Category: Uncategorized

Stangler for Medium: “The Democrats Should Talk About This Tonight”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Here is how tonight’s Democratic debate should begin:

The American economy has always been driven by entrepreneurial energy — the creation and growth of new businesses. Today, however, entrepreneurship in the United States is in trouble. Business creation has stalled; overall economic dynamism is faltering. We are experiencing what some researchers call a “startup deficit.”

How would your administration address this?

Most of the seven debate participants would be speechless, at least momentarily, before quickly running through a litany of actions they would take — some of which are tangential to entrepreneurship. A few of them would talk about the virtues of small business before bashing the evils of big business. A few might actually say the word “entrepreneurship.” At least a couple of them would be able to talk coherently about how they would tackle the startup deficit.

In all likelihood, of course, this question won’t be asked and entrepreneurship will barely be mentioned. More attention will be paid to the labor issues that almost derailed the debate. Yes: unions and the minimum wage should be topics of discussion. But, without the businesses to employ union workers and pay higher wages, those issues are moot.

Read the full piece here.

Gold for Medium: “Attention Democrats: UK Elections Not Only Cautionary Tale from Europe”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As Democratic presidential hopefuls gather in Los Angeles this week for the last debate of 2019, candidates should look across the Atlantic for a cautionary tale.

No, I’m not just talking about last week’s UK elections, which saw Labour’s far left-wing leader, Jeremy Corbyn, get crushed by Brexiteer Boris Johnson. Democrats can also draw useful lessons from the United Nations Conference of Parties (COP25) in Madrid, which by all accounts failed to kickstart progress toward implementing the Paris Climate Accords.

The culprit here, of course, is President Trump. His threat to pull the United States out of international efforts to combat climate change has created a major vacuum of leadership. What happened in Madrid underscores the folly of relying mainly on governments to tackle the climate crisis. Democratic presidential hopefuls should promise not only to re-exert U.S. leadership but to engage the private sector in efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions — regardless of which way the political winds happen to be blowing.

Read the full piece here.

Marshall for the Daily News: “Britain’s Warning to American Democrats”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s thumping victory last week confirms that 2016 was a political watershed. It marked the beginning of a new political alignment that is rewriting the rules of party competition here and abroad.

That was the year voters stunned the UK political establishment by voting narrowly to leave the European Union. Then followed Donald Trump’s equally shocking election. Both votes highlighted new political divides based on culture, identity and geography, as well as the waning relevance of old left-right debates.

So far, conservative parties have adapted to this changing landscape better than progressive parties. That’s why it’s crucial that Democrats come to terms with why Britain’s Labour Party, led by Jeremy Corbyn, was routed last week.

Corbyn blames Brexit for his defeat, and it obviously played a big role. Johnson offered voters a simple, unequivocal message on Brexit — get it done so Britain can move on. Corbyn and Labour took an ambiguous stance, and managed to win only 40% of the parliamentary constituencies that backed Remain.

Read the full piece here. 

Ritz for Forbes: “Naughty Or Nice? Breaking Down Congress’s $1.9 Trillion Budget Deal”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute
The House of Representatives earlier this afternoon passed two bills to provide $1.4 trillion in funding for defense and non-defense spending programs that must be appropriated on an annual basis. As is often the case with must-pass legislation at the end of the year, these bills have become “Christmas trees” decorated with various policy riders and pet projects for members of both parties in Congress. What are the major provisions attached to this legislation that help add $500 billion to its price tag, and should they put Congress on the naughty or the nice list?

Read the full piece on Forbes.

Ritz for Forbes: “Who Is Fighting For Fiscal Responsibility?”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The federal government is ending 2019 with a national debt of over $17 trillion for the first time in U.S. history – and if one includes intragovernmental debt, such as that held by the Social Security trust funds, this figure rises to $23 trillion. Beginning in 2020, the government is projected to add more than $1 trillion to the debt every year in perpetuity. Amid this rising tide of red ink, is anyone willing to fight for fiscal responsibility?

