Reinventing America’s Schools Project Director David Osborne appeared on the The Report Card, American Enterprise Institute’s education podcast hosted by Nat Malkus.
Three stunningly dire climate change reports have emerged in the last month, including the UN “Emissions Gap” report released this week and the U.S. National Climate Assessment released last Friday. Together, they ring an alarm bell of historic proportions, and must serve as an unprecedented wake-up call to the U.S. and global leaders meeting in Poland next week for key UN climate negotiations.
Yet, even as exigent as they are, these studies still underestimate the risks of runaway, catastrophic climate change, which other reports have found. Simply put, the sum of the science finds that achieving near-term and deep emissions reductions has become manifestly urgent for the safety of nations around the world.
The United Nation’s “Emissions Gap” report out this week finds that the current emissions reduction pledges from all countries within the Paris Agreement, including the U.S., are far too weak to keep temperatures from increasing less than 2 degrees Celsius pre-industrial levels and provide even a modicum of climate protection. The report notes that the “original [global] level of ambition needs to be roughly tripled for the 2°C scenario and increased around fivefold for the 1.5°C scenario.”
WASHINGTON—Will Marshall, President of the Progressive Policy Institute, today released the following statement regarding the Democratic House leadership election:
“The Progressive Policy Institute does not endorse candidates in elections for Congressional leadership. Who should be the next House Speaker and occupy other top leadership posts is for the new Democratic majority to decide.
“Whatever the outcome, we believe Democrats will need new leaders with fresh ideas to preserve their fragile House majority and build a big tent coalition that can send Trump Republicans packing in 2020.
“Therefore, we want to commend those rising Democratic leaders who have stood up to call for a new direction for the party. Win or lose, leaders like Reps. Kathleen Rice, Seth Moulton, Tim Ryan, Kurt Schrader and others have done their party a service by sparking a vital debate that centers less on personalities than a choice between the status quo and radically pragmatic change.”
The U.S. economy almost certainly has a problem with rising market power. A bevy of recent economic studies show that concentration in many sectors of the economy has increased over the past 20-30 years. These increases in concentration have been convincingly linked to such economic ills as rising prices, weak productivity growth, stagnant real wages, slower job growth, weak investment, and falling labor share.
Indeed, there is little doubt that strong and consistent competition policy plays an important role in a market economy. Longstanding incumbents in a wide range of industries can exercise market power to choke off innovation and growth, protecting the status quo and driving up prices rather than benefiting workers and consumers.
Online finance providers have supplied an innovative source of capital for small businesses after a credit gap opened up in the wake of the Great Recession. However, while disclosures such as annual percentage rate (APR) are required by federal law for consumer loans, they are not for small business loans and credit products. The result has been costly for small business owners, with some providers charging exorbitant but undisclosed rates. Research by Opportunity Fund found the average monthly payment for some small businesses was about double what they could afford to pay.
New Jersey has an opportunity to be a leader in extending commonsense consumer protections to the small business credit market. Proposed legislation currently being debated calls for standardized terms such as APR, the payment schedule, and the minimum payment to be applied to small business loans or credit products up to $100,000.
Access to financing is often one of the biggest hurdles small business owners face, particularly for the smaller loan amounts many new or very small businesses seek: 86 percent of minority-owned businesses and 88 percent of woman-owned business bring in less than $100,000 per year.[i] Supporting the financial health of these businesses is often critical to supporting the financial health of the communities they serve as well.
That’s why the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) commends State Senator Troy Singleton and Representative Clinton Calabrese for introducing this important legislation requiring greater transparency in the small business lending market. California was recently the first state in the nation to enact a similar law. The New Jersey bill closely tracks a proposal detailed in a recent PPI policy report, “Shining a Light on Small Business Credit: Promoting a Transparent Marketplace” by Jessica Milano, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Small Business, Community Development, and Housing Policy at the Treasury Department under the Obama Administration.
Milano calls for legislation to extend the Truth in Lending Act disclosure requirements to small business loans or credit products under $100,000. While no one likes reading fine print and filling out loan documentation, a recent poll by Small Business Majority found that 74 percent of small business owners support regulating online lending to ensure small businesses are protected from predatory practices. Simple disclosures including a few key metrics—especially APR—would allow a small business owner to “comparison shop” and easily analyze loan prices and terms across multiple credit providers, whether they are a bank, a payment processor, or an online lender.
