Government Executive - Authors - Jordan Weissmann

This Former DEA Agent Is Going to Work in the Marijuana Business

Jordan Weissmann, The Atlantic — Tue, 10 Dec 2013 16:10:07 -0500

Patrick Moen is a 36-year-old former supervisor at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, where, until recently, he led a team based in Portland that fought methamphetamine and heroin traffickers.

Now, he is embarking on a career change. A rather dramatic one. The Wall Street Journal reports that Moen has become the in-house lawyer at Privateer Holdings Inc., "a private-equity firm that invests solely in businesses tied to the budding legal marijuana industry."

In other words, the revolving door between business and government just made an unexpected, and very druggy, turn.

Wonkblog's Lydia DePillis thinks this has the makings of a Ben Affleck movie, presumably because Moen's beard has "Argo" written all over it. Me, I think this has more of a Showtime original series vibe. But beyond that, it's a telling sign of how quickly marijuana entrepreneurs have gone corporate, both to make a profit and, you know, avoid federal prosecution.

Founded by a pair of Yale MBA's, Privateer has $7 million in funding so far, and is one of at least two private equity firms aiming to civilize the industry a bit and mainstream its business practices. Rather than invest in U.S. growers or dispensaries, which operate in a legal gray area, it purchases up pot-consultants, insurers, and websites that operate around the edges of the business. One example: Leafly.com, a site where users can review cannabis strains and dispensaries. But, as USA Today has reported, "even the strategy of profiting from marijuana without touching it could run afoul of money-laundering laws, if those services are bought with drug proceeds."

So what's a savvy investment firm in legally hazy territory to do? Act like a bank, and hire a lawyer with government experience knows how to avoid breaking the law, or can at least make a polished case to their former colleagues arguing that you haven't.

If you think about the sheer number of career prosecutors who go on to become defense lawyers, it doesn't seem beyond the realm of possibility that, as the cannabis business grows, other narcs might one day follow Moen's lead. And if that happens, I have to wonder if it will start to subtly change the way regulators regard marijuana, since hiring former officials is one way industries tend to accrue credibility, both in the eyes of government lawyers and politicians.

"The potential social and financial returns are enormous," Moen told the Journal of his new business. "The attitudes toward cannabis are shifting rapidly."

Indeed they are.

]]>

The States Where Women Make the Most (and Least) Compared to Men

Jordan Weissmann, The Atlantic — Fri, 27 Sep 2013 14:00:00 -0400

At some point or another, you've heard the stat that American women earn just 77 cents for every dollar that men make. But what about state to state? Is it as bad in New York as, say, Ohio or Wyoming? In a new report, the Center for American Progress offers up this coast-to-coast breakdown. The pay gap ranges all the way from a low of 15 cents in places like Vermont and Nevada up to 36 cents in Wyoming. (More story after the chart. Also note: CAP tracks what women earn compared to white men specifically, though that doesn't seem to have changed the average disparity).

So what does this tell us? Before getting to that, we need to talk a little bit about the raw wage gap as a statistic. Because it has problems. Enough problems that my editor Derek Thompson and I strongly diverge on whether it's even a useful measure. (I say it is, he says it isn't.) When someone says women earn 84 cents on the dollar compared to men in New York or 70 cents on the dollar compared to men in Utah, they're comparing all female workers and all male workers at once. As a result, you sort of end up comparing apples and oranges, or in this case, software engineers and elementary school teachers. As a rule, women tend to work in lower-paying careers. They also tend to work fewer hours, thanks largely to family obligations, and often take breaks in their career to take care of children, both of which bring down their pay. When you compare women and men who work in the same kinds of jobs for similar hours and similar years, most (though not all) of the gap disappears. So the graph up above isn't really showing us the states where women face the most discrimination, in the sense of not being paid equally for equal work.*

All of that said, I do think that on a very basic level, it shows us the states where women are having the most luck matching up financially with men, whether it's because public policy gives them a leg up in the labor force, or because the local mix of industries happens to favor women (I don't think it's an accident that hospitality-heavy Florida has a relatively small gap). Though it's not an airtight relationship, states where women hold a greater percentage of management jobs seem to have a smaller pay gap.

Here's How Much It Costs the Feds to Lock Up 219,000 People

Jordan Weissmann, The Atlantic — Tue, 13 Aug 2013 11:01:46 -0400

This week, Attorney General Eric Holder is set to announce a batch of reforms aimed at thinning out our overcrowded federal prisons by easing up on drug prosecutions. Among other steps, the Washington Post reports that "low-level, nonviolent drug offenders with no ties to gangs or large-scale drug organizations will no longer be charged with offenses that impose severe mandatory sentences." So, in other words, common sense appears to be on the verge of winning a rare victory in the drug war. Good times.

