By the numbers: a 2014 money-in-politics index

By the numbers: a 2014 money-in-politics index
Source: Center for Public Integrity

We crunch a lot of numbers at the Center for Public Integrity. These are some from 2014 that stand out.

Caffeine improves reaction time, vigilance and logical reasoning during extended periods with restricted opportunities for sleep

Caffeine improves reaction time, vigilance and logical reasoning during extended periods with restricted opportunities for sleep
Source: Psychopharmacology

Rationale
Various occupational groups are required to maintain optimal physical and cognitive function during overnight periods of wakefulness, often with less than optimal sleep. Strategies are required to help mitigate the impairments in cognitive function to help sustain workplace safety and productivity.

Objectives
To test the effectiveness of repeated 200 mg doses of caffeine on cognitive function and live-fire marksmanship with soldiers during three successive nights of sustained wakefulness followed by 4-h afternoon sleep periods.

Methods
Twenty Special Forces personnel (28.6 ± 4.7 years, 177.6 ± 7.5 cm and 81.2 ± 8.0 kg) were randomly assigned to receive four 200-mg doses of caffeine (n = 10) or placebo (n = 10) during the late evening and early morning hours during three successive days. An afternoon 4-h sleep period followed. The psychomotor (PVT) and field (FVT) vigilance, logical reasoning (LRT) tests and a vigilance monitor assessed cognitive function throughout the study. Live-fire marksmanship requiring friend–foe discrimination was assessed.

Results
Caffeine maintained speed on the PVT (p < 0.02), improved detection of events during FVT (p < 0.001), increased number of correct responses to stimuli as assessed by the vigilance monitor (p < 0.001) and increased response speed during the LRT (p < 0.001) throughout the three overnight testing periods. Live-fire marksmanship was not altered by caffeine.

Conclusions
A total daily dose of 800 mg caffeine during successive overnight periods of wakefulness is an effective strategy to maintain cognitive function when optimal sleep periods during the day are not available.

AASHTO and APTA’s 2015 Bottom Line Report Estimates $163 Billion Needed Annually to Fix Nation’s Aging Surface Transportation System

AASHTO and APTA’s 2015 Bottom Line Report Estimates $163 Billion Needed Annually to Fix Nation’s Aging Surface Transportation System
Source: American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials and the American Public Transportation Association

The “2015 Bottom Line Report” on transportation investment needs, released today by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials and the American Public Transportation Association, estimates that to meet current demand it will require an annual capital investment over six years by all levels of government in the amount of $120 billion in the nation’s highway and bridge network and $43 billion in America’s public transportation infrastructure. To meet the combined surface transportation needs, it would require an investment of $163 billion investment per year in surface transportation over a six year period. Despite those dramatic investment needs, currently only $83 billion is invested in roads and bridges, while just $17.1 billion is invested in public transit.

126 Law Enforcement Officer Fatalities Nationwide in 2014

126 Law Enforcement Officer Fatalities Nationwide in 2014
Source: National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund

Law enforcement fatalities in the U.S. rose 24 percent in 2014, reversing what had been two years of dramatic declines in line of duty deaths, based on preliminary data compiled and released today by the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund (NLEOMF).

According to the NLEOMF report, 126 federal, state, local, tribal and territorial officers were killed in the line of duty this year, compared to 102 in 2013. The number of officers killed by firearms in 2014 (50) was 56 percent higher than the number killed by gunfire in 2013 (32). Ambush-style attacks, as evidenced earlier this month by the shooting deaths of New York City Police Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos while sitting in their marked patrol car, were the number one cause of felonious officer deaths for the fifth year in a row. Fifteen officers nationwide were killed in ambush assaults in 2014, matching 2012 for the highest total since 1995.

Forty-nine officers were killed in traffic-related incidents this past year, which was an 11 percent increase from 2013. Twenty-seven officers died due to other causes in 2014, including 24 who suffered from job-related illnesses—such as heart attacks—while performing their duties.

