Although a few political analysts have been focusing on the white working class for years, it is only in response to the rise of Donald Trump that this large group of Americans has begun to receive the attention it deserves. Now, thanks to a comprehensive survey that the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) undertook in collaboration with the Brookings Institution, we can speak with some precision about the distinctive attitudes and preferences of these voters.

There are different ways of defining the white working class. Along with several other survey researchers, PRRI defines this group as non-Hispanic whites with less than a college degree, with the additional qualification of being paid by the hour or by the job rather than receiving a salary. No definition is perfect, but this one works pretty well. Most working-class whites have incomes below $50,000; most whites with BAs or more have incomes above $50,000. Most working-class whites rate their financial circumstances as only fair or poor; most college educated whites rate their financial circumstances as good or excellent. Fifty-four percent of working-class whites think of themselves as working class or lower class, compared to only 18 percent of better-educated whites.

The PRRI/Brookings study finds that in many respects, these two groups of white voters see the world very differently. For example, 54 percent of college-educated whites think that America’s culture and way of life have improved since the 1950s; 62 percent of white working-class Americans think that it has changed for the worse. Sixty-eight percent of working-class whites, but only 47 percent of college-educated whites, believe that the American way of life needs to be protected against foreign influences. Sixty-six percent of working-class whites, but only 43 percent of college-educated whites, say that discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities. In a similar vein, 62 percent of working-class whites believe that discrimination against Christians has become as big a problem as discrimination against other groups, a proposition only 38 percent of college educated whites endorse.

This brings us to the issue of immigration. By a margin of 52 to 35 percent, college-educated whites affirm that today’s immigrants strengthen our country through their talent and hard work. Conversely, 61 percent of white working-class voters say that immigrants weaken us by taking jobs, housing, and health care. Seventy-one percent of working-class whites think that immigrants mostly hurt the economy by driving down wages, a belief endorsed by only 44 percent of college-educated whites. Fifty-nine percent of working-class whites believe that we should make a serious effort to deport all illegal immigrants back to their home countries; only 33 percent of college-educated whites agree. Fifty-five percent of working-class whites think we should build a wall along our border with Mexico, while 61 percent of whites with BAs or more think we should not. Majorities of working-class whites believe that we should make the entry of Syrian refugees into the United States illegal and temporarily ban the entrance of non-American Muslims into our country; about two-thirds of college-educated whites oppose each of these proposals.

Opinions on trade follow a similar pattern. By a narrow margin of 48 to 46 percent, college-educated whites endorse the view that trade agreements are mostly helpful to the United States because they open up overseas markets while 62 percent of working-class whites believe that they are harmful because they send jobs overseas and drive down wages.

It is understandable that working-class whites are more worried that they or their families will become victims of violent crime than are whites with more education. After all, they are more likely to live in neighborhoods with higher levels of social disorder and criminal behavior. It is harder to explain why they are also much more likely to believe that their families will fall victim to terrorism. To be sure, homegrown terrorist massacres of recent years have driven home the message that it can happen to anyone, anywhere. We still need to explain why working-class whites have interpreted this message in more personal terms.

The most plausible interpretation is that working-class whites are experiencing a pervasive sense of vulnerability. On every front—economic, cultural, personal security—they feel threatened and beleaguered. They seek protection against all the forces they perceive as hostile to their cherished way of life—foreign people, foreign goods, foreign ideas, aided and abetted by a government they no longer believe cares about them. Perhaps this is why fully 60 percent of them are willing to endorse a proposition that in previous periods would be viewed as extreme: the country has gotten so far off track that we need a leader who is prepared to break so rules if that is what it takes to set things right.

Although a few political analysts have been focusing on the white working class for years, it is only in response to the rise of Donald Trump that this large group of Americans has begun to receive the attention it deserves. Now, thanks to a comprehensive survey that the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) undertook in collaboration with the Brookings Institution, we can speak with some precision about the distinctive attitudes and preferences of these voters.

There are different ways of defining the white working class. Along with several other survey researchers, PRRI defines this group as non-Hispanic whites with less than a college degree, with the additional qualification of being paid by the hour or by the job rather than receiving a salary. No definition is perfect, but this one works pretty well. Most working-class whites have incomes below $50,000; most whites with BAs or more have incomes above $50,000. Most working-class whites rate their financial circumstances as only fair or poor; most college educated whites rate their financial circumstances as good or excellent. Fifty-four percent of working-class whites think of themselves as working class or lower class, compared to only 18 percent of better-educated whites.