Better yet, we stand to save a few dollars as a result. Over the last three decades, the federal prison population has grown by almost 800 percent, so that it now contains some 219,000 inmates, about half of whom are there for drug crime. And, as our penitentiaries have gotten fuller, running them has become more expensive.

See the chart and read more at The Atlantic.

(Image via schankz/Shutterstock.com)

]]>

How to Earn $990,000 More In Your Lifetime

Jordan Weissmann — Tue, 23 Jul 2013 14:00:00 -0400

Ever since the Great Recession sucked the air out of the legal industry, an extremely vocal group of writers—myself included—has been trying to warn pretty much any 20-something with an Internet connection to think twice about going to law school. The job market for recent grads has been murder. And there’s an abiding sense that the business model that sustained many big corporate firms, the ones that offer those plum $160,000-a-year jobs of lore, is in danger of becoming obsolete, if it hasn’t already.

So it was with both great skepticism and a bit of personal trepidation that I cracked open “The Economic Value of a Law Degree,” a new draft paper by Seton Hall Law Professor Michael Simkovic and Rutgers economist Frank McIntyre. The two researchers argue that over the course of a career, your average J.D.-holder will make almost $1 million more than a similar worker with just a bachelor’s degree (or about $700,000 after taxes). Even law grads on the low end of the salary scale seem to fare better than their merely college-educated peers. Crucially, the paper finds no evidence that the earnings premium has declined since the economy crashed.

“[O]ur results suggest that attending law school is generally a better financial decision than terminating one’s education with a bachelor’s degree,” they write. Or to put it more bluntly, the law school haters are wrong.

So, are we? Is paying $60,000 a year to learn torts, tax, and civil procedure really a great deal after all? I don’t think there’s a neat yes or no answer to that question. But I do think law school critics need to take Simkovic and McIntyre’s conclusions seriously.

Most Men Stop 'Leaning In' To Their Career By Their Mid-Thirties

Jordan Weissmann, Quartz — Mon, 15 Jul 2013 12:15:00 -0400

One big reason more moms (and dads) don’t “lean in” at the office is that they just don’t want more work.

As Catherine Rampell at the New York Times has been reminding us for the past week, that’s true for the majority of workers. According to the Families and Work Institute, just 37% of working women and 44% of working men said they wanted more responsibility at the office in 2008, the last year of data (see below).

Those figures got me wondering, though: When, exactly, do women and men stop trying to climb the corporate ladder? And why? Is it just about having children or is it something else?

To find out, I asked the Institute to break down its 2008 findings by age group, which produced the graph below. It tells a simple story: By our mid-to-late-20s, the desire to take on more responsibility fades fast for both men and women.

Analysis: Is Snowden an Example of Contractors Earning Too Much?

Jordan Weissmann, The Atlantic — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 09:32:59 -0400

No matter how you feel about Edward Snowden's decision to dish on the government's spying habits, there's at least one issue all of us can agree to be outraged over: his salary. Before hightailing it Hong Kong, the 29-year-old said he had a plum $200,000-a-year job as a Honolulu-based government-contractor for Booz Allen Hamilton, helping the National Security Agency run its surveillance operation. (Booz Allen Hamilton said it was $122,000 a year, not $200,000.) This for a fairly low-level professional with a GED. Here, meanwhile, is how Snowden described his pre-leak lifestyle to The Guardian:

"[Y]ou can get up everyday, go to work, you can collect your large paycheck for relatively little work against the public interest, and go to sleep at night after watching your shows."

Low stress. High pay. As long as your conscience doesn't get in the way, it's apparently good to be a cog in our national-security apparatus.

There's a frustrating reason for that. Over the years, the government has outsourced huge chunks of its operations wholesale to private contractors like Booz Allen, particularly in the realm of intelligence gathering. And it's costing Washington untold billions every year.

Nobody knows for sure how many contractors the government pays because, well, the government doesn't keep track. But New York University Professor Paul Light has estimated that in 2005, they made up more than half the federal workforce, totaling some 7.6 million employees. Since then, the tally has no doubt grown.

Read the full story at TheAtlantic.com.

Update: Booz Allen Hamilton has said Snowden earned $122,000 a year, not $200,000.

]]>

Analysis: Slashing Government Jobs Hurts the Unemployment Rate

Jordan Weissmann, The Atlantic — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 17:49:06 -0400

Today, the Labor Department announced that the U.S. unemployment rate remained unchanged in May at 7.6 percent. After the news, I caught the following exchange on Twitter between the Wall Street Journal's Justin Lahart and University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers.