According to the research by Opportunity Fund, some online lenders charge businesses average APRs of 94 percent, without ever disclosing those rates to the borrower. These companies argue that disclosing APR will discourage customers from taking their loans, causing the small business credit gap to widen further. That’s like arguing that if your doctor told you smoking was dangerous you might not do it, which in turn would hurt tobacco companies, so better not to know. If your doctor kept information that was vital to your health from you, he could be accused of malpractice, so why doesn’t the same principle apply to financial health as well?
As Singleton and Calabrese recognize, disclosing APR at the time of offering and acceptance of a loan would equip small business owners with a transparent metric to make an apples-to-apples comparison between products and choose the best option for them.
[i] Kate Bahn, Regina Willensky Benjamin, and Annie McGrew, “A Progressive Agenda for Inclusive and Diverse Entrepreneurship,” Center for American Progress, October 2016. https://cdn.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/13000159/ProgressiveAgenda.pdf
Restaurant workers are reputed to be among the lowest-paid workers in the country. One reason restaurant workers, and servers in particular, are perceived to be so poorly paid is the fact that tips often make up a good chunk of their pay, while the hourly wage they receive from their employers is lower than the prevailing minimum wage.
For years, partisans and ideologues have assured us that the political center is dead, so don’t bother making persuasive arguments to swing voters. Just get your base out, and may the most “energized” team win. The 2018 midterm elections, however, showed that the center’s demise has been greatly exaggerated.
The big story was the revolt of suburban voters, led by white, college-educated women, against President Trump’s polarizing populism. Their defection helped Democrats win the popular vote (again), score their biggest gains in the House of Representatives since 1974 and add a slew of new governors.
A national poll by the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) and Expedition Strategies taken on the eve of the midterm provides further evidence that America’s pragmatic center is resilient and bouncing back after two years of Trump’s bizarre presidency.
It suggests that our democracy’s firewalls against demagoguery and extremism are still intact and that Trump’s 2016 win may be an aberration, a detour rather than a fundamental realignment of U.S. politics.
In fact, our survey illuminates a new political landscape that is favorable to Democrats heading into the 2020 presidential election cycle.
Health care costs continue to be top of mind for a plurality of voters, according to a recent poll by PPI and Expedition Strategies. Our poll surveyed 1,090 likely voters on to gather data to apply context and to for what kind of agenda progressives should craft as the 2020 election cycle dawns. Health care handily outweighed other issues overall and was the one issue where there was agreement across party lines in its importance.
In the midterms, this was most clear in states like Arizona where Senator-elect Kyrsten Sinema essentially ran a one issue campaign – protecting those with preexisting conditions – and beat out Republican Martha McSally. Her messaging resonated with voters who were afraid of losing affordable coverage because of preexisting conditions.
Among respondents of our poll, 45 percent ranked health care as one of their top three concerns, including 55 percent of Democrats, 42 percent of Independents and 38 percent of Republicans. The results showed that there is anxiety around health care costs. When asked about the best way to reduce the gap between the wealthy and poor in the United States, 19 percent of respondents cited reducing health care costs as a possible policy lever.
The Affordable Care Act (ACA) was a market-based solution that focused on getting more Americans covered. And in that regard, it did succeed. The uninsured rate among the non-elderly population has dropped from 18.2 percent in 2010, to 10.3 percent in 2018.
That being said, costs are still a driving factor for why so many remain uninsured or why even those with coverage struggle to afford their co-pays and co-insurance. In 2016, of those who said they were uninsured, 45 percent cited cost as the driving reason. Additionally, one in four Americans taking prescription drugs reports difficulty affording their medications. Though overall drug spending only accounts for roughly 10-13 percent of total health care spending, it is the fastest growing sector. This may explain why drug companies find themselves out of favor with voters. When asked how they would rate industries, drug companies came in lower than oil companies.
It’s clear that the uncertainty stemming from GOP sabotage of the ACA contributes to voter anxiety over pre-existing conditions, drug costs, and out of pocket costs. The concern over cost could explain why there is significant public interest in nationalized health care and Medicare-for-all. By a margin of 54 percent to 46 percent, voters said they favor a system in which “everyone gets health care through Medicare instead of through people’s place of work or instead of buying it directly,” with even 47 percent of Republicans favoring such a universal program, according to the poll.
Health care is a top concern among women in particular. Women reported being very worried that drug companies are charging too much and were twice as worried as men about their ability to pay health care bills.