The PRRI/Brookings study finds that in many respects, these two groups of white voters see the world very differently. For example, 54 percent of college-educated whites think that America’s culture and way of life have improved since the 1950s; 62 percent of white working-class Americans think that it has changed for the worse. Sixty-eight percent of working-class whites, but only 47 percent of college-educated whites, believe that the American way of life needs to be protected against foreign influences. Sixty-six percent of working-class whites, but only 43 percent of college-educated whites, say that discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities. In a similar vein, 62 percent of working-class whites believe that discrimination against Christians has become as big a problem as discrimination against other groups, a proposition only 38 percent of college educated whites endorse.

This brings us to the issue of immigration. By a margin of 52 to 35 percent, college-educated whites affirm that today’s immigrants strengthen our country through their talent and hard work. Conversely, 61 percent of white working-class voters say that immigrants weaken us by taking jobs, housing, and health care. Seventy-one percent of working-class whites think that immigrants mostly hurt the economy by driving down wages, a belief endorsed by only 44 percent of college-educated whites. Fifty-nine percent of working-class whites believe that we should make a serious effort to deport all illegal immigrants back to their home countries; only 33 percent of college-educated whites agree. Fifty-five percent of working-class whites think we should build a wall along our border with Mexico, while 61 percent of whites with BAs or more think we should not. Majorities of working-class whites believe that we should make the entry of Syrian refugees into the United States illegal and temporarily ban the entrance of non-American Muslims into our country; about two-thirds of college-educated whites oppose each of these proposals.

Opinions on trade follow a similar pattern. By a narrow margin of 48 to 46 percent, college-educated whites endorse the view that trade agreements are mostly helpful to the United States because they open up overseas markets while 62 percent of working-class whites believe that they are harmful because they send jobs overseas and drive down wages.

It is understandable that working-class whites are more worried that they or their families will become victims of violent crime than are whites with more education. After all, they are more likely to live in neighborhoods with higher levels of social disorder and criminal behavior. It is harder to explain why they are also much more likely to believe that their families will fall victim to terrorism. To be sure, homegrown terrorist massacres of recent years have driven home the message that it can happen to anyone, anywhere. We still need to explain why working-class whites have interpreted this message in more personal terms.

The most plausible interpretation is that working-class whites are experiencing a pervasive sense of vulnerability. On every front—economic, cultural, personal security—they feel threatened and beleaguered. They seek protection against all the forces they perceive as hostile to their cherished way of life—foreign people, foreign goods, foreign ideas, aided and abetted by a government they no longer believe cares about them. Perhaps this is why fully 60 percent of them are willing to endorse a proposition that in previous periods would be viewed as extreme: the country has gotten so far off track that we need a leader who is prepared to break so rules if that is what it takes to set things right.

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) supports millions of single parents and their children each year. Although the majority of these are single moms, Father’s Day provides a good reminder that single dads are also a significant part of the equation.

Using Brookings’ MetroTax model, we estimate that roughly half (49 percent) of all EITC-eligible tax filers in 2014 filed as head of household—a group that includes many single custodial parents. Of these estimated 13.1 million filers, 8.9 million were women, and 4.2 million were men. These female-headed households included an estimated 14.7 million qualifying children, while their male counterparts included 6 million qualifying children.

Although women head of household filers were more likely to be EITC-eligible (69 percent), male heads of household were not far behind, with an estimated 61 percent eligible to receive the EITC in 2014.

To learn more about the EITC-eligible population, visit Brookings’ EITC data interactive.

On Monday, the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) released a report examining the long-term decline in the share of prime-age men (aged 25 to 54) who are either working or actively looking for work. What economists call the labor force participation rate for this population decreased from 98 percent in 1954 to 88 percent today, the second largest decrease among OECD countries. This trend has raised concerns not only for its impact on economic growth, but also because it seems to track an increase in mortality over that time, particularly among white males, as economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have found.

The CEA report documents a number of possible explanations for this trend, including increasing rates of women in the workforce, rising disability insurance claims, falling demand for less-skilled workers, and barriers to employment for those with criminal records.

The report’s national analysis alone, however, obscures tremendous variation across the United States in employment among this critical group.

