Center For A Just Society: Word on the street

The Real Economic Scorecard

By Robert J. Samuelson, Newsweek

Just last week, the Census Bureau released its annual study of household incomes, poverty and health insurance -- often called the nation's "economic report card." Its hard numbers seemed to confirm how many Americans feel. Sure, we're prosperous, but prosperity is fraying. Except for the rich, living standards are stagnant. Poverty is up; health insurance coverage is down. Naturally, both Barack Obama and John McCain seized upon the report to claim that their policies would restore progress.

Hold it.

Though echoed by policy wonks, pundits and politicians -- last week, Bill Clinton -- the conventional wisdom is wrong or, at least, misleading. Here's a more accurate assessment. For most Americans, living standards are increasing, albeit slowly, over any meaningful period. But rising health spending is eroding take-home pay, and immigrants are boosting both poverty and the lack of health insurance. Unless we control health spending and immigration, the economic report card will continue to disappoint. Unfortunately, neither Obama nor McCain seriously addresses these problems.

Superficially, the conventional wisdom seems convincing. The Census Bureau found that median household income in 2007 was $50,233. Though up 1.3 percent from 2006, that was still less than the peak of $50,641 in 1999. (The median is the midpoint; all figures are in inflation-adjusted 2007 dollars.) Meanwhile, the share of people below the government's poverty line -- about $21,000 for a family of four -- was 12.5 percent, up from 11.3 percent in 2000. Finally, the ranks of the uninsured have increased in six of the past eight years. They're now about 15 percent of the population...

Click here to read the rest of this article: The Real Economic Scorecard.

Every day, the Center for a Just Society compiles interesting and timely articles from around the web and makes them available to our readers as the "Word on the Street." These articles are intended to encourage discussion and reflection about faith, law, and policy. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the Center for a Just Society, or any of its employees.

US Drug Use Shows Little Change

By AP/Kevin Freking, Time

Cocaine and methamphetamine use among young adults declined significantly last year as supplies dried up, leading to higher prices and reduced purity, the government reports. Overall use of illicit drugs showed little change.

About one in five young adults last year acknowledged illicit drug use within the previous month, a rate similar to previous years. But cocaine use declined by one-quarter and methamphetamine use by one-third.

Drug use increased among the 50-59 age group as more baby boomers joined that category. Their past month drug use rose from 4.3% in 2006 to 5% in 2007.

"The baby boomers have much higher rates of self-destructive behavior than any parallel age group we have data from," said John Walters, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. Walters, 55, is a boomer himself.

The National Survey on Drug Use and Health, being released Thursday by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, is based on interviews with about 67,500 people...

Click here to read the rest of this article: US Drug Use Shows Little Change.

Advocating for Special Needs Children

By Wesley J. Smith, Secondhand Smoke

I wasn't going to opine about Governor Sarah Palin's speech, but I think one comment deserves highlighting: Having given birth to Trig, who has Down syndrome, Palin said:

Sometimes even the greatest joys bring challenge. And children with special needs inspire a special love.

To the families of special-needs children all across this country, I have a message: For years, you sought to make America a more welcoming place for your sons and daughters. I pledge to you that if we are elected, you will have a friend and advocate in the White House.

This is a profoundly important human exceptionalism issue that I think all political persuasions can get behind, and indeed, it is one that Senator Obama would be wise to embrace in his own campaign.

The need for vocal support for the worth of such children--and explicit and implicit validation of the choice to allow them to be born--from the highest levels of society could not be more important. As we have noted before here at SHS, in support of S-1810, a very worthy bill co-sponsored by Senators Ted Kennedy and Sam Brownback--stranger political bedfellows there never were--to ensure that prospective parents of such children receive accurate information about special needs children...

Click here to read the rest of this article: Advocating for Special Needs Children.

Why Obama Can't Close the Sale

By Al Hubbard and Noam Neusner, Wall Street Journal

Even before John McCain shook up the presidential race by tapping Gov. Sarah Palin to be his running mate, polls weren't showing the late-August lead that Barack Obama (and many Republicans) expected. Why so?

It's not because of the brilliance of the McCain campaign. Rather we believe that -- despite the media's best efforts to exempt Mr. Obama's policies from critical examination -- American voters aren't sheep. They pay attention to the candidates and positions and make wise decisions about who should lead the country.

