First Tuesdays

Community organizations, local governments, foundations, businesses, and social service providers rely on residential stability in their efforts to alleviate the plight of impoverished families in hard-pressed neighborhoods. While trading up to a better neighborhood may improve an individual family’s circumstances, frequent churning of residents may have negative effects for communities. A forthcoming examination of evidence from the Making Connections initiative, a decade-long effort sponsored by the Annie E. Casey Foundation to improve neighborhoods in 10 cities, will be the starting point for a debate about the intersection of poverty, neighborhood quality, and economic advancement.

The Congressional Budget Office's most recent long-term budget outlook declared that "current policies are unsustainable." Translation, according to tax scholar Len Burman: if we don’t change course, we're doomed. America will celebrate its tricentennial with IOUs 6.5 times its total economic output if current policies continue, CBO says, and that is under implausibly optimistic assumptions about the economy.

Health reform - the "let’s do lunch" of public policy - is on everyone's lips in Washington. But like many long-postponed, obligatory meals, who is going to pick up the check? Capping the tax exclusion of employer-sponsored insurance (ESI) - an idea loved and loathed by politicians from both parties - is on the table to pay for subsidies for the uninsured and to moderate companies’ incentives to offer high-end coverage.

Local governments sit at the confluence of formal and informal governance systems in Pakistan. Law and order, service delivery, and citizen interaction with the state take place in villages, towns, and cities, where families, tribes, political parties, religious organizations, and government officials share dominion. In 2001, then-President Pervez Musharraf called for the creation of local governments better attuned to citizen preferences and adept at providing improved services. Today, this autonomy initiative is up for grabs as Pakistan’s provinces reconsider the role of local government and the nation readies for fall elections.

Nearly 154,000 veterans are homeless on any given night. Another half million are at risk of homelessness because rent consumes more than half their income. In his run for the White House, President Obama pledged to deliver on a zero-tolerance policy for veteran homelessness. But for low-income veterans who fall in between homelessness and homeownership, there is little to help them afford rental housing. That lack of affordable housing, research shows, is the primary driver of homelessness for veterans and civilians alike.

One of the worst-kept secrets in law enforcement - that there is little science behind many standard investigative practices - is getting the sunshine treatment. A new National Research Council study concludes that crime-investigation practices across the country are inconsistent: who collects the evidence, how it is processed, and how it is interpreted vary from coast to coast. Moreover, no current scientific method ensures the accuracy of many common investigative tools.

Our panel of experts will bring us up to date on how employers are adjusting their retirement plans to this changing economic environment, how recent and prospective changes in pension offers and market values will affect workers' retirement, and how policymakers might respond to improve financial security for new and future retirees.

At this event, an array of experts looks beyond the broad employment landscape to see how those at-risk groups fare in good times and bad, what might be ahead for them, what the public and private sectors should do to brighten the outlook for jobs, and what would-be workers can do to improve their chances of securing employment.

Thirty years after Proposition 13 passed, some signs point to another tax revolt. Officially known as the "People's Initiative to Limit Property Taxation," California’s ground-shifting Proposition 13 was widely heralded in 1978 as a model for citizen-driven regulation of state and local taxes. In fact, while Proposition 13 stabilized property tax bills, it shifted power from local governments to the state. The initiative also set rules that contribute to California repeatedly missing its budget deadline, including this year’s delay of almost three months.

For most of the last generation, economists, policymakers, and journalists trained their sights on a U.S. economy that had recovered from the stagflation of the 1970s and deep recession of the early 1980s to produce sustained, if unevenly distributed, prosperity. But in the last year, prosperity has given way to something that looks much like recession and, worse yet, to the sort of intertwined problems of inflation, stagnating growth, and financial market fragility reminiscent of the 1970s. To date, most explanations for what’s gone wrong have focused on a set of exotic financial schemes, the bursting of a housing bubble, and imbalances in trade and the government budget.