When President Obama unveiled his budget allocation for high-speed rail, he said, “In France, high-speed rail has pulled regions from isolation, ignited growth [and], remade quiet towns into thriving tourist destinations.” His remarks emphasize how high-speed rail is increasing the accessibility of isolated places as an argument for similarly investments. So, what’s the source of this argument in the European context?

In November 2009, the European Union’s ESPON (the European Observation Network for Territorial Development and Cohesion) released a report called “Trends in Accessibility.” ESPON examined the extent to which accessibility has changed between 2001 and 2006. ESPON defines accessibility as how “easily people in one region can reach people in another region.” This measurement of accessibility helps determine the “potential for activities and enterprises in the region to reach markets and activities in other regions.”

ESPON’s research concluded that in this five-year period, rail accessibility grew an average of 13.1 percent. The report further concludes that high-speed rail lines have “influenced positively the potential accessibility of many European regions and cities.”

In particular, the research found that the core of Europe--Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland--has the highest potential accessibility. Europe’s core produces the highest levels of economic output and has the highest population densities. ESPON argues that with such densities, the core has found reason to link their economic hubs (cities) with high-speed rail. These are the places in Europe where they have the greatest returns on investment.

But ESPON also found that high speed rail is starting to increase the accessibility of isolated places such as France’s Tours, Lyon, and Marseille. This is a very important finding for Europe. They have a long-standing policy of social cohesion and balance, striving to create economic sustainability and population stability across Europe. The objective is for areas well beyond core to thrive economically and to dissuade people from migrating in search of jobs. Fiscally, social cohesion translates into investing disproportionately more money into areas not producing sufficient levels of economic output. High-speed rail is but one of the many strategies intending to produce “economic and social cohesion,” states a European Commission report on high-speed rail.

But we are not Europe. While their thesis underpinning high-speed rail is social cohesion, what is our underlying thesis for high-speed rail? And what does this look like spatially? What was the logic behind the selection of Florida over other possible corridors? Is this line going to strengthen our national economy and GDP? Clarity on this score will help ensure the project is a success and offers a high return on investment. Lessons from this accessibility study say that places with high population levels and GDP output offer the greatest accessibility and therefore success.

It would be a pity if the U.S. finally jumped on the high-speed bandwagon but still missed the train.

      

No. We should exempt workers earning the lowest wages.

Social Security faces a serious funding problem. The program takes in too little money to pay all that has been promised to future beneficiaries. Government forecasters predict Social Security’s reserve fund will be depleted between 2030 and 2034. There are two basic ways we can eliminate the funding gap: cut benefits or increase contributions. A common proposal is to increase the age at which workers can claim full retirement benefits. For people nearing retirement today, the full retirement age is 66. As a result of a 1983 law, that age will rise to 67 for workers born after 1959.

When policymakers urge us to raise the retirement age, they are proposing to increase the full retirement age beyond 67, possibly to 70, for workers now in their 30s or 40s. This saves money, but it also cuts monthly retirement benefits by the same percentage for every worker, unless workers delay claiming benefits. The policy might seem fair if workers in future generations could all expect to share in gains in life expectancy. However, new research shows that gains in life expectancy have been very unequal, with the biggest improvements among workers who earn top incomes. Life expectancy gains for workers with the lowest incomes have been small or negligible.

If the full retirement age were raised, future retirees with high lifetime earnings can expect to receive some compensation when their monthly benefits are cut. Because they can expect to live longer than today’s retirees, they will receive benefits for a longer span of years after 65. For low-wage workers, there is no compensation. Since they are not living longer, their lifetime benefits will fall by the same proportion as their monthly benefits. Thus, “raising the retirement age” is a policy that cuts the lifetime benefits of future low-wage workers by a bigger percentage than it does of future high-wage workers.

The fact that low-wage workers have seen small or negligible gains in life expectancy signals that their health when they are past 60 is no better than that of low-wage workers born 20 or 30 years ago. This suggests their capacity to work past 60 is no better than it was for past generations. A sensible policy for cutting future benefits should therefore preserve current benefit levels for workers who have contributed to Social Security for many years but have earned low wages.

Editor's note: This piece originally appeared in CQ Researcher.

       

Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JP Morgan Chase, this week announced a raise for his bank’s lowest pay employees. The company’s worst paid workers currently earn $10.15 an hour. By next February their pay will increase to at least $12 an hour, a jump of 18 percent. Dimon’s announcement follows widely reported wage hikes at Starbucks, Target, Walmart and other employers with sizeable numbers of low-pay workers.

