By Marci Greenstein It’s hard to find any hopeful news about the housing crisis.  There was a sharp decline in home sales in December.  And the federal Home Affordable Modification Program, which was supposed to help homeowners avoid foreclosure, is not working.  But Ruth Simon of the Wall Street Journal highlighted ...

By Marci Greenstein Prisons are in the news these days.  The Washington Post’s Keith L. Alexander profiled another innocent person who was released from prison after 28 years based on DNA evidence.  The same week, Carrie Johnson of the Post covered the Justice Department’s disturbing report on the widespread sexual abuse of juveniles in detention facilities.  The report says that 12% of adolescents are abused by inmates or prison staff.  Johnson notes that the report comes as those advocates say that the Obama administration is moving too slowly on reforms that would reduce rape in U.S. prisons and as corrections officials are pressing Justice to overhaul reform proposals it is reviewing. These stories are likely to fade away unless the press keeps the spotlight on them.  By contrast, another kind of prison story is likely to gain traction among policymakers -- a proposal by California’s Governor to shift funds from prisons to schools, as reported by Judy Lin of the Associated Press.

By Marci Greenstein The Massachusetts program to help low-income smokers kick the habit is an example of government money well spent.  As Abby Goodnough reports in today's New York Times, the state’s Tobacco Suspension and Prevention Program has resulted in a ten percent (30,000 people) drop ...

Truly original thinking is unusual in a state bureaucrat who has been on the job for 36 years.  But that appears to be the case with David Bronner, head of Alabama's public pension system.  Dan Luzadder of the New York Times brings us the story of Bronner has moved in recent years for Alabama to invest its public pension fund in revamped luxury hotels, office towers and even a cruise ship dock in Mobile, golf courses across the state, and New York City Class A office space to boot.  The result is a state pension fund, at $28 billion, that is more than fifty times as large as it was when Bronner took over in 1973. Most pension funds for public employees just invest in stocks and bonds -- and many such funds are in very deep trouble.   What Bronner and the people of Alabama have done is different -- they've invested pension monies in their own state, bringing benefits to both.  Luzadder writes that Bronner "has invested in real estate as a way to create cultural changes in the state."

The stars might be aligning for a real national effort to limit how America heats up the globe, to our own and others' detriment. President Obama spoke today at the UN about a more energetic U.S. approach, the EPA has a new carbon tracking system, the Congress ...

It's an old story in America, and it's not a pretty one:  government waste and corruption, an inability to raise anything that might be called a "tax," and incompetent management that only gets noticed when the money runs out. Shaila Dewan of the New York Times delivers the sad story of Jefferson County, Alabama -- of which Birmingham is the county seat -- where social services from state-run nursing homes to public schools are seeing services slashed and budgets decimated.   Why?

The Los Angeles Times headline reads "Budget Accord Reached." And it's accompanied by a picture of California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and California Assembly Speaker Karen Bass each smiling. All this indicates that finally, three weeks after the fiscal year started, California has closed its $26.3 billion deficit and passed ...

It's hard to imagine there weren't a few calls between 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and the State House in Boston as the news of problems with the government-supervised health care system in Massachusetts surfaced.  Just as the Obama Administration's initiative is struggling in Congress, Abby Goodnough of the New ...

Just a few months ago, Understanding Government released an in-depth report, called America's Best Ride? on the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, or WMATA, the agency that runs the Metrorail trains involved in yesterday's tragic commuter train accident in suburban Maryland. 

In preparing that report, Ellen Ramachandran and I had ...

Joe Matthews made a good point in the Washington Post Outlook section this weekend about California's projected $42 billion budget deficit over the next two years:

California has one-eighth of the country's population and represents one-seventh of the economy. But our debt is less than one-hundredth of the federal ...