What Chile Could Teach The United States About Preventing Government Shutdowns
Chile’s urgency provision is rooted in an important insight in constitutional design. It recognizes that legislation sometimes arises that is so important it must become the immediate business of the legislature, and that a forcing mechanism is sometimes necessary to ensure that such legislation receives a timely vote. Were a similar provision inserted into the United States Constitution — one allowing the president to bring a bill to the House floor and force a vote even against the House leadership’s will — that would likely be enough to end our current impasse and prevent leaders like Speaker Boehner from unilaterally vetoing legislation that enjoys majority support in the Congress.
Sunday, October 13, 2013
Wednesday, October 09, 2013
Opinion: Republicans can’t ignore minority voters - Rob Paral - POLITICO.com
according to my research, based on U.S. Census Bureau age and citizenship data, Asian and Latino youth and newly naturalized U.S. citizens will make up 34 percent of newly eligible voters at the time of the 2014 elections in 55 Republican-held congressional districts.
Opinion: Republicans can’t ignore minority voters - Rob Paral - POLITICO.com
Opinion: Republicans can’t ignore minority voters - Rob Paral - POLITICO.com
Monday, March 18, 2013
Wednesday, March 06, 2013
Hugo Chavez is Dead
So what can you say about this? Tragic, yes, but his legacy casts a shadow over Venezuela and Latin America.
Chavez was very popular with common people and spent a lot of money on projects to help them. But with little transparency, lack of political checks and balances and no accountability, hundreds of billions of dollars were wasted and stolen. First that means many projects were never completed - casting doubt on official poverty-reduction figures. if a clinic or hospital is never completed you can't count those hospital beds; the same goes for tons of containers of food that rotted in warehouses. Also it created a new class of multi-millionaires and further enriching Venezuela's traditional oligarchs. Chavez' State Capitalism enriched a lot of people at the very top.
Remember in a decade of historically high oil prices Chavez presided over a country with the biggest oil reserves in the world. He came into power with a barrel of oil at $10 dollars it climbed to $150 With this unprecedented bounty poverty SHOULD HAVE been reduced. You could hand out cash to poor people. Indeed, in previous governments during oil booms social spending was about the same percentage of GDP. People forget Venezuela had Social-Democratic governments that subsidized housing, education and health, well before Chavez. Chavez spent a lot of money and poverty did go down, but with the kind of money available and spent you would expect a stronger overall picture, which still is not true, due to waste, corruption and inefficiency. He has plowed through a trillion dollars in oil revenue and somehow left a country with the regions highest inflation, food scarcities, weak currency, indebted, infrastructure collapsing
Chavez was very popular with common people and spent a lot of money on projects to help them. But with little transparency, lack of political checks and balances and no accountability, hundreds of billions of dollars were wasted and stolen. First that means many projects were never completed - casting doubt on official poverty-reduction figures. if a clinic or hospital is never completed you can't count those hospital beds; the same goes for tons of containers of food that rotted in warehouses. Also it created a new class of multi-millionaires and further enriching Venezuela's traditional oligarchs. Chavez' State Capitalism enriched a lot of people at the very top.
Remember in a decade of historically high oil prices Chavez presided over a country with the biggest oil reserves in the world. He came into power with a barrel of oil at $10 dollars it climbed to $150 With this unprecedented bounty poverty SHOULD HAVE been reduced. You could hand out cash to poor people. Indeed, in previous governments during oil booms social spending was about the same percentage of GDP. People forget Venezuela had Social-Democratic governments that subsidized housing, education and health, well before Chavez. Chavez spent a lot of money and poverty did go down, but with the kind of money available and spent you would expect a stronger overall picture, which still is not true, due to waste, corruption and inefficiency. He has plowed through a trillion dollars in oil revenue and somehow left a country with the regions highest inflation, food scarcities, weak currency, indebted, infrastructure collapsing
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