These pay hikes signal further tightening in the nation’s job markets, including the market for low-wage workers. The drop in the unemployment rate below 5 percent has made it harder for employers to fill job vacancies, putting pressure on them to boost pay, both to attract new workers and to retain the ones already on their payrolls. Although highly compensated men have obtained the biggest pay increases in recent years, men and women earning bottom-end pay have fared better in the past year compared with workers in the middle of the earnings distribution.

The good news on the wage front tells us two things. First, the tightening of the job market is finally translating into gains for ordinary workers. More workers who want jobs are finding them. And adults who’ve managed to hang on to jobs are now enjoying faster growth in paychecks. Between 2011 and 2014, hourly pay gains averaged a little less than 2.0 percent a year. Since the end of 2014 they’ve averaged about 2.5 percent. The improvement in nominal pay gains has been magnified by exceptionally slow consumer price inflation. In the two years ending in May, real hourly pay has climbed 1.9 percent a year.

Second, the recent tilt in pay gains in favor of low wage workers shows that increases in the legal minimum wage can have an impact. Even though the federal minimum wage has remained at $7.25 an hour for the past seven years, 29 states have minimum wages above that level; 11 have a minimum equal to or greater than $9.00 an hour. Not surprisingly, low-wage workers in states that have recently raised minimum wages have seen faster gains than those in states that have left minimums unchanged. Since a growing number of states and localities are boosting minimum wage levels, this trend toward faster pay gains at the bottom may continue for a while.

The recovery from the Great Recession has been slow and disappointing, but it has been lengthy. One indicator that has been slowest to recover is wages. At long last wages are climbing, both in the middle and at the bottom of the pay scale.

       

       

       

With only a few months remaining before the 2004 elections, national party committees continue to demonstrate financial strength and noteworthy success in adapting to the more stringent fundraising rules imposed by the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA). A number of factors, including the deep partisan divide in the electorate, the expectations of a close presidential race, and the growing competition in key Senate and House races, have combined with recent party investments in new technology and the emergence of the Internet as a major fundraising tool to produce what one party chairman has described as a "perfect storm" for party fundraising.¹ Consequently, both national parties have exceeded the mid-year fundraising totals achieved in 2000, and both approach the general election with substantial amounts of money in the bank.

After eighteen months of experience under the new rules, the national parties are still outpacing their fundraising efforts of four years ago. As of June 30, the national parties have raised $611.1 million in federally regulated hard money alone, as compared to $535.6 million in hard and soft money combined at a similar point in the 2000 election cycle. The Republicans lead the way, taking in more than $381 million as compared to about $309 million in hard and soft money by the end of June in 2000. The Democrats have also raised more, bringing in $230 million as compared to about $227 million in hard and soft money four years ago. Furthermore, with six months remaining in the election cycle, both national parties have already raised more hard money than they did in the 2000 election cycle.² In fact, by the end of June, every one of the Democratic and Republican national party committees had already exceeded its hard money total for the entire 2000 campaign.³

This surge in hard money fundraising has allowed the national party committees to replace a substantial portion of the revenues they previously received through unlimited soft money contributions. Through June, these committees have already taken in enough additional hard money to compensate for the $254 million of soft money that they had garnered by this point in 2000, which represented a little more than half of their $495 million in total soft money receipts in the 2000 election cycle.

View the accompanying data tables (PDF - 11.4 KB)

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¹Terrence McAuliffe, Democratic National Committee Chairman, quoted in Paul Fahri, "Small Donors Grow Into Big Political Force," Washington Post, May 3, 2004, p. A11.
²In 2000, the Republican national party committees raised $361.6 million in hard money, while the Democratic national committees raised $212.9 million. These figures are based on unadjusted data and do not take into account any transfers of funds that may have taken place among the national party committees.
³The election cycle totals for 2000 can be found in Federal Election Commission, "FEC Reports Increase in Party Fundraising for 2000," press release, May 15, 2001. Available at http://www.fec.gov/press/press2001/051501partyfund/051501partyfund.html (viewed July 28, 2004).

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Ukraine faces critical challenges on a range of questions: shaping foreign and national security policies appropriate for a medium-sized country located between Europe and Russia; developing a strategy and policies to promote energy security and contribute to sustainable economic growth; and designing educational and cultural policies suitable for advancing the country’s European aspirations and its own national identity. The Ukraine 2020 Policy Dialogue—an initiative of the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation supported by the Democracy Grants Program of the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv—convened four U.S.-Ukrainian task forces earlier this year to discuss these questions and develop policy recommendations for the Ukrainian and U.S. governments.