The big question for Dems is, having won the 2018 midterm in significant part on defending ACA, what should Dems do next on health care? Our poll suggests voters want action to stabilize markets, protect people with preexisting conditions and keep premiums down. Though many reported supporting Medicare-for-all, our poll also shows that people don’t want big tax increases. Additionally, Kaiser Family Foundation polling has found that when informed about the tradeoffs of greater government involvement (i.e. higher taxes) some of the support for Medicare-for-all wanes.
As PPI has documented, there are many roads to universal and affordable health care. As the 2020 presidential cycle gets underway, there should be a robust debate about the best way for Dems to build on the ACA’s successes.
Overall, the poll suggested that a progressive, yet pragmatic, agenda could help Democrats sustain a governing majority. Voters clearly favor individual initiative and self-determination even if they favor a larger government role in health care specifically. Democrats need to maintain and expand this near-majority advantage going into 2020. And to do that, they must craft a broadly appealing agenda that brings in and keeps independents and less committed partisans—the majority of whom call themselves ‘moderate’—under the tent.
National survey shows suburban voters repelled by President Trump’s divisive behavior, open to Democrats’ “Big Tent” approach
WASHINGTON —The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) today released a national opinion survey that highlights the surprising resilience of America’s pragmatic political center two years into Donald Trump’s deeply polarizing presidency. The poll reinforces a key takeaway from the 2018 midterm elections: Suburban voters – especially women – are repelled by the president’s racial and cultural demagoguery and are moving away from a Trump-dominated GOP.
“Our poll suggests that Donald Trump’s election in 2016 is more likely to be an aberration than any permanent shift in America’s political course,” said Anne Kim, PPI Director of Social and Domestic Policy and PPI President Will Marshall. “The defection of suburban voters creates a political landscape that favors Democrats in 2020 – if they stick to the ‘big tent’ approach that proved so effective in the midterm.”
The poll conducted by Pete Brodnitz at Expedition Strategies contains findings about what’s top of mind for voters, their ideological outlook and leanings, and their views on health care, trade, growth and inequality, the role of government, monopoly and competition, and other contentious issues.
“The agenda that could help Democrats sustain a governing majority, our poll suggests, is one that is progressive yet pragmatic—one that’s optimistic, aspirational and respects Americans’ beliefs in individual initiative and self-determination; one that broadens Americans’ opportunities for success in the private sector and strengthens the nation’s global economic role; one that demands more from business but doesn’t cross the line into stifling growth; and one that adopts a practical approach to big challenges such as immigration reform and climate change,” write Kim and Marshall.
“For Democrats to maintain and expand this near-majority advantage, they must craft a broadly appealing agenda that brings or keeps independents and less committed partisans—the majority of whom call themselves ‘moderate’—under the tent.”
The following key findings from PPI’s survey provide some guideposts for how progressives can develop a winning agenda and message in 2020:
Moderates matter more than ever.
Strong partisans of either stripe were a minority among our respondents – potential evidence that the nation may have hit “peak polarization” and is now on its way to a more rational equilibrium.
Americans want help, not handouts.
Despite the strong economy, many Americans are anxious about their economic futures. Nevertheless, the vast majority of Americans do not see government’s job as rescuing them from these anxieties.
Voters are open to a bigger federal role in health care and are especially worried about drug prices – but the messages are mixed.
Nearly half of respondents ranked health care as one of their top three concerns. High costs – especially prescription drug prices – and the fear of losing coverage were voters’ biggest worries.
Companies need to step it up on wages, but treating Big Business as the enemy is a mistake.
Despite the unpopularity of some sectors, voters are not generally anti-business. Few voters, for instance, are worried about corporate monopolies.
Businesses are no longer getting a free pass when it comes to wages and worker treatment. Our survey found surprisingly strong support for government intervention to raise wages.
Nationalism is a failing strategy – perhaps even among Trump’s core supporters.
Voters would like to see American companies succeed globally and don’t support closing our economy to foreign trade or Trump’s tariff wars. More broadly, voters would like to see the United States involved with the world rather than retreating inward.
The federal deficit could be the sleeper issue of 2020.
Voters are very worried about government spending and debt. It ranked as their second biggest worry, behind drug prices, and fifth on the list of big problems they want Washington to tackle.
Don’t forget immigration.
While immigration priority ranked relatively low for Democrats, it registered as the top-tier concern for Republicans and a major concern for independents. Immigration also looms large for non-college-educated whites, both men and women. The good news is that voters are far more nuanced in their views on immigration than President Trump.
