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THURSDAY THINK TANK ROUND-UP: INAUGURAL EDITION: This'll be a new feature here at Tapped, in which every Thursday I'll offer up links and summaries to five think tank papers that caught my eye. It's wonkery that works for you! Here are this week's five:
- No-Vacation Nation: The Center for Economic and Policy Research reviews the paid leave and holiday laws in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and finds we're the only advanced nation not to guarantee workers any paid vacation or holidays. American exceptionalism at its best. (More on this, including a colorful picture, here.)
- Mirror, Mirror, On The Wall: "Despite having the most costly health system in the world," finds the Commonwealth Fund, "the United States consistently underperforms on most dimensions of performance, relative to other countries." The paper goes into great detail on the cross-national comparisons, and eventually concludes that "Among the six nations studied -- Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States -- the U.S. ranks last." For those who really want to dig deep, there's even a chartbook! You genuinely cannot know how excited that makes me.
- Iraqi Force Development and the Challenge of Civil War: CSIS's Anthony Cordesman writes that "the current combination of Sunni Neo-Salafi extremist insurgency, Sunni Arab versus Shi'ite Arab sectarian conflict, Shi'ite versus Shi'ite power struggles, and Arab versus Kurdish ethnic conflict could easily cause the collapse of the current political structure. In the best case, it could lead to a Shi'ite or Shi'ite-Kurdish dominated government, with strong local centers of power, and an ongoing fight with Iraq's Sunnis. In the worst case, it could escalate to the break up of the country, far more serious ethnic and sectarian conflict, or violent paralysis." Not an uplifting read, even though Cordesman does try and chart a path forward.
- Borrowing to Get Ahead, and Behind: Coming off the recent attention to sub-prime loans, Brookings researchers Matt Fellowes and Mia Mabanta dig into some new data to find that credit markets have exploded among low-income communities, about a third of lower income borrowers falls behind on bill payments in a typical year, and more than a quarter are devoting over 40 percent of their income to debt payments.
- How to Pay the Piper: AEI's Michael Greve and Russell Wheelerexamine the linkage between pay for congressmen, judges, and government executives. Congress tied all these groups together in an effort to depoliticize pay increases. In fact, quite the opposite has happened, and pay for judges and senior government appointees has stagnated as it got caught in arguments over congressional pay increases. That's bad for talent recruitment, and bad for good government.