According to data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, in 2014, 81 percent of prime-age men nationwide were employed (this statistic differs from the labor force participation rate in that it omits those who are looking for, but not in, work). Yet among the nation’s 374 metropolitan areas for which data are available, that rate ranged from over 93 percent in the oil boomtown of Midland, TX, to just over 50 percent in Kings County in California’s Central Valley.

There are clear regional patterns to this important statistic. Many of the metro areas with the highest employment rates for prime-age men are smaller places located in the middle of the country, from the Upper Midwest, to energy-rich areas in Texas and the Plains states, to the Intermountain West. In several large, economically dynamic metro areas such as Denver, Houston, Minneapolis, San Jose, and Washington, D.C., rates of work among prime-age men are also very high.

Of much greater concern is the large number of metropolitan regions with very low rates of work among prime-age men. These include many small former industrial centers in states like Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio; areas of West Virginia and Louisiana that rely on declining-employment industries like mining; and long-struggling agricultural economies in Arkansas, Texas, and inland California.

These patterns echo findings from the CEA report that falling demand for labor is an important part of the long-term decline in prime-age male employment. In many places where a high school diploma alone once provided the gateway to a middle-class job, nearly one-third of men in this age group are out of work. This is also evident in the local relationship between educational attainment and work—where educational attainment rates are higher among prime-age men, members of that group are more likely to be employed. A 10-percentage point difference in employment rates separates the most highly-educated quarter of metro areas from the least highly-educated quarter.

Beyond education, size seems to matter, too. Large metro areas exhibit higher rates of work among prime-age men than small metro areas. Across the 100 largest U.S. metro areas, 83.2 percent of prime-age males are employed, compared to 79.8 percent in the smaller 274 metro areas. This relationship partly reflects that men in large metro areas have higher rates of educational attainment than those in small metro areas. Yet even men who have no more than a high-school diploma work at higher rates in large metro areas (64 percent) than similarly educated men in smaller metro areas (62 percent). Larger regional economies with greater economic diversity may stimulate stronger demand for workers at lower skill levels.

Several of the policies that the CEA report recommends to improve prime-age male labor force participation, such as bolstering investment in public infrastructure, reforming unemployment insurance, and boosting educational attainment could help boost rates of work in lagging U.S. metro areas. However, none directly addresses the fact that problems in male employment disproportionately affect small and often economically isolated U.S. regions. This evidence suggests that policies to help dislocated workers relocate to larger, more economically dynamic metro areas—particularly by improving the supply of affordable housing in those regions—should be part of a comprehensive strategy to help reverse the troubling long-term decline in men’s work.

Editor's Note: This piece originally appeared on Lawfare.

The United States began to use drones in Yemen in 2002 to kill individuals affiliated with al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and its predecessor organizations and disrupt its operations there and abroad. Since then, over 200 strikes have killed over a thousand Yemenis, tens of children, and at least a handful of U.S. citizens – one of whom was a deliberate target. The program has drawn widespread condemnation from human rights organizations and some UN bodies, yet it remains in place because the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama view it as a success, as both have publicly stated.

Criticism of the program often takes the form of debates about which legal regime is relevant to judging a state’s use of targeted killings, which critics call “extra-judicial executions” or simply “assassinations.” While dissent has been strongest in academic and human rights communities, some scholars have echoed the arguments made by states that the imperatives of self-defense permit states to carry out such killings as legitimate acts of war. The Lawfare consensus seems in favor of these strikes.

I share the views of the moral and legal dissenters and hesitate to move beyond those debates because I don’t want to suggest that I accept the program’s legality. 

But I do want to engage those who do view the program as working — after all, if the U.S. administration did not believe it was working, it wouldn’t need to justify it legally. But by what metrics should we consider judging its success?

Perhaps the most obvious metric is whether AQAP leaders are actually being killed and, even more, whether their deaths substantially disrupted the group’s activities in Yemen or its ability to pursue objectives outside of Yemen. For advocates of this metric, the program has been successful in the short term — individuals killed – even if the longer-term impact is less clear because new leaders seem to step in with regularity.

Yet the success in taking out AQAP’s leadership is overstated. The numbers of AQAP members and supporters officially reported as killed are questionable, and probably grossly exaggerated. This is because the U.S. administration considers all adult males in the vicinity of the strikes to be combatants, not civilians, unless their civilian status can be established subsequently. Full investigations are neither desirable nor pragmatic for the U.S. government – particularly now that Yemen is the site of a civil and regional war. Even more troubling is that at times the U.S. may not even be certain of its primary targets. It frequently uses language that is so conditional that there seems to be more than a bit of guessing about the identities of those being targeted.