+ Full Report (PDF)

Business Bribery Risk Assessment

Business Bribery Risk Assessment
Source: RAND Corporation

Key Findings

Multinational companies often have inadequate tools for judging business bribery risk; they frequently rely on aggregate, general corruption indexes that may not provide sound information on which to base decisions.

• The lack of good information on bribery risk can lead to less-than-adequate compliance programs, exposing firms to the potential risk of violating anti-corruption laws, or to an overly aggressive and costly approach.

Business leaders and other stakeholders, as well as the literature, identified specific information needed to provide a balanced and objective view of business bribery risk.

• The types of information required included (1) difficulty of doing business; (2) need for interactions with government; (3) the relevant anti-bribery laws and regulations; (4) information concerning enforcement of domestic and international anti-bribery laws and regulations; (5) a measure of government transparency and quality, including budgetary transparency; (6) information about a government’s civil service quality and management; and (7) civil society oversight, including the role of the press and media.

Juvenile Court Statistics 2011

Juvenile Court Statistics 2011 (PDF)
Source: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention

Juvenile Court Statistics 2011 describes delinquency cases handled between 1985 and 2011 and petitioned status offense cases handled between 1995 and 2011 by U.S. courts with juvenile jurisdiction. National estimates of juvenile court delinquency caseloads in 2011 were based on analyses of 910,063 automated case records and court-level statistics summarizing an additional 51,569 cases. Estimates of status offense cases formally processed by juvenile courts in 2011 were based on analyses of 80,837 automated case-level records and court-level summary statistics on an additional 6,285 cases. The data used in the analyses were contributed to the National Juvenile Court Data Archive (the Archive) by more than 2,400 courts with jurisdiction over 85% of the juvenile population in 2011.

AU — Characteristics of people using mental health services and prescription medication, 2011

Characteristics of people using mental health services and prescription medication, 2011
Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics

Good mental health is a crucial aspect of good general health, and underpins a productive and inclusive society. Mental health and illness result from the complex interplay of biological, social, psychological, environmental and economic factors at all levels (Endnote 2).

The information in this publication relates to people who actually accessed either an MBS mental health-related service or a PBS subsidised medication in 2011. (For more information, please refer to the Explanatory Notes). As the following graph shows, the age structure of these two groups was quite different.

Overwork and the Slow Convergence in the Gender Gap in Wages

Overwork and the Slow Convergence in the Gender Gap in Wages
Source: American Sociological Review

Despite rapid changes in women’s educational attainment and continuous labor force experience, convergence in the gender gap in wages slowed in the 1990s and stalled in the 2000s. Using CPS data from 1979 to 2009, we show that convergence in the gender gap in hourly pay over these three decades was attenuated by the increasing prevalence of “overwork” (defined as working 50 or more hours per week) and the rising hourly wage returns to overwork. Because a greater proportion of men engage in overwork, these changes raised men’s wages relative to women’s and exacerbated the gender wage gap by an estimated 10 percent of the total wage gap. This overwork effect was sufficiently large to offset the wage-equalizing effects of the narrowing gender gap in educational attainment and other forms of human capital. The overwork effect on trends in the gender gap in wages was most pronounced in professional and managerial occupations, where long work hours are especially common and the norm of overwork is deeply embedded in organizational practices and occupational cultures. These results illustrate how new ways of organizing work can perpetuate old forms of gender inequality.

KPMG Report: Global Business Executives See Cloud Driving Business Transformation And Improving Customer Alignment

KPMG Report: Global Business Executives See Cloud Driving Business Transformation And Improving Customer Alignment
Source: KPMG

New data from the U.S. audit, tax and advisory firm KPMG LLP, show the increased use of cloud technology by global business to better connect with their employees and customers. In a new report, titled “Elevating Business in the Cloud,” the firm outlines the results of its 2014 Cloud Survey and interviews with more than 500 global executives from the financial services, retail, health care, media, and pharmaceutical industries. The report contrasts select aspects of the 2014 survey results with data collected in the 2012 edition of the survey, and outlines important shifts in the usage of and attitudes toward the cloud.

