New America Foundation

Latino voters garnered considerable attention for their role in reelecting President Barack Obama this year. An estimated 12.5 million Latinos went to the polls on Election Day, and  the number of eligible Latino voters, currently at 23.5 million, is expected to double by 2030, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. As a demographic that overwhelmingly supported Obama, it’s easy to view the Latino vote as a Democratic stronghold. But the group’s rapid growth could prove vital to either party’s policies—and victories—in the future.

The last thirty years of American history have witnessed, at least rhetorically, a battle over the size of government. Yet that is not what the history books will say the next thirty years of American politics were about. With the frontiers of the state roughly fixed, the issues that will dominate American politics going forward will concern the complexity of government, rather than its sheer size.

In his 2012 nomination acceptance speech in Charlotte, President Obama argued that this election represented “a choice between two fundamentally different visions for the future.” It is also true to say that we faced a choice between two fundamentally different visions of the past. And despite Obama’s reelection, the debate rages on in a closely-divided electorate and in Washington. Underneath disagreements over Obamacare, Medicare advantage cuts and Medicare vouchers, and individual retirement accounts, there is an argument about which model of social policy is best for the country.

The latest battle over who governs the Internet is taking place in Dubai this week. As the world’s governments meet at the World Conference on International Telecommunication (WCIT), hosted by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), it is already clear that the Internet governance system is under pressure. The legitimacy of this governance system and the Internet’s future success will be affected by these debates.

Tax reform is like the weather – everyone talks about it, but no one ever does anything about it. But unlike inclement weather, the problems of the tax system don’t go away; they continue to fester and compound. Today there are a number of unpleasant trends in the federal tax system that are crying out for attention:

Today’s prolonged economic slump is fundamentally different from an ordinary recession. In the aftermath of a severe financial collapse, an economy is at risk of succumbing to a prolonged deflationary undertow. With asset prices reduced, the financial system damaged, unemployment high, consumer demand depressed, and businesses reluctant to invest, the economy gets stuck well below its full employment potential.

For much of the last three decades, policy debates in the United States have been dominated by a quixotic concern about deficits, debt, and demographics. This concern has distracted policy from fundamental economic issues that have much more direct bearing on economic well-being, most notably the growth (and bursting) of the housing bubble in the last decade. While large deficits can have a negative impact on economic growth, this impact has been hugely misrepresented in public debates.

The way governments give aid to citizens in need has changed dramatically in recent years: the estimated number of government-to-person cash payments transferred electronically in 2012 has doubled from 2012 to 2009 — from 25 to 61 percent according to the data of countries examined by the Global Savings and Social Protection Initiative (GSSP).

With Americans still trapped in the fifth year of our Great Recession, and median personal income having been essentially stagnant for forty years, perhaps we should finally admit that decades of economic policies have largely failed.