But I would like to focus on different metric: the longer-term impact of the drone strikes on the legitimacy and attractiveness of al-Qaida’s message in Yemen and its ability to recruit among Yemenis themselves. Drone strikes are widely reported in local media and online and are a regular topic of discussion at weekly qat chewing sessions across the country. Cell phone calls spike after drone strikes, which are also widely reported on Twitter and Facebook. The strikes are wildly unpopular, with attitudes toward the United States increasingly negative. An Arab Barometer survey carried out in 2007 found that 73.5 percent of Yemenis believed that U.S. involvement in the region justified attacks on Americans everywhere.

The narrative that the West, and especially the United States, fears the Muslim world is powerful and pervasive in the region. The U.S. intervenes regularly in regional politics and is a steadfast ally of Israel. It supports Saudi Arabia and numerous other authoritarian regimes that allow it to establish permanent U.S. military bases on Arab land. It cares more about oil and Israel than it does about the hundreds of millions in the region suffering under repressive regimes and lacking the most basic human securities. These ideas about the American role in Middle East affairs – many of them true – are among those in wide circulation in the region.

Al-Qaida has since 1998 advanced the argument that Muslims need to take up arms against the United States and its allied regimes in the region. Yet al-Qaida’s message largely fell on deaf ears in Yemen for many years. Yes, it did attract some followers, mostly those disappointed to have missed the chance to fight as mujahidin in Afghanistan. But al-Qaida’s narrative of attacking the foreign enemy at home did not resonate widely. The movement remained isolated for many years, garnering only limited sympathy from the local communities in which they sought refuge. 

 The dual effect of U.S. acceleration in drone strikes since 2010 and of their continued use during the “transitional” period that was intended to usher in more accountable governance has shown Yemenis how consistently their leaders will cede sovereignty and citizens’ security to the United States. While Yemenis may recognize that AQAP does target the United States, the hundreds of drone strikes are viewed as an excessive response. The weak sovereignty of the Yemeni state is then treated as the “problem” that has allowed AQAP to expand, even as state sovereignty has been directly undermined by U.S. policy – both under President Ali Abdullah Salih and during the transition. American “security” is placed above Yemeni security, with Yemeni sovereignty violated repeatedly in service of that cause. Regardless of what those in Washington view as valid and legitimate responses to “terrorist” threats, the reality for Yemenis is that the United States uses drone strikes regularly to run roughshod over Yemeni sovereignty in an effort to stop a handful of attacks – most of them failed – against U.S. targets. The fact that corrupt Yemeni leaders consent to the attacks makes little difference to public opinion.

Regardless of what those in Washington view as valid and legitimate responses to “terrorist” threats, the reality for Yemenis is that the United States uses drone strikes regularly to run roughshod over Yemeni sovereignty in an effort to stop a handful of attacks – most of them failed – against U.S. targets.

The United States cut aid to Yemen in 1990 when the newly united Yemeni state, which had just rotated into the Arab seat on the UN Security Council, voted against authorization for a U.S.-led coalition to reverse the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Yemen suffered a tremendous economic blow, as the United States joined Kuwait and Saudi Arabia in unilaterally severing aid to what was then and still is the poorest Arab nation. But with the rise of jihadi activism on the Arabian Peninsula over the next decade, and particularly after the bombing of USS Cole in 2000, Salih welcomed the return of U.S. aid to Yemen. This included a strong security dimension as the United States began tracking those suspected of involvement in the Cole attacks and other al-Qaida activities. Conspicuous caravans of FBI agents became a topic of local conversations, so the return of a U.S. presence in Yemen was also more visible than it had been previously. Salih claimed to have had advance knowledge of every drone strike.

Saudi Arabia has meddled in Yemen at least since the fall of the northern Mutawakkilite monarchy in the late 1960s. The Saudi intervention that began with air strikes in March of this year and escalated to ground troops is thus only the latest — and most egregious — of the kingdom’s efforts to affect Yemen politics. This background is necessary to understand that if Yemen is a “failed state,” despite scholarly protestations otherwise, it is at least in part due to decades of external actors violating Yemeni sovereignty with near impunity. The drone program, like the Saudi-led war, is merely a recent and overt example.