Unemployment rate with same number of govt jobs as at end of 2008: 6.9%
-- Justin Lahart (@jdlahart) June 7, 2013

@justinwolfers Back of my envelope, 6.5%.
-- Justin Lahart (@jdlahart) June 7, 2013

That's the long and the short of what I find to be the most infuriating aspect of this jobs recovery. The U.S. economy has been steadily adding jobs, but were it not for government layoffs -- made at a time where Washington has been capable of borrowing money essentially for free -- we'd be in better shape. We've been self sabotaging for about four years now.

How to Mock Your Boss On Facebook Without Getting Fired

Jordan Weissmann, The Atlantic — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 09:08:00 -0500

The right of workers to get together and moan about their bosses has been enshrined in U.S. law ever since 1935, when President Roosevelt signed the landmark National Labor Relations Act. The heart of the statute, known as Section 7, guarantees employees the right to organize, collectively bargain, and "engage in other concerted activities" for their "mutual aid and protection." That basically means you've got permission to whine about management at a bar without getting canned.

These days, that right also extends to the (often whiny) free-for-all that is social media. In a series ofreports and rulings this year, the National Labor Relations Board clarified that you are indeed entitled to log onto Facebook or Twitter and gripe about your employer without facing retribution. Of course, all rights have their limitations, and this one is no exception, as attorney Philip Gordon explained in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek this week. Gordon relates the fascinating case of Knauz BMW, the moral of which is this: If you're determined to make fun of your company, keep your lacerating wit focused on stuff involving your actual job.

Here are the facts of the case, as Gordon realtes them: Knauz BMW, a dealership outside Chicago, decided to throw a soiree of sorts for its customers, and management thought it would be fun to roll out a hot dog cart for the party. Its sales team argued -- to no avail -- that an event full of luxury-car owners needed a classier menu, and when the day came, a salesman named Robert Becker snapped some photos of the cart and loaded them onto Facebook "along with snide comments," as Gordon puts it.

Read more at The Atlantic.

Image via Tom Kaye / Shutterstock.com ]]>

The head of Goldman Sachs wants to raise your retirement age

Jordan Weissmann, The Atlantic — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 10:31:18 -0500

Lloyd Blankfein, the 57-year-old CEO of Goldman Sachs, who was paid more than $16 million dollars last year, appeared on CBS last night to talk about the Fiscal Cliff and lay some truth on the American people: You all need to work longer.

You can look at history of these things, and Social Security wasn't devised to be a system that supported you for a 30-year retirement after a 25-year career. ... So there will be things that, you know, the retirement age has to be changed, maybe some of the benefits have to be affected, maybe some of the inflation adjustments have to be revised. But in general, entitlements have to be slowed down and contained.

As Ezra Klein and others before me have noted, it is very easy for people like Blankfein who are paid outrageous sums of money to sit in offices, think, and talk to tell Americans they should delay retirement. After all, they probably aren't pining for for the day they get to stop working. Same goes for senators who would prefer to croak while prattling on during a floor speech and for national journalists who intend to keep writing until they finally go blind from staring at a monitor. They like their jobs. They don't want to leave them.

However, it might not be so easy for your average American, particularly one with a numbingly repetitive or physically taxing occupation, to work those extra years.

Why don’t more women get promoted?

Jordan Weissmann, The Atlantic — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 12:57:40 -0500

This past week, Goldman Sachs announced its latest round of annual promotions, and in doing so, it offered all of us a reminder that Wall Street is still more or less an adult chapter of the He-Man Women Hater's Club. Just 14 percent of the bank's new partners, and 23 percent of its new managing directors, were female, according to Bloomberg. That's pretty paltry, and about in line with the last couple years.

The sobering stats prompted Business Insider's Henry Blodget to ask his readers just what the heck was going on. Though he later nixed this passage after deciding it made him sound like a "sexist neanderthal," here's how he initially framed the issue.

Choice of words aside, Henry's on target about at least one thing: Babies probably explain much of the gap, and not just at Goldman. As Anne Marie Slaughter will tell you, even highly educated women tend to do a disproportionate share of child rearing in this country, and research suggests that ends up putting a huge dent in their careers.

Get used to bigger government, former Treasury secretary says

Jordan Weissmann, The Atlantic — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 12:17:09 -0500

Americans may need to get used to the idea that government will make up a bigger part of our economy in the future, former treasury secretary and Obama economic advisor Larry Summers said today at the Washington Ideas Forum.

At least, they do if they want to keep living in the sort of country they've gotten used to.

Summers tried to offer a dose of realism to the debate over debt reduction and the fast-approaching fiscal cliff, the massive package of tax hikes and spending cuts scheduled to kick in at the end of the year that economists, including Summers, say will plunge the economy back into a recession. Summers argued, as many have, that the final deal the president strikes with Republicans needs to address our long-term debt problems without imperiling the near-term health of the recovery. But he said that policy makers who want to pare government spending back so that it makes up the same portion of the economy it has in past decades -- say, around 20 percent -- are ignoring the hard truth about the ways the world has changed.

