LOBBYING ARMS RACE
Jane Greenway Carr for the New America Foundation: Numbers can go a long way toward telling the story of money in politics. Of the top 100 spenders in Washington on lobbying, for instance, 95 are business organizations …
But as Lee Drutman, author of The Business of America is Lobbying: How Corporations Became Politicized and Politics Became More Corporate, numbers only offer a partial picture of how lobbying works. Because although the largest and most active of American companies spend upwards of $10 million a year hiring small armies of lobbyists, they don’t always get what they want — and to focus on those numbers is to neglect the historical and organizational factors at play in the unprecedented rise of business lobbying …
The upshot of the book is that the reality of corporate lobbying is more complex than meets the eye. “There’s an old saying in Washington,” Drutman — a political reform senior fellow — quipped at a recent event at New America, where he spoke about his book with NPR Power, Money, and Influence correspondent Peter Overby. “If you’re not at the table, then you’re probably on the menu.” …
At the same time, noted Drutman using a slightly mixed metaphor, control of the menu hasn’t transformed politics into a vending machine offering “shrink-wrapped policy outcomes” to anyone with crisp dollar bills.
As business has built up its dominance of the lobbying process, that process’s dysfunction has ballooned. Individual businesses fight each other directly for attention and influence, which “creates an environment where if anybody gets what they want it’s most likely to be large corporations and it also makes the status quo a lot harder to change.” As a result, the overall political capacity of the government has been diminished.
REASONS WHY DEBT-FREE COLLEGE WOULD HELP EVERYONE
Mark Huelsman for Demos: There has been much joy in progressive circles this week, as Hillary Clinton’s campaign has floated an embrace of debt-free higher education, following broad statements of support from other candidates as well as a group of influential Senate Democrats. …
In a world where we have failed to increase college graduation rates, debt-free higher education would at least remove some of the risk of going to college. …
Students of color and low-income students really are bearing the burden of undergraduate debt.
Decades of public disinvestment in higher education have coincided with the federal government failing to increase need-based grant aid (like Pell Grants), which are targeted at low-income students. Because Pell Grants cover far less of the cost of college than they used to, we actually have shifted the cost of college onto the backs of our least vulnerable. Low-income students are required to pay a far greater portion of their family’s income in unmet college costs. …
Debt-free college doesn’t necessarily mean free tuition.
One of the fundamental misunderstandings in this debate is that many are conflating “debt-free college” with “free tuition.” But these distinctions are important.
… The assumption underlying debt-free college is that a student can be guaranteed to cover any college costs without borrowing. This, of course, means that a student could work a reasonable amount — say 10-15 hours a week — during the school year or summer, with enough grant aid to keep unmet need low enough to be covered by working. It means that we should be targeting our resources toward students who have no choice but to borrow because of their family financial circumstances.
A guarantee of debt-free college also does not necessarily mean debt-free private college, which educate a disproportionate number of wealthy students. It would simply create a true public option for those who wish to take advantage of it. …
We actually used to invest in debt-free college.
Historically, our system relied on states covering the vast majority of college costs and the federal government targeting resources toward those who need additional help financing it. The result was that, up until about 20 years ago, student debt was the exception, not the rule, for those who wanted a bachelor’s degree.
FACEBOOK IS MAKING US MORE PARTISAN
Joshua Bleiberg and Darrell M. West for the Brookings Institution: Data scientists at Facebook recently published their research on how people consume political news on the social network. The study is noteworthy because the researchers had direct access to Facebook’s own data …
The study finds that, roughly speaking, a Facebook user has five politically likeminded friends for every one friend on the other side of the spectrum. In a democracy it’s generally a value add for citizens to encounter a variety of political opinions. This fact does not enumerate the “right” number of friends to have from across the political aisle.
The Facebook News feed does limit the amount of cross-cutting links that viewers choose to read. The News feed algorithm ranks stories based on a variety of factors including their history of clicking on links for particular websites. If a user regularly clicks on stories from sources with a partisan leaning, then the chances of seeing a similar story increases. The News feed algorithm functions in this way to make the experience of using the website more enjoyable. This approach also has some unintended negative consequences. The authors find that the News feed algorithm reduces the politically cross-cutting content by 5 percent for conservatives and 8 percent for liberals.
Compiled by Joseph Lawler from reports published by the various think tanks.