True, Mr. Obama enjoys several advantages. Republicans are struggling nationwide in head-to-head contests. Democrats lead in voter registration, and have a well-funded presidential candidate.

Yet Americans have not committed to Mr. Obama. Why?

Clearly, Mr. Obama's weakness on foreign policy is a factor. He has a knee-jerk preference for diplomacy with China, Europe and Russia over the security of the American people and our closest allies. He hasn't explained his shifting positions on Iraq and Iran, among other hot spots. And he felt compelled to make up for his experience gap with Mr. McCain by picking Sen. Joe Biden to be his running mate...

Click here to read the rest of this article: Why Obama Can't Close the Sale.

Help for Georgia

By the New York Times Editorial Staff

The Kremlin’s leaders continue to bluster and preen in the wake of their invasion of Georgia. Dmitri Medvedev, the Russian president, urged Washington this week to abandon Georgia’s president, Mikheil Saakashvili — calling him a “political corpse” — and claimed a “sphere of influence” outside Russian borders. His foreign minister warned Europe that countries dependent on Russian energy had better look to their “core interests.”

The Bush administration responded Wednesday, proposing $1 billion in American reconstruction aid for Georgia, which needs the help. Moscow needs to understand that the West will not be intimidated into abandoning a struggling democracy.

The administration must also keep up the pressure on Russia to withdraw its remaining troops from Georgia and permit deployment of neutral peacekeepers. Its decisions to suspend military exercises and a civilian nuclear deal, worth billions to Moscow, were sensible.

While the Kremlin’s leaders may be feeling invincible Russia’s business class clearly is not. Since early August, more than $7 billion in capital has fled the country...

Click here to read the rest of this article: Help for Georgia.

Braking the Virus

By Olivia Judson, New York Times

Most of the time, talk of genetic modification revolves around crops, with claims and counterclaims as to the relative risks and benefits. Such questions are obviously important, but they have been so much discussed I don’t want to consider them again here (at least, not at the moment). Instead, I want to spend the next couple of weeks looking at other possible uses of genetic engineering.

As my first exhibit, I’ve chosen the genetic modification of a virus for the purpose of producing a safer vaccine. I like this example not just for its practical importance, but for its elegance. It exploits a fundamental property of life: the fact that there is more than one way to write a gene.

To recap: genes are instructions for making proteins — long strings of smaller molecules called amino acids. But this raises a question. For any given gene, how does the cell know what the corresponding protein should be? The answer is in the genetic code.

The term “genetic code” is sometimes used casually to refer to someone’s genome, as in, “He can’t help it, it’s in his genetic code.” But the term has a more specific, technical meaning, too. It’s the mechanism that a cell uses for translating genes into proteins.

Genes are usually represented as a string of letters — CAGCCCAGA, say. The letters stand for a set of chemicals, known as nucleotides, that make up a gene’s information content. The machinery of the cell “reads” these chemicals in consecutive groups of three; each group of three corresponds to a particular amino acid. The example above would, therefore, give the amino acids glutamine (CAG), proline (CCC) and arginine (AGA). Each group of three is called a “codon.”

However — and this is where the opportunity to rewrite genes comes in — there is more than one way to specify most of the amino acids. Glutamine, for example, can also be written as CAA. Arginine can be written in six different ways; proline, in four. The reason for this is that the genetic code has a great deal of redundancy. Although there are 64 possible codons (4 different nucleotides for each of three positions), there are only 20 amino acids to be assigned to them. This means that the particular string of the three amino acids given above could be specified in 48 different ways...

Click here to read the rest of this article: Braking the Virus.

Obama Ad Slams McCain On Abortion Rights

By Ben Smith, Politico

Barack Obama has launched a broadside against John McCain’s opposition to abortion rights and moved one of the most divisive issues in modern American politics to the airwaves on a large scale for the first time in this presidential campaign.

Obama’s new radio ad, airing widely in at least seven swing states, tells voters McCain “will make abortion illegal.” It’s airing as McCain courts female voters with the addition of the staunchly anti-abortion governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, to his ticket.

Democrats had, until now, sought to appeal to women primarily on economic issues such as health care and workplace discrimination; abortion rights were hardly mentioned at the Democratic National Convention in Denver last week. But women’s rights groups have been urging Obama to attack McCain on the issue, pointing to polling showing that some women who support McCain think he supports abortion rights. In fact, the Arizona senator has long supported a ban on abortions, with exceptions for victims of rape and incest, and for pregnancies that threaten the life of the mother. Palin has an even firmer anti-abortion stance: She would require rape and incest victims to carry their pregnancies to term.