I lived in Yemen for several years spread over the period from 1994-1999. During that time, the optimism about the democratic opening of 1990 gave way to increasing frustrations as Salih solidified his control over united Yemen. He defeated the southern leadership in the 1994 war and curtailed the freedoms and pluralism that marked the early unification period, but open public debate has always been vibrant. Travel throughout Yemen was easy at that time, the only obstacle being the need to hire an all-terrain vehicle and driver who knew the many poorly marked roads.

The Yemenis I met cut across social classes and regions, but were overwhelmingly welcoming and friendly toward Americans. In my research on Islamist political parties in Yemen and Jordan, I talked to hundreds of self-described Islamists. I spoke to people in the larger cities, the smaller towns, and in rural areas. We spent long hours talking about Islam and debating the contemporary political problems facing Yemen, the United States, and the world. In 1995 we spoke extensively about race and class in America as Yemenis watched the O.J. Simpson trial on CNN International. I often marveled at the knowledge Yemenis had of the U.S. political system; I wondered if most Americans had comparable knowledge of any other country at all. I was welcomed into homes and shared holidays with families.

What strikes me now is how most Islamists saw jihadi groups as having no place in Yemeni politics. There were jihadis in Yemen, of course, primarily the “Afghan Arabs” who had returned from fighting abroad in Afghanistan and other theaters of jihad and faced difficulties reassimilating. Islamists donning mustaches complained about Taliban proclamations that adult male Muslims must sport a beard at least a fist long. They also complained of the Saudi-sponsored “scientific institutes” that taught the super-conservative Wahhabi take on Islam. Salih had even enjoined these extremists to launch deadly attacks against Southern socialists in the first years after unification. Most of the individuals influenced by these trends eventually found their way into al-Qaida circles.

But they were relatively few. Al-Qaida found little success in attracting Yemenis who were not already drawn to jihadi ideas. The al-Qaida recruiting pitch of attacking foreign powers inside of Yemen simply rang hollow. Even the 2000 attack upon USS Cole — a warship docked in Aden — was not widely viewed as the legitimate targeting of a foreign military power intervening in Yemeni politics. Al-Qaida had to resort to extremist tactics precisely because its ideas did not attract a following significant enough to spark a popular mobilization.

For al-Qaida, the drone program is a gift from the heavens. Its recruiting narrative exploits common misperceptions of American omnipotence, offering an alternative route to justice and empowerment. Regardless of American perceptions about the legitimacy or efficacy of the attacks, what Yemeni could now deny that the United States is waging an undeclared war on Yemen?

Most recently, this narrative of direct U.S. intervention has been further substantiated by U.S. material and intelligence support for the Saudi-led military campaign aimed at the return to power of the unpopular and exiled-President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi. Photographs of spent U.S.-made cluster bombs are widely circulated. Nor have drone attacks ceased; alongside the often indiscriminate Saudi-led bombing, American drones continue their campaign of targeted assassination. 

One might think that the Saudi attacks would not help al-Qaida, but it is contributing to al-Qaida’s growth in Yemen. The indiscriminate targeting of the Saudi-led campaign undermines any sense of security, let alone Yemeni sovereignty. And AQAP-controlled areas like the port of Mukalla are not being targeted by Saudi or Gulf troops at all. The United States aims to take up the job of targeting AQAP while the Saudi-led (and U.S.-backed) forces focus on defeating the Houthis and restoring Hadi to power. But the overall situation is one in which those multiple interventions in Yemen are creating an environment in which al-Qaida is beginning to appeal in ways it never had before.

For al-Qaida, the drone program is a gift from the heavens. Its recruiting narrative exploits common misperceptions of American omnipotence, offering an alternative route to justice and empowerment.

For these reasons, the U.S. use of drones to kill even carefully identified AQAP leaders in Yemen is counterproductive: it gives resonance to the claims of the very group it seeks to destroy. It provides evidence that al-Qaida’s claims and strategies are justified and that Yemenis cannot count on the state to protect them from threats foreign and domestic.

U.S. officials have argued that the drone program has not been used as a recruiting device for al-Qaida. But it is hard to ignore the evidence to the contrary, from counterinsurgency experts who have worked for the U.S. government to Yemeni voices like Farea Muslimi.