Read the rest at TheAtlantic.com.

]]>

How a former Bush administration official would reform FEMA

Jordan Weissmann, The Atlantic — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 12:55:48 -0400

Hurricane Sandy has focused attention on Mitt Romney's comment that we should shrink the Federal Emergency Management Agency and give states more responsibility for dealing with natural disasters. Is he right? Could conservative reforms actually save FEMA -- and save lives? To get a sense of what a thoughtful Republican plan for the agency might look like, I called Matt Mayer, a former Bush administration official in the Department of Homeland Security and visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What did you make of Romney's comments about FEMA?

He didn't artfully state the point I think he was trying to make.

I think his thrust was that there is an appropriate role for states and local governments, and there is an appropriate role for the federal government. And we've kind of lost sight of that in terms of disaster response. We've nationalized so many of the events over the last few decades that the federal government is involved in virtually every disaster that happens. And that's not the way it's supposed to be. It stresses FEMA unnecessarily. And it allows states to shift costs from themselves to other states, while defunding their own emergency management because Uncle Sam is going to pay. That's not good for anyone.

When FEMA's operational tempo is 100-plus disasters a year, it's always having to do stuff. There's not enough time to truly prepare for a catastrophic event. Time is a finite quantity. And when you're spending time and money on 100-plus declarations, or over 200 last year, that taxes the system. It takes away time you could be spending getting ready for the big stuff.

Why do you think Washington has assumed so much responsibility for dealing with disasters?

I think the first real change was when James Lee Witt was put in charge of FEMA during the Clinton administration, and for the first time it wasn't a Washington Bureaucrat or a former military person. For the first time, it was someone who came from the states and spent most of their career in the states. And so he brought a very state-centric position. And it was also the first time a former politician was put in charge of FEMA. He ran for office seven times in Arkansas, and he brought a very political mindset to FEMA. One of his famous quotes was: "Disasters are inherently political events." And I think that created the opportunity to start using FEMA as an entity that could get involved in things in a way that would have political outcomes. And I think you saw that in 1996, when FEMA eclipsed any record it had previously set and issued 158 declarations in an election year. It was just unprecedented. And it's not like there was just some flurry of activity. They just got involved in lots and lots of different disasters.

We now have our smallest government in 45 years

Jordan Weissmann, The Atlantic — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 15:29:03 -0400

Since the official end of the Great Recession, America's public sector has shrunk. And shrunk. And shrunk some more. We've said goodbye to about 600,000 government jobs, handing the economy a nasty self-inflicted wound in the process.

But how small has our public sector really become? Here's one way to think about it: Compared to our population, it hasn't been this size since 1968. Your dreams are coming true Baby Boomers. We're almost all the way back to the Summer of Love!

First, credit where it's due. The Hamilton Project has produced a beautiful graph illustrating the government employment to population ratio. As it shows, there are now fewer public sector employees per American than at any time dating back to the Carter administration (To be clear, we're talking state, federal, and local here).

Read more of this story at The Atlantic.

]]>

Workers spend 650 hours a year on email

Jordan Weissmann, The Atlantic — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 14:00:47 -0400

Unless you happen to get some sort of obsessive compulsive satisfaction from keeping your inbox in shipshape -- and hey, if you do, more power to ya -- dealing with email has got to be one of the most deadening aspects of any office job. And if the tedium of Outlook management wasn't already dreadful enough, consider this: There's a good chance you spend more than a quarter of each week reading and answering those emails.

That factlet comes courtesy of the McKinsey Global Institute, which broke down how so-called "interaction workers" spend their days. They describe these as people whose jobs require "complex interactions with other people, independent judgment, and access to information." I'm interpreting it as consultant speak for "office stiff."

The upshot: we spend 13 hours a week, or 28 percent of our office time, on email. Assuming two weeks vacation, that multiplies out to 650 hours a year

Read the full story at The Atlantic

(Image via nokhoog_buchachon /Shutterstock.com)

]]>

The incredible shrinking American government

Jordan Weissmann, The Atlantic — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 11:52:00 -0400

Another jobs report has come and gone, and yet again, we're left to wonder whether the economy might not be a tad healthier if we weren't firing government workers left and right. Over the past year, the United States has shed 169,000 public sector workers. That's more jobs than we've added in the past two months.

Of course, those cuts haven't been equally distributed. The biggest blow has been to local governments, which have said goodbye 96,000 workers. Uncle Sam has been on his own weight loss plan too, though, slimming down by 52,000 workers.

See graphs and the rest of the story at The Atlantic.

(Image via Andrey_Popov /Shutterstock.com)

]]>