“Let me tell you: If Roe vs. Wade is overturned, the lives and health of women will be put at risk. That's why this election is so important,” says the nurse-practitioner who narrates Obama’s ad. “John McCain's out of touch with women today. McCain wants to take away our right to choose. That's what women need to understand. That's how high the stakes are.”

An announcer then claims that “as president, John McCain will make abortion illegal,” before playing an exchange on "Meet the Press" in which McCain told moderator Tim Russert that he favors “a constitutional amendment to ban all abortions.”

“We can't let John McCain take away our right to choose. We can't let him take us back,” says the ad...

Click here to read the rest of this article: Obama Ad Slams McCain On Abortion Rights.

Obama and Big Government

By Steve Chapman, Washington Times

There are no disciples of small government in the Democratic Party, and Barack Obama fits right in. His economic program is based on the assumption that the economy is to the president what a marionette is to a puppeteer, requiring his direction and responding to his every wish.

Anyone partial to free markets, restrained government, fiscal discipline and light taxation approaches a Democratic nominee's economic platform with trepidation, expecting one fright after another. Mr. Obama does not disappoint.

He offers a long list of things the federal government should be doing to rearrange the nation's productive sector - paying U.S. automakers to build fuel-efficient vehicles, confiscating allegedly excessive oil profits, and spending hundreds of billions to create jobs in environmental and infrastructure industries. Democrats have not given up their basic faith that the market, while useful, always needs Washington's whip hand.

In his windfall profits tax plan, Mr. Obama puts aside the troublesome fact that the last time we tried it, at the behest of President Carter, the tax yielded far less revenue than projected while reducing domestic energy production. And if Detroit didn't invest in fuel-efficient cars when Honda and Toyota did, why should it get a $4 billion reward for its failure...?

Click here to read the rest of this article: Obama and Big Government.

Ending Homelessness

By Philip Mangano, Washington Times

When President Bush called on the nation to reduce and end chronic homelessness in 2003, few people were optimistic that such a goal was achievable. Many were cynical about the motivation. After all, hadn't the nation focused on this issue long enough to know that change was improbable?

For 25 years, those of us on the front line of the problem were frustrated that nothing seemed to work. People experiencing homelessness were shuffled and cycled from street, to emergency room, to shelter, while we waited for some positive news.

That news arrived last month, when the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) unveiled new research conducted by communities across the country showing that the number of homeless people living on the streets and languishing in shelters is down - dramatically.

According to the data, between 2005 and 2007, the number of people experiencing chronic homelessness - our most vulnerable and disabled neighbors - dropped from nearly 176,000 to fewer than 124,000. That represents a decrease of 52,000 or nearly 30 percent.

What accounts for this documented decrease, the largest in our nation's history? What has moved the nation from being demoralized that street homelessness seemed to be an intractable part of our social landscape, to being re-moralized that change is possible, both visible and quantifiable?

The answer is straightforward. In partnership with the federal government, states and communities are now planning to end homelessness with a new approach. If good intentions, well-meaning programs, and humanitarian gestures could have gotten the job done, homelessness would have been history decades ago...

Click here to read the rest of this article: Ending Homelessness.

John McCain Has a Tax Plan To Create Jobs

By Martin Feldstein and John B. Taylor, Wall Street Journal

John McCain's tax policies are designed to create jobs, increase wages and allow all Americans -- especially those in the hard-pressed middle class -- to keep more of what they earn. His plan achieves these goals in three important ways.

First, he proposes a package of tax incentives that will create jobs and raise earnings by inducing firms to invest more in the U.S. Second, he is strongly committed to blocking any increase in tax rates while doubling the personal exemptions for families with children, which will reduce the tax burden on working Americans. Third, he proposes a new, refundable tax credit that will increase health-care coverage, reduce the cost of health care, and provide more funds for families and individuals to purchase health care.

Here's how the three components of Sen. McCain's tax plan will work in practice.

To create jobs, Mr. McCain will reduce the corporate tax rate -- now at 35% the second highest among all industrial countries -- to one that doesn't penalize firms for doing business here. To encourage small businesses to expand, he will fight against higher tax rates on their income.

To increase wages, Mr. McCain will provide incentives to raise productivity, which leads to higher wages. To increase productivity, he will provide incentives for developing and applying new technologies by expanding the tax credit for research and development, and by making that credit permanent...