According to the executives in the 2014 survey, the top use of cloud remains driving cost efficiencies (49 percent), as was evident in the 2012 version (48 percent). However, the 2014 survey results reveal that in increasing numbers, organizations are using cloud technology to enact large-scale change, whether within individual business units or across the enterprise. These transformative uses of cloud include: better enabling a flexible and mobile workforce (42 percent) and improving alignment and interaction with customers, suppliers and business partners (37 percent).

Structure and Finances of U.S. Farms: Family Farm Report, 2014 Edition

Structure and Finances of U.S. Farms: Family Farm Report, 2014 Edition
Source: USDA Economic Research Service

Most U.S. farms—97 percent in 2011—are family operations, and even the largest farms are predominantly family-run. Midsize and large-scale family farms account for 8 percent of U.S. farms but 60 percent of the value of production. In contrast, small family farms make up 90 percent of the U.S. farm count but produce a 26-percent share of farm output.

See also: America’s Diverse Family Farms: 2014 Edition

Violence perpetrated by ex-spouses in Canada

Violence perpetrated by ex-spouses in Canada
Source: Justice Canada

Intimate partner violence affects the lives of many Canadians. In 2011, there were 97,451 victims of police-reported intimate partner violence1 (Sinha 2013) with women representing 80% of the victims of police-reported intimate partner violence in 2011.

While these numbers provide some insight into the prevalence of spousal violence2 in Canada, it only reflects a small portion of the actual violence that occurs. Data from the 2009 General Social Survey – Victimization (GSS) found that only 22% of victims of self-reported spousal violence reported the incident to the police (Brennan 2011). These numbers also do not provide information on the prevalence of violence perpetrated by ex-spouses, nor the experiences of victims of ex-spousal violence

Brookings — Top Economic Stories of 2014

Top Economic Stories of 2014
Source: Brookings Institution

Brookings Economic Studies experts offer insights and recommendations on what lies ahead in 2015, while weighing in on the economic developments that made headlines in the past 12 months.

Retail — The Agglomeration of Bankruptcy

The Agglomeration of Bankruptcy (PDF)
Source: National Bureau of Economic Research

This paper identifies a new channel through which bankrupt firms impose negative externalities on non-bankrupt peers. The bankruptcy and liquidation of a retail chain weakens the economies of agglomeration in any given local area, reducing the attractiveness of retail centers for remaining stores leading to contagion of financial distress. We find that companies with greater geographic exposure to bankrupt retailers are more likely to close stores in affected areas. We further show that the effect of these externalities on non-bankrupt peers is higher when the affected stores are smaller and are operated by firms with poor financial health.

CBO — Long-Term Implications of the 2015 Future Years Defense Program

Long-Term Implications of the 2015 Future Years Defense Program
Source: Congressional Budget Office

To provide information about its plans beyond the coming year, the Department of Defense (DoD) generally provides a five-year plan, called the Future Years Defense Program (FYDP), that is associated with the budget it submits to the Congress. Because decisions made in the near term can have consequences for the defense budget in the longer term, CBO regularly examines DoD’s FYDP and projects its budgetary impact for roughly a decade beyond the period covered by the FYDP. For this analysis, CBO used the FYDP that was provided to the Congress in April 2014; it spans fiscal years 2015 to 2019, and CBO’s projections span the years 2015 to 2030.

For fiscal year 2015, DoD requested appropriations totaling $555 billion. Of that amount, $496 billion was for the base budget and $59 billion was for what are termed overseas contingency operations (OCO). The base budget covers programs that constitute the department’s normal activities, such as the development and procurement of weapon systems and the day-to-day operations of the military and civilian workforce. Funding for OCO pays for U.S. involvement in the war in Afghanistan and other nonroutine military activities elsewhere. The FYDP describes DoD’s plans for its normal activities and therefore generally corresponds to the base budget.

