New America Foundation

IN A REMARKABLE SPEECH at the National Endowment for Democracy in November 2003, President Bush acknowledged 60 years of American error and announced a policy of encouraging democracy, not dictatorship, in the Muslim world. Whether this long overdue message is followed by an actual policy change or simply results from the short-term need to explain the Iraq war in the absence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) remains to be seen.

A NEW CHALLENGE FACES THE WORLD. It is not a problem that can be photographed, reduced to a sound bite, or rendered into the conventional formulations of Left and Right. It has everything to do with sex, death, money, and power, yet is rarely the subject of a headline.

FROM THE MOMENT the Berlin Wall came down, a succession of U.S. presidents used American economic, military, and cultural primacy as leverage to build a new global system incorporating both the former communist countries and the developing nations of the global South. Over the course of the next decade, America's leaders phased out the Pax Americana alliance system in Europe and East Asia -- a Temporary Cold War measure -- and replaced it with a global great-power concert.

The central idea underlying American grand strategy since the end of the Cold War has been dominance -- the notion that the United States is so powerful and virtuous that it can pretty much remake the world on its own terms. For most of its two terms in office, the Clinton administration pursued a form of soft dominance, in that it sought to legitimize its policies through America's traditional alliances and through the use of international bodies like the International Monetary Fund.

A college education is not only increasingly a necessity to secure a good job, but also often the first step to acquiring assets and creating greater opportunities. Each additional year of educational attainment yields increased earnings and makes the ownership of assets such as investments, retirement savings, a home, and other sources of wealth more likely. With the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act underway in 2004, an opportunity now exists to make a college education available to every qualified person.

This menu of policy options was written with federal policymakers in mind. It reflects the latest and best thinking, and draws heavily on the work of many experts focusing on various facets of savings and asset-building policy. As there are many policy routes to broadening savings and asset ownership, there is necessarily some overlap among the ideas presented below.

All new media, taught Marshall McLuhan, are destined to subsume and extend all old media, and to use the old media as their content, much like large fish filling their stomachs with small fish. The fish metaphor belongs to me, not McLuhan, since he was rarely so dull in his imagery.

The big fish of today is Big Broadband – access to the Web at 10 to 100 megabits per second for homes and 1 to 10 gigabits per second for businesses. The small fish are broadcast, DSL, cable modem, and voice.

We stand at the threshold of a wireless paradigm shift. New technologies promise to replace scarcity with abundance, dumb terminals with smart radios able to adapt to their surroundings, and government defined licenses with flexible sharing of the airwaves. Early examples suggest that such novel approaches can provide affordable broadband connections to a wide range of users.

The Federal Communications Commission will soon decide whether to grant local TV broadcasters enhanced “must-carry” rights on cable TV systems. Specifically, broadcasters seek to expand their current one-program must-carry right to a multi-program must-carry right, which they call “multicast” must-carry.