Click here to read the rest of this article: John McCain Has a Tax Plan To Create Jobs.

Governor Palin And The Religious Right

By Burns Strider, Faithful Democrats

Senator McCain's Vice Presidential selection of Alaskan Governer Sarah Palin really has the talking heads, pundits and bloggers going at it today. The focus has been on various issues such as her experience and ability to win over Clinton women.

With all the talking and speculating going on there is one fact we can all agree on: no one really knows enough about Governor Palin to make any conclusive, rational observations. We can only speculate and out of this discourse look for and allow the facts about who she is and what she has done in public life surface.

One area that is receiving little attention on the national news and cable talk shows is her association with the Religious Right. National pundits and talking heads, from their coastal beachheads, usually miss certain currents and facts related to faith that the mass of the nation can be acutely aware. I think this issue is just such the case. Here's why:

David Brody of Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) says "I am told that when conservative leaders heard the news this morning at a meeting at the Council for National Policy, one attendee told me that there is 'nothing but elation. People are giddy. They are energized and they now believe that in fact this campaign has the ability to win this election.'"

Mat Staver, Founder of Liberty Counsel, says, "Absolutely brilliant choice. John McCain could not have chosen a better vice-presidential nominee than Gov. Palin. She is attractive, articulate, conservative, pro-family, pro-life, and pro-marriage. John McCain hit this one out of the ballpark..."

Click here to read the rest of this article: Governor Palin And The Religious Right.

The Dirty Little Secret About Social Security

By Bob Barr, Washington Times

I am frustrated by the refusal of Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama to adequately confront Social Security's looming fiscal crunch. The United States faces a demography-driven crisis of entitlement spending.

Medicare is in the worst shape, but Social Security alone has $15.8 trillion in unfunded liabilities. The natural temptation is to do nothing, but the longer we wait, the bigger will be the shortfall and the more difficult it will be to reform the system.

Unfortunately, we can't get by hoping to save a little money elsewhere. The national debt is $9.5 trillion and next year's deficit will run a half trillion dollars.

Social Security was sold as social insurance, but benefits are neither legally guaranteed nor set aside in income-earning accounts. The "trust fund" is pure fiction, a public relations cover for a "pay-as-you-go" system.

The nation's roughly 80 million Baby-Boomers have begun to retire and Social Security will be out of money in 2017. The "trust fund" is empty. Earlier this year, Moody's Investors Services announced that it was considering downgrading federal bonds because of the coming entitlements tsunami.

Even if there is money to pay Social Security's promised benefits, recipients would receive far less than they could earn in a private system. Nor would they own the principal, like any normal investment...

Click here to read the rest of this article: The Dirty Little Secret About Social Security.

An Even Poorer World

By the New York Times Editorial Staff

There is a lot more poverty in the world than previously thought. The World Bank reported in August that in 2005, there were 1.4 billion people living below the poverty line — that is, living on less than $1.25 a day.

That is more than a quarter of the developing world’s population and 430 million more people living in extreme poverty than previously estimated. The World Bank warned that the number is unlikely to drop below one billion before 2015.

The poverty estimate soared after a careful study of the prices people in developing countries pay for goods and services revealed that the World Bank had been grossly underestimating the cost of living in the poorest nations for decades. As a result, it was grossly overestimating the ability of people to buy things. And the new research doesn’t account for the soaring prices of energy and food in the past two years.

The poverty expressed in the World Bank’s measure is so abject that it is hard for citizens of the industrial world to comprehend. The new count underscores how much more the developed world needs to do to help the world’s most vulnerable people.

It should also serve as a jarring reminder to the leaders of the world’s much-touted new economic powers — India and China — about the inequities growing amid their growing wealth. Forty-two percent of India’s people live below the World Bank’s poverty line, as do 16 percent of China’s...

Click here to read the rest of this article: An Even Poorer World.

Medicare�s Troubling Drug Gap

By the New York Times Editorial Staff

Probably no aspect of the new Medicare drug program has caused more confusion and irritation than the notorious “doughnut hole,” a gap in coverage that forces people who had been getting their drugs cheaply to suddenly pay the full price out of pocket. Now, for the first time, an analysis has quantified what happened last year when millions of beneficiaries fell into the gap. For patients with serious chronic conditions, the medical implications were very troubling.