DoD’s 2015 plans differ from its 2014 plans in important ways. For example, in an effort to reduce costs, the current FYDP includes sizeable cuts in the number of military personnel, particularly in the Army.

Census Bureau Projects U.S. and World Populations on New Year’s Day

Census Bureau Projects U.S. and World Populations on New Year’s Day
Source: U.S. Census Bureau

As our nation prepares to ring in the new year, the U.S. Census Bureau today projected the United States population will be 320,090,857 on Jan. 1, 2015. This represents an increase of 2,334,187, or 0.73 percent, from New Year’s Day 2014, and 11,345,319, or 3.67 percent, since Census Day (April 1) 2010.

In January 2015, the U.S. is expected to experience a birth every eight seconds and one death every 12 seconds. Meanwhile, net international migration is expected to add one person to the U.S. population every 33 seconds. The combination of births, deaths and net international migration increases the U.S. population by one person every 16 seconds.

The projected world population on Jan. 1, is 7,214,958,996, an increase of 77,381,246, or 1.08 percent, from New Year’s Day 2014. During January 2015, 4.3 births and 1.8 deaths are expected worldwide every second.

CRS — PILT (Payments in Lieu of Taxes): Somewhat Simplified (December 10, 2014)

PILT (Payments in Lieu of Taxes): Somewhat Simplified (PDF)
Source: Congressional Rsearch Service (via Federation of American Scientists)

Under federal law, local governments (usually counties) are compensated through various programs for reductions to their property tax bases due to the presence of most federally owned land. These lands cannot be taxed, but may create a demand for services such as fire protection, police cooperation, or longer roads to skirt the federal property. Some compensation programs are run by specific agencies and apply only to that agency’s land. The most widely applicable program, administered by the Department of the Interior (DOI), is called “Payments in Lieu of Taxes” (PILT, 31 U.S.C. §§6901-6907). Under the statute, eligible lands consist of those in the National Park System, National Forest System, or Bureau of Land Management; lands in the National Wildlife Refuge System if they are withdrawn from the public domain; lands dedicated to the use of federal water resources development projects; dredge disposal areas under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; lands located in the vicinity of Purgatory River Canyon and Piñon Canyon, Colorado, that were acquired after December 31, 1981, to expand the Fort Carson military reservation; lands on which are located semi-active or inactive Army installations used for mobilization and for reserve component training; and certain lands acquired by DOI or the Department of Agriculture under the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act (P.L. 105-263). This report addresses only the PILT program administered by DOI.

Early-Life Exposure to Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons and ADHD Behavior Problems

Early-Life Exposure to Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons and ADHD Behavior Problems
Source: PLoS ONE

Importance
Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are widespread urban air pollutants from combustion of fossil fuel and other organic material shown previously to be neurotoxic.

Objective
In a prospective cohort study, we evaluated the relationship between Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder behavior problems and prenatal polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon exposure, adjusting for postnatal exposure.

Materials and Methods
Children of nonsmoking African-American and Dominican women in New York City were followed from in utero to 9 years. Prenatal polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon exposure was estimated by levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon- DNA adducts in maternal and cord blood collected at delivery. Postnatal exposure was estimated by the concentration of urinary polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon metabolites at ages 3 or 5. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder behavior problems were assessed using the Child Behavior Checklist and the Conners Parent Rating Scale- Revised.