Voters are pragmatists on energy and climate change.
Green hostility to fossil fuel is an anti-jobs stance among moderate voters. Democrats can win on energy and climate issues – but only if they stop outsourcing their energy policy to green activists and avoid a false choice between fossil fuels and renewable energy.
Americans prefer a responsive local government over a centralized federal government that they deeply distrust.
Voters across the political spectrum deeply distrust the federal government, both in its capacity and competence to get things done and on the question of whether it serves the interests of the public versus those of moneyed concerns.
While voters see state governments as much less captive to special interests than Washington, they otherwise tended to give the states similar grades. However, they express a strikingly high level of satisfaction in local government.
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The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) today released a national opinion survey that highlights the surprising resilience of America’s pragmatic political center two years into Donald Trump’s deeply polarizing presidency. The poll reinforces a key takeaway from the 2018 midterm elections: Suburban voters – especially women – are repelled by the president’s racial and cultural demagoguery and are moving away from a Trump-dominated GOP.
“Our poll suggests that Donald Trump’s election in 2016 is more likely to be an aberration than any permanent shift in America’s political course,” said Anne Kim, PPI Director of Social and Domestic Policy and PPI President Will Marshall. “The defection of suburban voters creates a political landscape that favors Democrats in 2020 – if they stick to the ‘big tent’ approach that proved so effective in the midterm.”
The poll conducted by Pete Brodnitz at Expedition Strategies contains findings about what’s top of mind for voters, their ideological outlook and leanings, and their views on health care, trade, growth and inequality, the role of government, monopoly and competition, and other contentious issues.
“The agenda that could help Democrats sustain a governing majority, our poll suggests, is one that is progressive yet pragmatic—one that’s optimistic, aspirational and respects Americans’ beliefs in individual initiative and self-determination; one that broadens Americans’ opportunities for success in the private sector and strengthens the nation’s global economic role; one that demands more from business but doesn’t cross the line into stifling growth; and one that adopts a practical approach to big challenges such as immigration reform and climate change,” write Kim and Marshall.
“For Democrats to maintain and expand this near-majority advantage, they must craft a broadly appealing agenda that brings or keeps independents and less committed partisans—the majority of whom call themselves ‘moderate’—under the tent.”
By all accounts, House Democrats return to Washington this week to begin planning their priorities for 2019 in an aggressive frame of mind. But on climate change and energy issues, rather than simply responding to Trump’s latest provocation (like those regarding California wildfires), they must step back and take a strategic approach.
This means Democrats must have the discipline to subordinate all other considerations to the key goal of creating the political and policy conditions needed to enact landmark energy and climate legislation after 2020, when they may well win back the White House and Senate. Indeed, how they handle energy and climate in the next two years will play a critical role in determining whether they gain the power to act.
Despite bright spots in Nevada and several Governors races, the mid-term elections held some cautionary lessons. The defeat in Washington State of a carbon tax referendum and several other climate-related measures in Arizona and Colorado, along with apparent state-wide losses in “ground-zero” climate impacts states of Florida and Texas, should be sobering.
The politics of climate change are complex, even for voters already suffering from its impacts. Swing voters will not respond to far-left ideological crusades or simple-minded attempts to rigidly impose “best” climate policies from above. Such approaches have largely failed as political matter for nearly 30 years now.
On Tuesday, Democrats won control of the U.S. House of Representatives and state legislatures across the country thanks to record-breaking turnout among young voters. Now it is time for newly elected Democrats to stand up for the interests of their constituents by supporting an economic agenda that funds America’s future.
The reckless policies of the current administration, and many of its predecessors, have slashed critical public investments that most benefit young Americans while simultaneously burying them and future generations under a mountain of debt. In a recent report, the Progressive Policy Institute documents these trends and explores how these reckless policies could drain America’s economic strength and seriously harm young Americans for decades if no action is taken to change course.
Although not quite the stinging rebuke that Democrats and Never-Trump Republicans were hoping for, the midterm elections show that President Trump’s strategy of maximum polarization has reached the point of diminishing political returns.
Trump predictably claimed victory, but in the real world Democrats won the popular vote again, by more than seven percentage points, captured the House of Representatives and added seven more governors, including one in the GOP bastion of Kansas. What’s more, the party generally prevailed not by swerving left, but by appealing to moderate and even conservative suburbanites, especially across the Midwest, who are repelled by Trump’s dark mastery of tribal politics.