Congress crafted the “doughnut hole” to limit federal spending on the drug benefit. Beneficiaries pay only deductibles and co-payments, with the rest covered by their insurance plan, until their drug purchases reach a specified limit. Last year, the gap began when beneficiaries purchased $2,400 worth of drugs. Then they fell into the doughnut hole and had to pay the full cost until their out-of-pocket spending reached $3,850, at which point they qualified for catastrophic coverage.

Last year, an estimated 3.4 million beneficiaries reached the coverage gap, according to a study by researchers at the Kaiser Family Foundation, Georgetown University and the National Opinion Research Center, or NORC, at the University of Chicago. Beneficiaries taking drugs to treat such chronic conditions as Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, depression, osteoporosis and high blood pressure were especially likely to reach the gap...

Click here to read the rest of this article: Medicare’s Troubling Drug Gap.

Immigrants and the GOP

By the Wall Street Journal Editorial Staff

While the Democrats were in Denver nominating Barack Obama, Republicans were busy writing their party platform. Not surprisingly, immigration was a sticking point. And while some of the more extreme proposals, such as denying citizenship to the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens, were defeated, the platform committee did vote to wall off Mexico.

The platform will go before the full Republican National Convention next week. And before approving it, the GOP would be wise to consider the demographic data that the Census Bureau released earlier this month. The media focused on Census projections that ethnic and racial minorities will comprise a majority of U.S. residents by 2042, thanks to higher minority birth rates, especially among Hispanics. But there's also a political lesson in these findings: A party that thinks it can win elections by alienating Latinos is going to be in the minority for a very long time.

A Pew poll released last month found that Hispanic registered voters favor Barack Obama over John McCain by 66% to 23%. That yawning gap almost certainly has less to do with Mr. Obama's appeal than with a perception -- courtesy of conservative immigration restrictionists -- that Latinos are not welcome in the Republican Party. Ronald Reagan regularly won a third of the Latino vote, and more than 40% of Latinos supported George W. Bush in 2004.

In recent years, however, and despite President Bush's warnings, many on the political right have tried to turn illegal immigration into a wedge issue, like guns or abortion. And while it hasn't produced victories at the polls, this strategy has succeeded in alienating many among the country's fastest-growing voting bloc. By 2020, Hispanics are projected to be 20% of the electorate, up from 9% today.

"Latino voters have moved sharply into the Democratic camp in the past two years, reversing a pro-GOP tide that had been evident among Latinos earlier in the decade," according to Pew. "Some 65% of Latino registered voters now say they identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party, compared with just 26% who identify with or lean toward the GOP." The 39-point Democratic edge was 21 points as recently as 2006. It's an example of what can happen when Republicans lose their free-market bearings and start channeling cable news populists...

Click here to read the rest of this article: Immigrants and the GOP.

The "Obama Straddle" on Assisted Suicide

By Wesley J. Smith, Secondhand Smoke

As the election progresses, I will attempt to present the positions of the candidates on issues germane to human exceptionalism, assisted suicide, animal rights, health care rationing, in short, all of the grist we grind here at SHS.

This morning, I did a quick search on Obama and assisted suicide and found this interview. It is a complete straddle, which is a disappointment given the import of the issue. In a March newspaper interview he was asked about assisted suicide. His answer from the interview:

I am in favor of palliative medicine in circumstances where someone is terminally ill. ... I'm mindful of the legitimate interests of states to prevent a slide from palliative treatments into euthanasia. On the other hand, I think that the people of Oregon did a service for the country in recognizing that as the population gets older we've got to think about issues of end-of-life care....

Click here to read the rest of this article: The "Obama Straddle" on Assisted Suicide.

Obama Should Come Clean On Ayers, Rezko And the Iraqi Billionaire

By John Fund, Wall Street Journal

Even as Barack Obama gave his soaring speech Thursday night, his campaign was playing hardball with its critics.

Team Obama has launched an offensive against WGN, the Chicago Tribune's radio station, for interviewing Stanley Kurtz. Mr. Kurtz is a conservative writer who this week forced the University of Illinois to finally open its records on Sen. Obama's association with William Ayers, the unrepentant 1970s Weather Underground terrorist.

An Obama campaign email to supporters called Mr. Kurtz a "slimy character assassin" whose "divisive, destructive ranting" should be confronted. WGN producer Zack Christenson says the outpouring of negative calls and emails is "unprecedented." He also notes that it is curious -- because "we wanted the Obama campaign's take" on Mr. Kurtz's findings, but the campaign declined to put anyone on air.