On September 28, the Center on the United States and Europe at Brookings (CUSE) hosted a discussion of the recommendations developed by the Policy Dialogue. Panelists included four co-chairs of the Dialogue’s working groups: Edward Chow of the Center for Strategic and International Studies; William Miller of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; Robert Nurick of the Atlantic Council; and Brookings Senior Fellow Steven Pifer. Brookings Nonresident Senior Fellow Angela Stent moderated the discussion. Copies of the Policy Dialogue recommendations were available. 

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Seven months have passed since Israel officially apologized to Turkey for the Mavi Marmara incident of May 2010, in which nine Turks were killed by Israeli fire. What seemed, at the time, to be a diplomatic breakthrough, capable of setting into motion a reconciliation process between America’s two greatest allies in the region, has been frustrated by a series of spiteful interactions.

The Turkish-Israeli alliance of the 1990s and first decade of the 2000s was viewed by senior U.S. officials as an anchor of stability in a changing region. The relationship between Ankara and Jerusalem served vital U.S. interests in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East, and so it was therefore a U.S. priority to restore dialogue between the two former allies-turned-rivals. The Obama administration, throughout both terms, has made a continuous effort to rebuild the relationship and was ultimately successful in setting the stage for the Israeli apology and the Turkish acceptance of that apology. The U.S. was not the only party that stood to gain from reconciliation; both Turkey and Israel have many incentives for normalizing relations. For Turkey, the reestablishment of a dialogue with Israel has four main potential benefits: It would allow for greater involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations, it would provide greater opportunity for information sharing on the developments of the Syrian civil war allowing Turkey to have a more comprehensive perspective, it would also provide more economic opportunities for Turkey especially with regard to cooperation in the field of natural gas (following Israel's High Court of Justice recent ruling that paves the way toward exports of natural gas), and finally it would remove an irritant from Turkey's relations with the United States. In turn, Israel would benefit from the reestablishment of dialogue in three major ways: the rebuilding of relations between senior Turkish and Israeli officials would facilitate intelligence sharing and help to gain a more complete picture of the Syrian crisis, Israel would have the opportunity to contain delegitimization efforts in the Muslim and Arab worlds, and Israel may be able to rejoin NATO related activities and maneuvers.

Despite these enticements, in recent weeks a series of news stories and revelations have put the Turkish-Israeli relationship, yet again, in the international spotlight, raising doubts whether reconciliation between the two countries is at all possible at this time. As the Obama administration struggles to deal with the fallout of allegations that the NSA has tapped the office and cellular phones of Western European leaders and as it focuses on more pressing issues in the Middle East, namely the P5+1 negotiations with Iran, the Syrian crisis, Egypt and negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, it finds itself with little time to chaperone the Turkish-Israeli reconciliation process. Nevertheless, despite tensions, direct talks are reportedly being held between senior Turkish and Israeli officials in an effort to reach a compensation agreement in the near future.

The Israeli apology and Turkish acceptance, orchestrated by Barack Obama during his trip to the region in March 2013, was an essential first step in a long process of reconciliation, aimed at normalizing relations between the two countries after a four year hiatus in their relationship. The next step was an agreement between the two sides in which Israel was to pay compensation to the families of the victims of the Mavi Marmara. Several rounds of talks between senior Turkish and Israeli representatives were reportedly held during the spring of 2013 in Ankara, Jerusalem and Washington, but to no avail. Disagreements over the amount of compensation to be paid by Israel were reported, but later, in July, Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Arinc clarified that money was not the issue. He stated that the problem lay in Israel’s refusal to acknowledge that the payment was a result of its “wrongful act.” Arinc added that another point of contention was Turkey's demand that Israel cooperate in improving the living conditions of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Arinc emphasized that only when these two conditions were met could the countries move forward to discuss the specific amount of compensation.

The shadow cast over negotiations by Arinc’s comments was darkened by a string of comments made by Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan against Israel. First, he blamed the “interests lobby” – perhaps a reference to the so-called “Israel Lobby” -- for the large protests that took place against him and his government in Istanbul’s Taksim square and across Turkey in June. Then, in August, Erdogan accused Israel of backing the military coup in Egypt, citing comments made in 2011 by the French Jewish philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy, as proof of a long standing Israeli-Jewish plot to deny the Muslim Brotherhood power in Egypt. This drew sharp Israeli criticism, notably from former Israeli Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, who compared Erdogan to the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels.