These gains in the pragmatic center bode well for Democrats’ 2020 prospects. Midterm elections are rarely reliable predictors of what will happen in the next presidential election. But by revealing rising antipathy to Trump among college-educated white women and men, and confirming the wisdom of Democrats’ “big tent” strategy, the outcome shows the party the way to evict Trump from the White House.
As they contemplate next steps, here are four key conclusions about the 2018 midterm Democrats should keep in mind.
Manufacturing is going digital—but it isn’t easy.
Domestic manufacturers employ 150,000 software developers and programmers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Seems like a hefty number, right? But 120,000 of those tech experts, or 80%, are concentrated in only two industries: computer and electronics manufacturing; and transportation equipment. These are also the industries that have been buying the great majority of robots. Indeed, roughly two-thirds of the industrial robots sold in North America go to the automotive industry.
Across the rest of manufacturing, most executives are cautiously inching rather than sprinting towards digitization. The slow progress shows up in the productivity statistics. For example, labor productivity actually declined in 15 out of 21 3-digit manufacturing industries in 2017.
Continue reading at Forbes.
In the last two years the U.S. has suffered from record hurricanes, rainfall, floods, wildfires and other disasters made worse by rising temperatures and sea levels. These extreme events, exacerbated by climate change, have cost thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars.
Now, as election day looms, the gross mishandling of these disasters is likely to exact a high political price on Donald Trump and other climate change-denying Republicans, helping to create a political blue wave that will swell Democratic numbers to a House majority, Florida’s Governorship, and other key prizes in the mid-terms.
There is political precedent for this. Recent history shows voters punish poor Presidential responses to natural disasters, and that such poor responses have a role in changing the public perception regarding the competence and characters of the ruling party.
Federalism – the division of sovereign authority among three separate levels of government (local, state and national) – is a distinctive feature of American democracy. The interplay between the three levels has profoundly shaped our country’s political, economic and social development.
During the 19th Century, progressive democrats like Jefferson and Jackson regarded the states as bulwarks of individual liberty, free enterprise and popular sovereignty. They resisted conservative attempts to establish a European-style central government, which they feared would be dominated by economic privilege.
Around the turn of the 20th century, however, the party they founded reversed course. Democrats increasingly saw centralizing political power in Washington as essential to tempering the social disruptions of industrialization, countering the growing economic power of corporations, and defending America in a dangerous world.
Now, in the 21st century, many progressives are questioning whether aggregating more power and resources in Washington is still the best way to achieve their ends. A key reason is that, with the federal government stalemated by extreme polarization, fiscal deadlock and bureaucratic bloat, the political initiative in America is increasingly shifting to other levels of government, especially to local and metro leaders.
Progressives and National Power
During the 20th Century, U.S. progressives helped to catalyze three great waves of political centralization:
The Progressive Era – As the century dawned, reformers in both parties warned that powerful new forces – industrialization, urbanization and the concentration of economic power in giant monopolies – were overwhelming the capacities of state governments. Woodrow Wilson orchestrated a remarkable flurry of progressive legislation that included the federal income tax, the Federal Reserve System, national child labor laws and tougher anti-trust regulations. Progressives also pushed successfully to increase popular participation in government, through primaries, referenda and initiatives, and direct election of U.S. Senators.
The New Deal – During the Depression, FDR promised “bold, persistent experimentation” to deal with the nation’s worst economic calamity. His New Deal expanded the scope of federal power dramatically, by launching huge public works and relief programs; regulating prices and wages; nationalizing income support and labor protections; establishing Social Security; and, multiplying federal agencies staffed by a new breed of college-educated technocrats. Washington also replaced laissez faire with Keynesian spending designed to manage the business cycle.
The Great Society – The nationalizing impulse intensified after World War II, reaching its peak in LBJ’s Great Society. This period of expansive liberalism saw the federal government assume responsibility for problems that had previously been left mainly to states and local authorities: racial injustice, poverty, illness, gender inequality, urban decay, educational inequity and pollution. Proliferating mandates and regulations vastly extended Washington’s reach and often made state and local governments seem like subsidiary arms of the federal government.
The assumption that underlay each of these waves – that nationalizing policy would best serve progressive purposes – was very often true. No one wants to go back to a time when giant monopolies crushed competition and bought state legislatures; when the doctrine of “states’ rights” sanctioned racial subordination; or when industries produced unsafe food and polluted our air and water with impunity.