It’s not just that drone strikes make al-Qaida recruiting easier, true as that probably is, but that they broaden the social space in which al-Qaida can function. America does not need to win the “hearts and minds” of Yemenis in the service of some grand U.S. project in the region. But if America wants to weaken al-Qaida in Yemen, it needs at a minimum to stop pursuing policies that are bound to enrage and embitter Yemenis who might otherwise be neutral. 

There is an old saying that when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. The U.S. military — let alone its drones — is not the only tool on which the United States can rely. But when the measure of success is as narrow as the killing of a specific person, the tool gets used with increasing frequency. Indeed, drone strikes have significantly expanded under the Obama administration.

It is crucial to see the bigger picture, the one in which long-time Yemeni friends tell me of growing anti-U.S. sentiment where there was previously very little. Public opinion toward America has clearly deteriorated over the past decade, and to reverse it may take much longer. But the use of drones to kill people deemed enemies of the United States, along with the Saudi-led war against the Houthis, is expanding the spaces in which al-Qaida is able to function.  

Editor’s Note: This blog post is one in a series of posts in which guest bloggers respond to the Brookings paper, “The potential and limitations of impact bonds: Lessons from the first five years of experience worldwide."

In 2014, clause 5 (1) of the County Early Childhood Education Bill 2014 declared free and compulsory early childhood education a right for all children in Kenya. Early childhood education (ECE) in Kenya has historically been located outside of the realm of government and placed under the purview of the community, religious institutions, and the private sector. The disparate and unstructured nature of ECE in the country has led to a proliferation of unregistered informal schools particularly in underprivileged communities. Most of these schools still charge relatively high fees and ancillary costs yet largely offer poor quality of education. Children from these preschools have poor cognitive development and inadequate school readiness upon entry into primary school.

The Kenyan constitution places the responsibility and mandate of providing free, compulsory, and quality ECE on the county governments. It is an onerous challenge for these sub-national governments in taking on a large-scale critical function that has until now principally existed outside of government.

In Nairobi City County, out of over 250,000 ECE eligible children, only about 12,000 attend public preschools. Except for one or two notable public preschools, most have a poor reputation with parents. Due to limited access and demand for quality, the majority of Nairobi’s preschool eligible children are enrolled in private and informal schools. A recent study of the Mukuru slum of Nairobi shows that over 80 percent of 4- and 5-year-olds in this large slum area are enrolled in preschool, with 94 percent of them attending informal private schools.

In early 2015, the Governor of Nairobi City County, Dr. Evans Kidero, commissioned a taskforce to look into factors affecting access, equity, and quality of education in the county. The taskforce identified significant constraints including human capital and capacity gaps, material and infrastructure deficiencies, management and systemic inefficiencies that have led to a steady deterioration of education in the city to a point where the county consistently underperforms relative to other less resourced counties. 

Nairobi City County now faces the challenge of designing and implementing a scalable model that will ensure access to quality early childhood education for all eligible children in the city by 2030. The sub-national government’s resources and implementation capacity are woefully inadequate to attain universal access in the near term, nor by the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) deadline of 2030. However, there are potential opportunities to leverage emerging mechanisms for development financing to provide requisite resource additionality, private sector rigor, and performance management that will enable Nairobi to significantly advance the objective of ensuring ECE is available to all children in the county.

Social impact bonds (SIBs) are one form of innovative financing mechanism that have been used in developed countries to tap external resources to facilitate early childhood initiatives. This mechanism seeks to harness private finance to enable and support the implementation of social services. Government repays the investor contingent on the attainment of targeted outcomes. Where a donor agency is the outcomes funder instead of government, the mechanism is referred to as a development impact bond (DIB).

The recent Brookings study highlights some of the potential and limitations of impact bonds by researching in-depth the 38 impact bonds that had been contracted globally as of March, 2015. On the upside, the study shows that impact bonds have been successful in achieving a shift of government and service providers to outcomes. In addition, impact bonds have been able to foster collaboration among stakeholders including across levels of government, government agencies, and between the public and private sector. Another strength of impact bonds is their ability to build systems of monitoring and evaluation and establish processes of adaptive learning, both critical to achieving desirable ECD outcomes. On the downside, the report highlights some particular challenges and limitations of the impact bonds to date. These include the cost and complexity of putting the deals together, the need for appropriate legal and political environments and impact bonds’ inability thus far to demonstrate a large dent in the ever present challenge of achieving scale.