Despite these setbacks, bilateral trade between Turkey and Israel has expanded since the official apology and the number of Israeli tourists returning to visit Turkey has risen dramatically. Yet it is clear that with such harsh rhetoric it will be difficult to effectively advance a reconciliation process. Among American, Turkish and Israeli experts, the prevailing view is that Erdogan and the AKP government, mainly due to domestic political considerations, are not interested in normalizing relations with Israel, and that the only reason Erdogan accepted Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s apology was to gain favor with U.S. President Obama.

At the end of August, as the plan for a U.S. military strike in Syria gained momentum, relative calm prevailed in the relations between Ankara and Jerusalem, both focusing on preparations and plans to address the fallout of such an attack. Yet, just when it seemed that tensions were reducing, and Turkish President Gul stated that negotiations "are getting on track," in a September interview with the Washington Post, a series of news stories and revelations injected a poisonous dimension to the already-strained ties.

In early October another round of Turkish-Israeli verbal attacks and counter-attacks was sparked by a Wall Street Journal profile of the Turkish Head of Intelligence, Hakan Fidan, which included a quote from an anonymous Israeli official stating, "It is clear he (Fidan) is not an enemy of Iran." Shortly after came the revelation by David Ignatius in the Washington Post that quoted reliable sources that pointed to Fidan as allegedly passing the names of 10 Iranians working for the Israeli Mossad on to the Iranian intelligence in early 2012. These ten people were later arrested by the Iranian authorities. Senior Turkish officials blamed Israel for leaking the story to Ignatius and the Turkish daily, Hurriyet, reported that Fidan was considering severing ties between Turkish and Israeli intelligence agencies. Reactions in Turkey and Israel to the Ignatius story were harsh and emotional. Turkish officials denied the report while Israeli officials refrained from any public comments. The Friday edition of Yediot's front page headline read, “Turkish Betrayal,” and former Foreign Minister Lieberman voiced his opposition to the apology made in March; he expressed his opinion that it weakened Israel’s stance and image in the region, and he attacked Erdogan for not being interested in a rapprochement.

In recent days Prime Minister Erdogan struck a more conciliatory tone, saying that if Israel is denying involvement in the leak then Turkey must accept it. Israeli media outlets reported over the weekend that Israeli and Turkish negotiators are again trying to reach a compensation agreement. Israeli experts, quoted in these reports, view November 6 as a possible target date to end negotiations over this agreement. The logic behind this being that former Israeli Foreign Minister Lieberman’s verdict is expected that day. If acquitted of corruption charges Mr. Lieberman will return to the Foreign Minister’s job and will likely try and block any attempt to reach an agreement. Turkish experts however assess that Turkey is simply not ready to move forward at this time due to domestic political constraints, as Prime Minister Erdogan and the AKP are bracing for Presidential and local elections in 2014.

Notwithstanding, the next few weeks will be crucial in determining whether Turkey and Israel can move forward and finally put the Marmara incident behind them. Turkey and Israel both have separate disagreements with the U.S. - Turkey over Syria, Egypt and the Turkish decision to build a missile defense system with a Chinese firm under U.S. sanctions; Israel over the Iran nuclear issue. However, the lingering Syrian crisis and reported progress on the Israeli-Palestinian track, in addition to economic considerations such as trade, tourism and above all potential cooperation on natural gas may entice both sides to proceed. Undoubtedly, a final deal will require strong U.S. support.

       

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Two of the United States' closest traditional allies in the Middle East, Israel and Turkey, have a tumultuous relationship. Once-strong relations soured in the last decade, with the Mavi Marmara flotilla incident in 2010 marking its nadir. Repeated attempts by the United States to mediate have helped move the parties closer together, but the gap is still wide, hindering regional security and impacting U.S. interests. Questions remain about whether the ties between the two former allies be mended and what role the United States can play in managing the relationship.

On March 23, in conjunction with the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, the Center for Middle East Policy (CMEP) at Brookings hosted a discussion examining the relationship between Israel and Turkey. The discussion built on an ongoing dialogue between the Israeli think tank Mitvim, and the Turkish Global Political Trends Center, sponsored by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, as well as ongoing work by Brookings experts.

Join the conversation on Twitter using #IsraelTurkey

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