But we live in a different world. Power today flows out of Washington. Urban America – centers of economic and social dysfunction a generation ago – has now become the nation’s prime catalyst for innovation. Brookings Institution scholars Bruce Katz and Jenifer Bradley have aptly dubbed this upsurge of local initiative and creativity the “metro revolution.” This phenomenon illustrates one of the great advantages of America’s flexible federalism: If one level of government stops working, the locus of public problem-solving shifts elsewhere.
The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) believes it is time to rethink the default assumption of progressive federalism as we’ve know it – that the arrow of progress always points toward centralizing power. Here are five reasons to think the arrow now points the other way:
First and most obvious is the political impasse in Washington. The inability of our national leaders to forge consensus or compromise, especially on the biggest challenges facing the country, has given rise to a new truism: the more dogmatic and polarized our politics, the less productive our government. That’s why political leaders who want to get things done are increasingly drawn to local government instead of Washington, where lawmakers are turning into fundraisers.
Second is the cratering of public confidence in the federal government. Most Americans don’t trust Washington to do the right thing most of the time. This lack of confidence in the means by which progressives propose to solve the nation’s problems and help people get ahead is a huge obstacle. In contrast, 72% of Americans trust their local governments, making them more promising terrain for public activism.
Third, the federal government has lost its fiscal freedom. Today the cost of maintaining the government’s cumulative commitments exceeds expected tax revenues. With “mandatory” spending on entitlements relentlessly squeezing out space for new investments, U.S. officials in effect have slapped fiscal handcuffs on themselves. That squeeze will only intensify as America gets older. Says Emmanuel, “We’ve always said there’d be a day when all the federal government does is debt service, entitlements and defense. Well folks, that day is here.”
Fourth, after four generations of nationalizing policy, Washington really has gotten too big, too bureaucratic and too rule-bound. The federal government is mired in the sludge of duplicative, overlapping and outdated laws and regulations that have accumulated over decades. Saddled with industrial-era bureaucracies and colonized by powerful interest groups, the vast federal establishment today is better at protecting the programmatic status quo than at sparking progressive change.
Fifth, digital technology, networks and globalization have combined to attenuate Washington’s ability to manage the national economy so that it delivers mass prosperity. Even as they create an increasingly integrated global economy, these forces also seem to be driving political fragmentation around the world. The great sociologist Daniel Bell captured this dynamic nearly three decades ago:
The common problem, I believe, is this: the nation-state is becoming too small for the big problems of life, and too big for the small problems of life. It is too small for the big problems because there are no effective international mechanisms to deal with such things as capital flows, commodity imbalances, the loss of jobs, and the several demographic tidal waves that will be developing in the next twenty years. It is too big for the small problems because the flow of power to a national political center means that the center becomes increasingly unresponsive to the variety and diversity of local needs.
In short, there is a mismatch of scale.
Today’s borderless economy is organized around vibrant metro regions, not nation-states. U.S. metros today are making the key investments – in innovation, modern infrastructure and human capital – that are renewing our economy’s dynamism and ability to provide broadly shared prosperity. They are developing their unique assets and comparative advantages to find niches in the emerging global knowledge economy. What they need from Washington is not standardized, one-size-fits all policies that are oblivious to local realities, but the flexibility and resources to tackle the nation’s problems from the ground up.
For all these reasons, it’s time to redefine federalism for the 21st century. Instead of turning reflexively to Washington, progressives should push for a systematic decentralization of decisions and resources to the creative Mayors and metro leaders who are making local government an effective agent of economic and social progress.
This isn’t a matter of eviscerating the federal government, as many conservatives would like. Washington must continue to do the things it is best suited to do: set fiscal and monetary policy; invest in science and technology, infrastructure and career preparation; make the rules for immigration, environmental protection and other cross-border issues, and of course take the lead on diplomacy and defense.
Nor does progressive federalism mean a preference for states over Washington – in fact, metro leaders say state governments often put bigger obstacles in their way than the feds. The real question is, how can the states and the federal government enable and be better partners with local leaders? What practical steps should they take to empower metro leaders to do more of what they are already doing – spurring job and business creation; forging regional collaborations and public-private partnerships; unlocking private and civic investment in local infrastructure and housing; improving education and career training; making their communities healthier and safer; and, making local governments more efficient and responsive to the people they serve?
