All posts by: Dinah Winnick

Last week, PoliFact’s “Truth-O-Meter” assessed President Obamas assertion that the sequester “won’t consider whether we’re cutting some bloated program that has outlived its usefulness, or a vital service that Americans depend on every single day. It doesn’t make those distinctions.” Citing analysis by UMBC political science professor Roy T. Meyers and others, PolitiFact concludes that Obama’s statement is an oversimplication, but it is mostly true that sequestration cuts will be indiscriminate.

The site notes, “even the fact that some programs are exempted from the sequester supports Obama’s point.” How? Meyers explains that the list of exempted programs (e.g., Social Security, Pell Grants, food stamps) “is the result of tradition and legislative negotiations, rather than a defensible process of prioritizing cuts based on explicit criteria.” Further, agencies’ discression over how to make cuts within their programs will likely be based on expediency, Meyers says, “not on whether a program is more effective or has a higher priority than other programs.”

Meyers also provided expert analysis for another PolitiFact post last week on the potential of sequestration to impact health care.

As criticism emerges surrounding a $758,000, no-bid contract the city of Cleveland awarded to a Texas company for a racial disparity study, The Plain Dealer asked UMBC professor George La Noue, political science and public policy, for his take on the situation. La Noue is director of the Project on Civil Rights and Public Contracting.

The newspaper says La Noue believes Cleveland’s study is the most expensive study to-date of a city’s race- and gender-based contracting programs and legitimate studies can be done for as little as $250,000. “Typically these studies overwhelm the cities’ capacity to understand them,” La Noue said. “They’re too long and complex. City Council members are not going to read them. A mayor is not going to have time. But it’s like buying an insurance policy. If you’ve spent enough money and have a long enough study, your program will stand up pretty well against a court challenge.”

La Noue went on to delineate what he perceives as flaws in the study’s methodology. Read the full article for details.

Responding to recent cheating scandals — from Lance Armstrong using banned substances to reports of inflated performance data in higher ed — Thomas F. Schaller’s latest Baltimore Sun column argues, “there’s ample evidence that cheating is rampant in almost every sphere of American life.” The political science professor delves into the economic impacts of cheating, particularly in the realm of tax evasion.

Schaller writes, “In a July 2012 report, the Tax Justice Network estimated that, conservatively, between $21 trillion and $32 trillion of global income is hidden in offshore tax havens…that means probably a minimum of $5 trillion in U.S income is currently shielded from taxation. Assume an average marginal tax rate of just 20 percent, and that’s $1 trillion lost to the treasury.” He further suggests that asymmetry in the U.S. tax system “makes cheating especially tempting to the rich.” Read Schaller’s full commentary on the Baltimore Sun website.

“The desire to empower citizens directly is alluring in principle but can be very problematic in practice,” writes UMBC political science professor Thomas F. Schaller in his latest Baltimore Sun column.

Schaller is referring to the practice of using ballot referenda to impact policy, rather than working through the legislature. He writes, “Last week, top Maryland Democrats announced their intention to make it more difficult to put statewide policy referenda on the ballot. The move is a clear response to Republicans’ success last year in putting to referendum policy questions in the hope of achieving victories the GOP couldn’t win in the legislature.”

But what, exactly, is the problem with this form of “direct democracy”? Schaller suggests, “Policy fights should be won by persuading the public to elect officials who will fight to pass laws, issue orders and appoint judges who in turn rule in accordance with public preferences. Circumventing the checked-power lawmaking process with referenda, or trying to manipulate the referendum process to embolden or thwart the other party, offends our constitutional traditions.” For these reasons, he argues, Maryland Democrats’ efforts to limit referendum access are right on merits, but wrong on motives.

This week Minnesota Public Radio’s “The Daily Circuit” hosted UMBC political science professor Thomas F. Schaller for a show on the role of the South in U.S. politics. Schaller is the author of Whistling Past Dixie: How Democrats Can Win Without the South and appeared with David Woodard, professor of political science at Clemson University.

Schaller articulated the argument, central to his book, that the South is no longer required for Democrats to win a presidential election. He further suggested that the South — though it will, to an extent, always “remain distinct” culturally — is becoming increasingly like the rest of the United States. “In 30 years or 40 years,” Schaller said, “I don’t think we’ll see the kind of distinction between South and non-South that we see today and that we saw 100 years ago,” as new populations move into the region and younger, more secular voters in the South voice more liberal views on social issues.

For the full interview, including a debate between Schaller and Woodard on the role of race and class in Southern voting patterns, see the show recording (now online).