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This week’s House and Senate vote on a short-term deal to re-open the government and extend the federal debt ceiling was the symbolic equivalent of a stroke victim taking his first few tentative yet positive steps in rehab. It’s not a perfect metaphor to describe the legislative paralysis that has gripped Washington, but it works when we think about what Congress needs to do going forward. With congressional [...]
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My college statistics professor was the source of a truly memorable warning: “There are PT Barnums in data analysis who can easily influence people who’ve either never taken a statistics course or slept through one.” That’s good advice for policymakers because in major policy debates statistical wars usually occur, and some PT Barnums do surface. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) is vying for the [...]
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Under a beautiful blue sky in the Rose Garden this morning, President Obama laid out the three key questions that drove the priorities in his just-released Fiscal Year (FY) 2014 budget: “How do we make America a magnet for new jobs? How do we give our workers the skills they need to do those jobs? And how do we make sure that hard work leads to a decent living?” Some of the key initiatives put forward [...]
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In October 1986, then-Los Angeles Lakers Coach Pat Riley confronted a major challenge: How to restore a talented basketball team to dominance in a highly competitive league. His response proved to be the most pivotal strategic decision of his career: He made his most innovative playmaker, Earvin “Magic” Johnson, the focal point of the team’s offense. Riley believed Magic had not reached his full [...]
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Sparky Anderson, who managed World Series-winning teams in Cincinnati and Detroit, once remarked, “We’re getting close to opening day. I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing.” January 3rd, 2013 marked American policymaking’s opening day: the start of the 113th Congress. We in the tech industry see the start of a new season of policymaking as a good thing because ours is an industry rooted [...]