Results
High prenatal adduct exposure, measured by elevated maternal adducts was significantly associated with all Conners Parent Rating Scale-Revised subscales when the raw scores were analyzed continuously (N = 233). After dichotomizing at the threshold for moderately to markedly atypical symptoms, high maternal adducts were significantly associated with the Conners Parent Rating Scale-Revised DSM-IV Inattentive (OR = 5.06, 95% CI [1.43, 17.93]) and DSM-IV Total (OR = 3.37, 95% CI [1.10, 10.34]) subscales. High maternal adducts were positivity associated with the DSM-oriented Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Problems scale on the Child Behavior Checklist, albeit not significant. In the smaller sample with cord adducts, the associations between outcomes and high cord adduct exposure were not statistically significant (N = 162).

Conclusion
The results suggest that exposure to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons encountered in New York City air may play a role in childhood Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder behavior problems.

See: A Link Between Air Pollution and Adolescent ADHD (The Atlantic)

New Report: City Officials Optimistic On City Financial Health

New Report: City Officials Optimistic On City Financial Health
Source: National League of Cities

City officials are overwhelmingly feeling optimistic about the health and direction of local fiscal conditions for the first time since the recession, according to a new report from the National League of Cities. The 29th annual City Fiscal Conditions report shows that city revenues are showing the first positive growth in 5 years and cities are beginning to hire workers again.

City officials clearly believe cities are in better shape than at any point since the recession. But there are still questions over what the next few years will bring since the report also indicates that revenue is likely to be flat next year, with increases in: service costs, long-term infrastructure needs, and city pension and health care obligations, along with decreased federal and state aid.

+ City Fiscal Conditions in 2014

CBO — Taxing Capital Income: Effective Marginal Tax Rates Under 2014 Law and Selected Policy Options

Taxing Capital Income: Effective Marginal Tax Rates Under 2014 Law and Selected Policy Options
Source: Congressional Budget Office

The federal tax treatment of capital income affects investment incentives, both for the amounts invested and for allocations among assets. When tax rates are high, investors require higher before-tax rates of return and thus forgo investments with lower returns that they otherwise would have made. Current law produces significant variations in the taxation of capital income from different investments, thus leading investors to require higher before-tax rates of return on some investments than on others. Those differences reduce economic efficiency—the extent to which resources are allocated to maximize before-tax value.

An effective marginal tax rate (hereafter referred to as an effective tax rate or ETR) measures an investor’s tax burden on returns from an investment. An ETR combines a statutory tax rate with other features of the tax code (various deductions and credits, for example) into a single percentage that applies to before-tax capital income realized over an investment’s lifetime. (In this report, capital income consists of receipts minus the cost of goods sold, operating expenses, interest paid, and an allowance equal to the decline in value of capital assets because of economic depreciation—that is, wear and tear or obsolescence.) The higher the ETR, the greater the distortion in investments, holding all else equal; thus, the greater the variation (or nonuniformity) of ETRs among different investments, the less likely it is that resources will be used efficiently.

For this report, CBO estimated ETRs on income from marginal investments (those expected to earn just enough, after taxes, to attract investors) in such tangible capital assets as equipment, structures, land, and inventories (assets held for resale). In considering both corporate and individual taxation—but only with respect to the permanent features of federal income tax law in 2014—CBO arrived at the following conclusions:

• The ETR on capital income is, on average, 18 percent;
• The ETR on income from owner-occupied housing is close to zero; and
• The ETR on capital income generated by businesses is, on average, 29 percent.

Parental Rights and Sexual Assault

Parental Rights and Sexual Assault
Source: National Conference of State Legislatures

Approximately 26 states and the District of Columbia have enacted legislation regarding the parental rights of perpetrators of sexual assault.

Eighteen states allow for termination of parental rights if the parent was convicted of sexual assault which resulted in the birth of the child. The other 8 states and the District of Columbia deny custody or visitation if the child was conceived as a result of a rape or sexual assault. Generally, a conviction is required before parental rights are terminated.

Also, some states (Arkansas, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Rhode Island, Utah and Wyoming) still allow child support to be collected when the custody and visitation rights have been restricted. However, in Oregon, child support is still required even though parental rights are terminated.