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The Northeast Region's Relative Success on Two Fronts

Writer's picture: Tom CochranTom Cochran




A terrifically interesting piece on the Northeast region's states' relatively coordinated, cooperative, and successful approach to dealing with the COVID-19 plague appears in today's NYTimes by the Times' New England Bureau Chief, Ellen Berry. Her piece rightly quotes Brown University/Watson Institute's Wendy Schiller and refers generally to its 400-year tradition of "localized, participatory government," with the region having been been "..less affected by decades of anti-government rhetoric" in partially explaining how the region's Governors could loosely unite on policy actions and elicit more widespread public support for their coordinated disease control measures.



However, I would like to have seen more attention paid to the post-WW II history of regional organizing by public and private sector leaders to achieve federal and state public policy outcomes, e.g the work of the New England Council, the Northeast-Midwest Congressional and Senate Coalitions, the Coalition of Northeastern Governors, and others. Though this tradition and the institutional bases of regional cooperation and collaboration have undoubtedly waxed and waned since World War II - perhaps having reached their post-war peak in the 70's and 80's - they have never declined irredeemably. So it shouldn't be a surprise to that the Governors of the have region from both parties stuck loosely together in the face of this health challenge. Nor is it a surprise to see House members like Rep. Mikie Sherrill and Peter King forming their Regional Recovery Task Force, which seeks broader regional and national unity to address a state and local government fiscal crisis without post- Great Depression precedent.


At almost the same moment as I was finishing Ellen Berry's piece, The Century Foundation's study "Inequality begins in childhood. What would it cost to close America's education, funding gaps?" landed in my in-box. (Answer: about $150 billion). The study's incredibly useful interactive map - letting you drill down to the district level in each state) - strongly suggests that, while the Northeastern states have continued to perpetuate some serious funding gaps between rich and poor school districts despite a long history of state constitutional cases supporting property tax power equalization, they have generally done better on this score than states in other regions of the country.


It's reasonable to argue that the same traditions that have supported the states' more successful approach to pandemic fighting have also contributed to a loose region-wide consensus of the value of public goods like education and the willingness to pay the among the nation's highest state and local tax rates to secure those public goods.


Now let's see if the region's Governors and other leaders can find a way to reboot and then sustain a regionally unified approach and hammer out a unified policy action agenda to the serious structural challenges that continue to plague the regional economy and tear at its social fabric, as they were able to do in 1976 with their Saratoga conference in that pivotal Presidential election year.


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