New Reports: Energy Effiiciency, Stimulus Spending and National Prosperity, and Much More

The Center for American Progress has a new interactive map to view the unemployment numbers in each state

Harvesting Low-Hanging Energy Savings -  Families and businesses fail to invest in energy efficiency for a variety of reasons: utility companies discourage it since their profits are often tied to electricity sold or landlords often don't profit from efficiency investments. This Center for American Progress report highlights how "energy efficiency resource standards" - adopted in 18 states - can generate real energy savings for consumers.

Metropolitan Recovery and Spending Priorities - This series of papers by the Brookings Institution suggests how the federal budget plan and recovery package might affect the metropolitan drivers of national prosperity, including innovation, human capital, infrastructure, and sustainable places.

Nine in Ten: Using the Tax System to Enroll Eligible, Uninsured Children into Medicaid and SCHIP - With 89.4% of uninsured children who qualify for Medicaid or SHIP living in families who file federal income tax homes, this Urban Institute paper argues that reforms that linked income tax data to health coverage applications could dramatically expand health coverage.

The Need for Speed: The Importance of Next-Generation Broadband Networks - In this report, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) argues that a jump to much faster "next generation" broadband speeds will allow radically new forms of Interent use, including collaborative music production, virtual teleconferencing, real time sharing of file servers, virtual classrooms, remote surgery and and a range of other uses that will have profound effects on economic and social life.

Election Protection 2008: Helping Voters Today, Modernizing the System for Tomorrow - The Election Protection Network has released their post-mortem on the 2008 elections.  Presented at the Senate Rules Committee hearing on voter registration, the report finds that the largest problem in the 2008 election was voter registration problems, which effected over a third of the voters seeking assistance through the election protection hotline.

The Millennial Pendulum and Yes We Can - Two new reports from the New America Foundation outline the overwhelmingly progressive political views of young voters ("millennials") as well as their emergence as a coherent political generation.