Separately, Mr. Obama's lawyers have also demanded that the Justice Department prosecute an organization called the American Issues Project for running an ad about ties between their candidate and Mr. Ayers.

Obama aides believe John Kerry lost in 2004 because he failed to respond to the "Swift Boat" ads attacking him, and they are lashing out. Sometimes the Obama objections have merit, as when they exposed errors in Jerome Corsi's sensationalized Obama biography. But sometimes they are designed to shut down legitimate questions. "They're terrified of people poking around Obama's life," one reporter told Gabriel Sherman at the New Republic. "The whole Obama narrative is built around the narrative that Obama and [campaign strategist] David Axelrod built, and, like all stories, it's not entirely true." The stakes are high. If the full story of Mr. Obama's relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright had been revealed before the Iowa caucus, he wouldn't have won.

Aides claim Mr. Obama "has taken voluntary transparency steps" that allow "his constituents, the media and his political opponents to fully examine him." In reality, anyone questioning the approved story line is liable to be ignored, misled or even bullied. This isn't what reporters expected when Mr. Obama began campaigning for a "new politics" that would bring honesty and openness to government...

Click here to read the rest of this article: Obama Should Come Clean On Ayers, Rezko And the Iraqi Billionaire.

Losing Faith Voters

By Cal Thomas, Washington Times

Democrats have made it a priority to lure more evangelical and Catholic voters from the Republican camp into their own, but the likelihood of success is becoming more problematic given pronouncements by two Catholic archbishops and a decision by the editor of an evangelical Christian magazine.

Most Rev. Charles J. Chaput, the archbishop of Denver, said Democratic vice presidential candidate Joseph Biden should avoid taking Communion because of his support for abortion rights.

In 2004, the Archbishop of Boston, Sean O'Malley stood by a statement he had made the previous year that pro-choice Catholics are in a state of grave sin and cannot take Communion properly. Around the same time, then-Cardinal (now Pope Benedict XVI) Joseph Ratzinger, in a private memorandum, told American bishops that Communion must be denied to Catholic politicians who support legal abortion. The memo and the statement by Mr. O'Malley were thought at the time to be directed at Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, who is Catholic. Mr. Kerry and many other Democratic and Republican Catholic politicians have mostly ignored such directives and taken Communion anyway.

Appearing last Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tried some theological hair-splitting. She described herself as "an ardent, practicing Catholic," but then said the church had only held its pro-life position for the last 50 years and that during the previous 2,000 years it had reached different conclusions about when life begins...

Click here to read the rest of this article: Losing Faith Voters.

Better Education Through Innovation

By Cory Booker, John Doerr, and Ted Mitchell, Los Angeles Times

In the summer of 1918, as tuberculosis, bubonic plague and a flu pandemic threatened America's newly crowded cities, the chemist Charles Holmes Herty took a walk through New York City with his colleague J.R. Bailey. Herty posed a question: Suppose Bailey discovered an exceptionally powerful medicine. What institution would allow him to take his breakthrough from lab experiment to widespread cure?

Bailey replied, "I don't know."

That alarming answer moved Herty to propose a visionary solution -- an institution that would encourage research and development throughout the country. It would find its value, Herty said, "in the stimulus which it gives" to research, thought and discovery by practitioners in the field.

Nearly a century later, that vision stands as the National Institutes of Health. Its record, from deciphering and mapping the human genome to finding the source of AIDS, leaves no doubt about the NIH's ability to stimulate innovation.

Today, the shame of our cities isn't bubonic plague; it's ignorance. In our urban areas, only one child in five is proficient in reading. On international tests, we rank behind the Czech Republic and Latvia; our high school graduation rate barely makes the top 20 worldwide. As columnist David Brooks has noted, educational progress has been so slow that "America's lead over its economic rivals has been entirely forfeited." Under-education may not end lives the way infectious diseases do, but it just as surely wastes them. For all the hard work of our good teachers, our system is failing to keep pace with the demands of a new century.

As our next president confronts this reality, he should look to Herty's inspiration. We need a new, results-driven mind-set at the Department of Education that will drive pure educational innovation and "scale up" proven experiments and novel ideas that work. The federal government stands in a unique position to meet these needs...

Click here to read the rest of this article: Better Education Through Innovation.