Gary Schmitt for the American Enterprise Institute: There will certainly be calls to use our cybercapabilities to set down a marker and suggest to the Kremlin that this is a path Russia really doesn’t want to go down. And it’s possible that such a signal has already been sent.
Just as likely, however, our own cyberteams will be reluctant to pull out of the cybergarage anything that would be really disruptive, as doing so now would mean they wouldn’t be able to when there is a more serious need for it. In the realm of cyberwarfare, once a tool is used, the other side rather rapidly determines what countermeasures it needs to deploy to cover over whatever hole has been exploited in their defenses. “Use it and you’re likely to lose it” is the mantra.
Instead, the U.S. could take a less risky action that would be largely reciprocal to what Russian President Vladimir Putin was trying to accomplish with his interference in our electoral season: begin “outing” the vast wealth Putin and his Kremlin mafia have acquired by insider deals and plain old corruption.
Exposing them, while the rest of the Russian population suffers a flat or declining economy, poor health and poor housing, would be the appropriate response to Russia’s kleptocratic rule. Who owns all those mansions in London and Manhattan? Who are those Russians whose yachts populate the Adriatic Sea? My guess is that such information would be a lot more interesting and more damaging than the relatively mundane emails of John Podesta and company.
Why school lunch money is misspent
Robert Orr for the Niskanen Center: Ensuring that children receive adequate daily nutrition, regardless of family income, should not require programs to be structured like a Soviet-era economy.
And yet that is more or less how federal school meal programs are organized, with resources allocated according to a central plan enacted by multiple layers of administrative and committee control.
The Office of Management and Budget has designated both the National School Lunch Program and School Breakfast Program as “high error”— meaning they report high rates of improper payments each year. In fact, among federal programs, School Lunch and Breakfast have the second and third-highest improper payment rates just behind the Earned Income Tax Credit. In 2015, the cost of this error across the two nutrition programs was $2.7 billion per year.
Under the programs, schools charge differing meal fees to students based on their parents’ income and are reimbursed according to the distribution of children in each income category. In 2016, schools participating in the lunch program received $3.17 in subsidies for each lunch provided to children below 130 percent of the federal poverty guidelines. Schools are prohibited from charging children from this group any additional cost. For children between 130 and 185 percent of the poverty line, children pay a reduced price for lunch, with the federal government reimbursing at a rate of $2.76 per meal. The third tier is composed of children who do not qualify for fully subsidized or reduced-priced meals, for whom the federal government chips in 30 cents per meal. Additional payments are made to schools in Hawaii and Alaska, as well as districts with particularly high rates of low-income students.
This reimbursement model presents an immediate problem: parents and school meal administrators have a shared interest in inflating the size of the reimbursement claim that the federal government pays.
Region, not race, defines life expectancy
Thomas Bollyky for the Council on Foreign Relations: The National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, recently released its 2015 mortality statistics, which showed U.S. life expectancy fell from 78.9 to 78.8 years over the prior year. This means roughly 86,000 more deaths last year in the United States than in 2014, a 1.2 percent jump in the U.S. death rate. These startling results generated substantial media attention, building on the election-year narrative of the declining fortunes of Americans, especially working-class white men.
As the chief of the Mortality Statistics Branch at the center has pointed out, no one really knows what led to the downward turn in U.S. mortality in 2015 or if that trend will continue.
Many of the factors behind the difference in the life expectancy of Americans relative to their peers in other wealthy countries are well-known. Despite spending the highest amount of any nation on health care, the United States has staggering and growing disparities in life expectancy. Those disparities are now greater across regions than between races. In the highest-performing regions, life expectancy rivals countries with the highest life expectancy in the world, such as Switzerland and Japan. But the life expectancy in the lowest-performing regions, particularly in parts of the Southeast, is lower than it is in Bangladesh.
For all the recent focus on men, it is women in half of the counties in the United States who have experienced no real gains in life expectancy since 1985. The same is true for men in only 3 percent of U.S. counties.
Compiled by Joseph Lawler from reports published by the various think tanks.
