress is necessary for there to be sustained growth in output per hour worked.”

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Why Jerry Brown’s Bid to Fix California’s Budget Isn’t Working

  • By
  • Joe Mathews,
  • New America Foundation
May 16, 2012 |

How desperate is Gov. Jerry Brown?

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Why Corporate America Shrugged at the Wal-Mart Bribery Scandal

  • By
  • Steve LeVine,
  • New America Foundation
May 16, 2012 |

When the New York Times reported last month that Wal-Mart had brazenly been bribing government officials in Mexico, the public responded with anger. According to the Washington Post, the outcry forced the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to slow its campaign to water down the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), the 1977 law that bars payoffs to foreign decision-makers in exchange for business. The agitation also led to a 5 percent drop in the price of Wal-Mart stock.

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“Privatizing” Space

  • By
  • Konstantin Kakaes,
  • New America Foundation
May 16, 2012 |

Later this week, a Falcon 9 rocket built by SpaceX, a young company founded by Elon Musk, is scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida. The rocket will carry a Dragon capsule, also built by SpaceX, to the International Space Station. This is being hailed as a conspicuously important achievement because SpaceX, which Musk founded in 2002 with money from his share of PayPal, is a private company. The temptation to celebrate the privatization of space exploration—the unleashing of all those entrepreneurial billionaires to take us where we haven’t been before—is understandable.

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Government and the Net Serve Us, Not Vice Versa

  • By
  • Rebecca MacKinnon,
  • New America Foundation
May 16, 2012 |

A global struggle for control of the internet is under way. At stake is nothing less than civil liberties, privacy and democracy itself. Electronic censorship and surveillance are on the rise -- not only in dictatorships but also in democracies. Facebook and Google are battling over who will be our gateway to the rest of the internet through "like" buttons and universal logins -- giving them huge power over our online identities and activities. Companies are clashing with governments over how far the law should extend into private networks, platforms and devices.

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G8 and NATO-athon, With Pakistan at the Table

  • By
  • Peter Bergen,
  • New America Foundation
May 16, 2012 |

It's the diplomatic equivalent of hosting both the World Cup and the World Series in the same country on the same weekend.

On Saturday President Obama welcomes the leaders of the world's most powerful countries to the G8 conference at his country retreat at Camp David in Maryland. And the next day he hosts some two dozen NATO heads of state in Chicago.

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