In the Kenyan context, especially at the sub-national level, there are two key challenges in implementing impact bonds.

To begin with, in the Kenyan context, the use of a SIB would invoke public-private partnership legislation, which prescribes highly stringent measures and extensive pre-qualification processes that are administered by the National Treasury and not at the county level. The complexity arises from the fact that SIBs constitute an inherent contingent liability to government as they expose it to fiscal risk resulting from a potential future public payment obligation to the private party in the project.

Another key challenge in a SIB is the fact that Government must pay for outcomes achieved and for often significant transaction costs, yet the SIB does not explicitly encompass financial additionality. Since government pays for outcomes in the end, the transaction costs and obligation to pay for outcomes could reduce interest from key decision-makers in government.

The above challenges notwithstanding, a combined approach of results-based financing and impact investing has high potential to mobilize both requisite resources and efficient capacity to deliver quality ECE in Nairobi City County. To establish an enabling foundation for the future inclusion of impact investing whilst beginning to address the immediate ECE challenge, Nairobi City County has designed and is in the process of rolling out a modified DIB. In this model, a pool of donor funds for education will be leveraged through the new Nairobi City County Education Trust (NCCET).

The model seeks to apply the basic principles of results-based financing, but in a structure adjusted to address aforementioned constraints. Whereas in the classical SIB and DIB mechanisms investors provide upfront capital and government and donors respectively repay the investment with a return for attained outcomes, the modified structure will incorporate only grant funding with no possibility for return of principal. Private service providers will be engaged to operate ECE centers, financed by the donor-funded NCCET. The operators will receive pre-set funding from the NCCET, but the county government will progressively absorb their costs as they achieve targeted outcomes, including salaries for top-performing teachers. As a result, high-performing providers will be able to make a small profit. The system is designed to incentivize teachers and progressively provide greater income for effective school operators, while enabling an ordered handover of funding responsibilities to government, thus providing for program sustainability.

Nairobi City County plans to build 97 new ECE centers, all of which are to be located in the slum areas. NCCET will complement this undertaking by structuring and implementing the new funding model to operationalize the schools. The structure aims to coordinate the actors involved in the program—donors, service providers, evaluators—whilst sensitizing and preparing government to engage the private sector in the provision of social services and the payment of outcomes thereof.

The decision by the Federal Election Commission to defer action on new rules to constrain the activities of so-called 527 political organizations is being portrayed as an utter collapse of the new McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. In fact, nothing could be further from reality.

The dispute over whether several new Democratic-leaning independent political groups should be required to register with the FEC and abide by contribution limits is a legitimate one, and there is merit in the regulatory proposal — rejected by the full commission — that was offered by Commissioners Scott Thomas and Michael Toner. But this argument largely concerns unresolved questions stemming from judicial and FEC interpretations of the 1974 law that governs federal election law — not McCain-Feingold.

Had the Thomas-Toner proposal been adopted, the Media Fund and America Coming Together would have faced tougher requirements on the sources and amounts of contributions they receive. But supporters of the Media Fund and ACT still would have had legal options to continue their campaign activities. ACT would have had to raise more hard money to match its soft-money contributions, but it had already been moving in that direction, as had Moveon.org, which is now focusing its campaign activities on hard-money fundraising and expenditures.

Millionaire contributors to the Media Fund could have separately made independent expenditures in the form of television ads that expressly advocated the defeat of President Bush. Unions could have financed their own "issue ads" supporting Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and attacking Bush until 30 days before the party convention or 60 days before the general election. Corporations would have retained the option to sponsor similar ads. Thereafter, even without FEC action, a key provision of McCain-Feingold kicks in. As the election nears, no 527 organization can use corporate or union money to finance broadcast ads that feature federal candidates.

McCain-Feingold was not written to bring every source of unregulated federal campaign funding within the scope of the law. Rather, it was designed to end the corrupting nexus of soft money that ties together officeholders, party officials and large donors. The law's principal goal was to prohibit elected officials and party leaders from extracting unregulated gifts from corporations, unions and individual donors in exchange for access to and influence with policymakers.

Indeed, the law has accomplished this objective. Members of Congress and national party officials are no longer soliciting unlimited contributions for the party committees, nor are they involved in the independent fundraising efforts of the leading 527 groups. The FEC's decision to defer action, therefore, does not pose the same risk of corruption as did the soft-money decisions of the past.

