“The lesson for all leaders: Start with problems, not solutions. People will discount the evidence if they don’t like the fix you are proposing. This is particularly important in today’s extremely fractured world. The first step in moving forward during such great polarization isn’t offering solutions, it’s agreeing a problem exists,” writes Fuqua School Dean Bill Boulding.
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NC ‘Compromise’ on HB2 and LGBT Discrimination
“Many activists working on the ground in North Carolina for HB2’s repeal see the compromise as a disgrace,” says Gabriel Rosenberg, a professor of gender, sexuality and feminist studies. “Gov. Cooper and the state Republican Party are horse-trading with the basic human rights of their constituents. … The compromise takes basic rights from LGBTQ citizens and gives them access to accommodations that never should have been denied in the first place. So it’s a give and take just like when a bully steals your wallet but lets you keep bus fare home.”
North Carolina’s HB142: Repeal? Compromise? What Does it all Mean?
Once North Carolinians saw the economic impact of HB2 and realized it put the state out of step with federal and most state laws, “people just saw this as unnecessary, unforced error,” says Pope “Mac” McCorkle, a former Democratic consultant said. North Carolina’s bill also left other Southern states — such as South Carolina, which rejected a bathroom bill, and Georgia, whose governor vetoed a religious freedom bill, last year — looking “more progressive, reasonable, sensible,” he says.
Is Repeal of Bathroom Bill a Good Deal for Anyone?
The NCAA’s deadline was “the symbolic hammer that finally worked,” says public policy professor Pope “Mac” McCorkle, a former lawyer who has worked as a policy consultant for North Carolina’s representatives. He says the deal worked out Thursday looks more like “a plea bargain. “The NCAA isn’t liberal or conservative (by nature) so it became kind of the default judge in this case.”
Read More in The International Business Times
Bathroom Law Repeal Leaves Few Pleased in North Carolina
Public policy professor Pope “Mac” McCorkle called the deal an “awkward compromise.” He says it would ultimately be judged by how many of the sports events, entertainers and businesses who had turned on the state would eventually change their minds. Law professor Jane Wettach says that beyond schools, few institutions had ever policed people’s bathroom choices. “Which is what made the law sort of symbolic,” she says, referring to House Bill 2.
Read More in The New York Times
North Carolina’s Bathroom Bill Repeal Won’t Bring the NCAA Back
“The state could lose more than $3.76 billion over the next 12 years due to boycotts and lost business opportunities stemming from the bill, which takes aim at LGBT anti-discrimination policies, according to an Associated Press analysis. … It will take strong action to convince national and global organizations that have cut ties with the state to return …,” writes Dorie Clark, an adjunct professor at The Fuqua School of Business and a former presidential campaign spokeswoman for Howard Dean.
Read More in Fortune
Is Fight to Repeal/Replace Affordable Care Act Dead?
Dr. Kevin Schulman says President Obama is often blamed for skyrocketing health care costs even though it long preceded the Affordable Care Act and affects everyone, not just those who have insurance through the law. Yet Schulman doesn’t see any serious attempts to address that core issue among the health care policy proposals floating around Washington. “It doesn’t seem like a lot of people on the Hill have agreement about what the problems are,” he says. “Coming to a consensus on a solution is even more challenging. I’m not optimistic that they can get there.”
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Business and Political Worlds are Colliding
Bill Boulding, dean of The Fuqua School of Business, talks about how business leaders are reacting to political activism. Some of the recent examples include the NBA cancelling its all-star game in North Carolina because of HB2, the state’s so-called “bathroom bill.” Adds Boulding: “The thing that I think is critical that I think the business community brings that’s lost in the political world, is the business community knows how to bring people together with common purpose and we seem to have lost that on the political side of things where there’s so much divisiveness.”
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How Will Trump’s Moves on Coal Affect the Industry?
Coal’s share of the U.S. power market has dwindled from more than 50 percent last decade to about 32 percent last year. Gas and renewables have both made gains, and hundreds of coal-burning power plants have been retired or are scheduled to shutter soon — trends over which Trump has limited influence. Utilities “are not going to flip on a dime and say now it’s time to start building a whole bunch of coal plants because there’s a Trump administration,” says Brian Murray, director of environmental economics at the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.
Read More in The Denver Post
Equitable Growth in Conversation: An interview with William Darity Jr.
“I think that the run-up in inequality that we’ve observed in recent years is closely tied to a set of social policies that have produced virtually unlimited capacity to generate extraordinary levels of wealth. … In short, I think we can look directly at a set of policies and, more recently, at the advent of the Great Recession to understand the rise in economic inequality,” says economist William “Sandy” Darity, the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy at the Sanford School of Public Policy.
Read More From The Washington Center for Equitable Growth
Trump Moves Decisively To Wipe Out Obama’s Climate-Change Record
President Trump will take the most significant step yet in obliterating his predecessor’s environmental record Tuesday, instructing federal regulators to rewrite key rules curbing U.S. carbon emissions. Tim Profeta, who directs the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, says regulators from more than half-dozen states in the Southeast are now talking about how to chart their own path forward. “We are now talking about the evolution of the power sector in an environment of uncertainty,” Profeta says. “We’re seeing the beginning of states taking control of their destiny.”
Read More in The Washington Post
The GOP Effort To Repeal Obamacare Appears Dead, For Now
David Anderson, an expert in insurance plan design at the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy, explains how under the GOP plan insurers would use their newfound freedom to exclude potentially costly customers. “The first stream of product design will be aimed to cover very little,” he says. “They will be very narrow networks with no major academic medical centers involved; their benefits will be designed to drive away sick people with chronic conditions.”
Read More in The Los Angeles Times
