New America Foundation

Every year the Asset Building Program conducts an analysis of the federal budget to provide a more complete understanding of how the federal government encourages the accumulation of assets for families up and down the economic ladder. We seek to shine a light on what policy levers are deployed, who benefits from these from these programs and policy efforts, and how recent legislation potentially alters the landscape.

In that pursuit, we present The Assets Report 2011, an assessment of federal policies and program to promote asset building opportunities. Our analysis finds:

Terrorism is not a new phenomenon, but since the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks the United States and the United Kingdom have significantly altered their counterterrorism programs or created new programs, laws, and institutions to cope with changing understandings of the threat posed by individuals living in the West attracted to al-Qaeda’s cause.

Executive Summary

Chairman Thornberry, Ranking Member Langevin and other members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to testify today.

My testimony will attempt to answer three questions:

What does today’s threat look like? How has the threat changed? And, what do we do about it?

1. Today’s threat

China is gradually emerging as a new superpower in global energy markets and energy geopolitics.  This reflects the enormous scale of China’s current and future energy and oil consumption, Beijing’s growing energy investments abroad and expanding energy diplomacy, its rising carbon emissions, and China’s emergence as a global leader in clean energy technology development. The scale of China’s energy expansion is quite breathtaking.

This forum's focus on the problems of sluggish wage-growth for much of the American workforce is most welcome. Before the overwhelming surge of joblessness and underemployment of the last four years caused by the bursting housing bubble, the failure of the wages of most American workers to track economy-wide productivity growth was one of the most conspicuous failures of U.S. economic performance.
 

The failure of today’s economy to generate and sustain decent jobs can be traced to the breakdown in the post-World War II social contract that supported a tandem growth in productivity and wages.  From 1945 to 1979 productivity and real wages both grew by approximately two to three percent per year.  Figure 1 shows that since then, productivity continued to grow steadily while real wages for high school men remained stagnant and the gaps between productivity growth and college graduates expanded, albeit at lower rates.  The same basic pattern has persisted over these years f

This summer, two federal departments -- the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services -- are working together to create guidelines for a new grant competition called the Early Learning Challenge, which is part of the Race to the Top program for fiscal year 2011. This competition gives states the chance to compete for a portion of $500 million to build and improve a system of early learning for infants, toddlers and preschoolers (birth to age 5) within their states.

This presentation was made at the RESULTS International Conference in Washington, D.C. RESULTS is a grassroots advocacy organization focusing on federal policies that create long-term solutions to poverty by supporting programs that address its root causes and has selected The Saver's Bonus as a component of their 2011 domestic legislative campaign. Click here to view the presentation.

During the last century, the establishment of Social Security and the tax favored employer pension plans that followed transformed and improved the lives of American workers. Combined with economic growth, these institutions meant that both the rich and the poor lived longer and every worker became entitled to pensions at the end of their working lives.