One of the fundamental concerns raised by the activities of 527s is that these groups, with their ability to receive unlimited contributions, would overshadow the candidates and weaken the role of parties in the electoral process. The new law, however, increased contribution limits to candidates and parties, to offset the effects of inflation and to ensure that parties remain major players in federal elections. Here, the evidence is overwhelming that the law's objective is being realized.

Bush and Kerry have both registered extraordinary fundraising success. Kerry has already raised more than $110 million, while the president has raised more than $200 million. In raising these sums, the presidential nominees have attracted the support of more than 500,000 donors who did not give money during the 2000 campaign. Congressional candidates, too, are also reaching out to new donors, with fundraising up 35 percent over the last cycle.

And in the first 15 months of this cycle, the national party committees have raised more than $430 million in hard money alone — $60 million more than they had raised in hard and soft money combined at the comparable point in the previous presidential cycle. This financial strength reflects the parties' success at adding more than 2 million new donors to their party rolls. For all the attention they are garnering, these 527 groups — both Democratic-leaning and Republican-leaning — pale when compared to the activities of the parties and candidates.

The 2004 elections have enormously high stakes. Supporters of Bush and Kerry are highly motivated to boost the election prospects of their favored candidate. All signs point to a vibrant get-out-the-vote effort by both parties and a rough equality in funding by and on behalf of the two major presidential campaigns. This reflects the 50/50 partisan division in the country and suggests that a disparity in resources is unlikely to determine the outcome of the presidential election.

The FEC has cheered some and disappointed others with its decision to defer new rulemaking on independent political organizations. While we empathize with the critics' concerns, we nonetheless take satisfaction that the major objectives of the new campaign-finance law are being realized.

The addition of Medicare in 1965 completed a suite of federal programs designed to protect the wealth and health of people reaching older ages in the United States, starting with the Committee on Economic Security of 1934—known today as Social Security. While few would deny Medicare’s important role in improving older and disabled Americans’ financial security and health, many worry about sustaining and strengthening Medicare to finance high-quality, affordable health care for coming generations.

In 1965, average life expectancy for a 65-year-old man and woman was another 13 years and 16 years, respectively. Now, life expectancy for 65-year-olds is 18 years for men and 20 years for women—effectively a four- to five-year increase.

In 2011, the first of 75-million-plus baby boomers became eligible for Medicare. And by 2029, when all of the baby boomers will be 65 or older, the U.S. Census Bureau predicts 20 percent of the U.S. population will be older than 65. Just by virtue of the sheer size of the aging population, Medicare spending growth will accelerate sharply in the coming years.

Employment among lower-income men has declined by 11 percent since 1980 and has remained flat among lower-income women. Men and women in the top and middle of the income distribution, on the other hand, have been working as much or more since 1980, creating a growing “work gap” in labor market income between haves and have-nots.   

This paper simulates the effect of five labor market interventions (higher high school graduation rate, minimum wage increases, maintaining full employment, seeing all household heads work full time, and virtual marriages between single mothers and unattached men) on the average incomes of the poorest one-third of American households. They find that the most effective way to increase average incomes of the poorest Americans would be for household heads to work full time, whereas the least effective intervention would be increasing education.

In terms of actual impact on incomes, the simulation of all household heads working full time at their expected wage increased average household earnings by 54 percent from a baseline of $12,415 to $19,163. The research also suggests that even if all household heads worked just some—at expected wages or hours—average earnings would still increase by 16 percent.

The least effective simulation was increasing the high school graduation rate to 90 percent and having half of those “newly” graduated go on to receive some form of post-secondary education. The authors note that the low impact of increasing education on mobility is likely because only one in six of bottom-third adults live in a household in which someone gains a high school degree via the intervention.

Because single parents are disproportionately represented among low-income families, Sawhill and coauthors also explored the impact of adding a second earner to single-parent families through a simulation that pairs low-income, single-mother household heads with demographically similar but unrelated men. That simulation increased the average household earnings of the bottom-third only modestly, by $508, or about 4 percent.

Efforts to increase employment among heads of the poorest households must take into consideration why those household heads aren’t working, they note. According to data from the 2015 Census, the most cited reason for women not working is “taking care of home and family” and for men it is being “ill or disabled.”  

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