Certainly not President Donald Trump. Since taking office three years ago, Trump earned his crown as the self-proclaimed king of debt by signing into law a $2 trillion tax cut and shattering spending caps created under President Obama. Congressional Republicans – the same folks who demanded these caps be imposed in the first place – had no qualms about charging these costs to the national credit card. After eight years of lambasting deficits under President Obama, most Republican deficit hawks have revealed themselves to be nothing more than peacocks.

Thankfully, there is some leadership on the other side of the aisle. When Democrats retook control of the U.S. House of Representatives earlier this year, Speaker Nancy Pelosi reinstated pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) rules requiring legislation that cuts taxes or increases automatic spending to be fully offset. Although not all of her caucus supports PAYGO, the moderate House Blue Dog Coalition – which spearheaded the push to bring back the rule after it was repealed by Republicans in 2011 – has rebuffed efforts to waive PAYGO, sending a clear signal that at least some Democrats oppose digging the nation’s fiscal hole deeper.

Read the full piece here.

Valentine for the Washington Informer: “Talent First: How the Phalen Leadership Academy Closed Achievement Gaps Through Effective Teaching”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

“We will retain 85 percent of our effective teachers and remove 100 percent of my ineffective teachers.”

Those words from Earl Martin Phalen, founder of the George and Veronica Phalen Leadership Academy (PLA) in Indianapolis, represent more than a strategic goal. They are PLA’s foundational priority: the quality of its teachers will be the driver of student success.

Six years ago, Earl Martin Phalen founded what has quickly become the largest African American-run charter school network in the country. In just six years, Phalen Leadership Academies (PLA) has grown from one school to 20, most of them in Indiana but also four in Tampa, one in Detroit, and two schools in Beaumont, Texas. All but two are previously underperforming schools that districts asked PLA to turn around.

Read the full piece here.

A Banner Year at the Progressive Policy Institute

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute
Dear Friends,
I look back on 2019 with mixed feelings. It’s been another terrific year for the Progressive Policy Institute. But it hasn’t been a great year for our country.
Thanks to Rep. Adam Schiff, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats, the public knows exactly how President Trump misused the power of his office to pursue his personal and political interests. For this and his blatant obstruction of justice, Trump richly deserves to be impeached.
He likely won’t be convicted, however, because most Republican Senators apparently lack the integrity and courage to put country over party and uphold the Constitution. So U.S. voters will have to fire Trump to get our democracy back on track.
Democrats’ responsibility is to give voters an acceptable alternative. As a think tank, PPI can’t endorse candidates, but we can influence the national political debate. Over the past year we’ve done just that.
For example, PPI organized issues forums in Iowa earlier this year featuring former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, who led a discussion of progressive alternatives to single payer or “Medicare for all,” and Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio, who joined Iowa leaders in making the case for a major infrastructure push to stimulate job and business creation in parts of the country that have been left out of today’s prosperity.
In September, PPI rolled out our alternative to Sen. Bernie Sanders’ massively expensive and disruptive Medicare for All plan: Affordable Health Care for All: An American Solution to High Costs and Coverage Gaps. Written by PPI health policy director Arielle Kane, the report instead proposes an innovative “price cap” and other reforms that would reduce medical costs without depriving 150 million Americans of private health insurance.
Throughout the year, Team PPI also kept up a steady output of op-eds in major newspapers, articles, posts and media mentions. And thanks to digital communications director Carter Christensen, our online communications footprint is bigger than ever.

Here are some other highlights from the year:

  • In a series of groundbreaking reports and articles, PPI chief economic strategist Michael Mandel documented the enormous contribution digital innovation is making to U.S. job growth and competitiveness, including the emergence of “manufacturing platforms” – companies that rewrite the rules of production and product development, and in the process create new opportunities for local manufacturing.
  • PPI’s Reinventing America’s Schools project, led by David Osborne, Curtis Valentine and Tressa Pankovits, helped education leaders and parents’ groups in many cities learn from “best practice” K-12 reforms in New Orleans, Washington, D.C., Denver and Indianapolis. PPI also pushed back against a campaign by teachers’ unions to demonize public charter schools, reminded Democrats that their party had led the development of charters, and criticized Sens. Sanders and Elizabeth Warren for parroting union demands to deprive minority parents of the ability to choose better schools for their kids.
  • In July, PPI released a comprehensive budget proposal: Funding America’s Future: A Progressive Budget for Equitable Growth. Written by Ben Ritz and Brendan McDermott, the 96-page blueprint details a fiscally responsible way to cut the national debt while supercharging critical public investments in innovation and growth, modernizing federal health and retirement programs and reforming taxes to reward work over wealth.
  • On the trade front, PPI highlighted the destructive impact of President Trump’s capricious tariffs, while also making the case for why progressives should “get to yes” on the NAFTA update. This included conversations between New Democrats and Blue Dogs with Ambassadors of America’s chief trading partners.
  • On the increasingly important issue of climate change, Strategic Adviser Paul Bledsoe skewered both GOP science denial and Green New Deal fantasies of a top-down reordering of the U.S. economy. He advocated instead for practical clean energy policies, such as making sure America wins the global race to electric cars.
  • Our Center for Civil Justice, led by attorney Phil Goldberg, hosted a California forum on how local and state governments can do their part to combat climate change without resorting to litigation scapegoating energy companies.
  • PPI kept up its robust international engagement in Europe, Asia and Latin America. In addition to multiple trips to Brussels and other European capitals, PPI made its first foray into India, and also met with key political and business leaders in Japan, Vietnam, Australia and Canada.
2019 was another year of expansion. Additions to our team include Neel Brown (political outreach), Dane Stangler (entrepreneurship, metro innovation and immigration); and Jason Gold (leading a new project on “Free Enterprise for All.”).
None of this would be possible without the counsel, friendship, and financial support of friends like you. Together, we are strengthening America’s pragmatic center against extremism on both ends of the political spectrum. Please let us hear from you in 2020 as we work to make democracy in America great again.
With gratitude,
Will Marshall

Bledsoe for the New York Times: “Our Future Depends on the Arctic”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Delegates from nearly every nation spent the last two weeks here at a United Nations climate summit struggling to chart a course to meet the extraordinarily difficult goal of net zero emissions of carbon dioxide by the year 2050.

Yet long before then, the effects of global warming could spin out of control. As the United Nations’ secretary general, António Guterres, warned in opening the meeting: “The point of no return is no longer over the horizon. It is in sight and hurtling toward us.”

Perhaps nowhere is that more true than in the Arctic. The surface air there is warming at twice the global rate and temperatures over the past five years have exceeded all previous records since 1900. This past week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that the extent of Arctic summer sea ice was at its second lowest point since satellite observations began in 1979, and that average temperatures for the year ending in September were the second highest since 1900, when record-keeping began.

Read the full piece here.

Ritz for Forbes: “Three Tax Cuts a Santa Claus Congress Could Deliver in 2019”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Congress must pass a comprehensive funding bill by the end of next week to avoid a repeat of last year’s government shutdown. Such a must-pass bill at the end of the year often becomes a “Christmas tree” decorated with various policy riders and pet projects for members of both parties in Congress. But under this year’s tree, a fiscally irresponsible Santa Claus Congress might leave wealthy Americans three gifts that together could cost up to $1 trillion over the next ten years – all put on the nation’s credit card for young Americans to pay off for generations to come.

Read the full piece here.

Marshall for The Hill: “Is Corbyn handing Brexit to Boris Johnson?”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

When British voters go to the polls Thursday, it probably will be their last chance to stop Brexit. If they don’t, Jeremy Corbyn will bear much of the blame.

Wait – isn’t the Labour Party leader running to oust the man actually driving the UK toward Brexit, Prime Minister Boris Johnson? Yes, but polls show Johnson’s Conservatives holding on to a double-digit lead over Labour. That’s remarkable, considering the sorry mess Tory leaders have made of Brexit over the last three years.

If Johnson has the electoral wind at his back, it’s not because he’s so mesmerizing. It’s mainly because of Corbyn’s epic unpopularity with UK voters. A mere 22 percent approve of Labour’s chief, while 58 percent say he’s doing badly. Thirty-six percent approve of Johnson, and 43 percent rate him negatively.

Read Will Marshall’s full op-ed here.

Pankovits and Osborne for The Washington Post: “Poor children are still left behind in DCPS schools”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

D.C. Public Schools received well-deserved praise for its recent scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a.k.a. “The Nation’s Report Card.” Of the 27 urban districts that took the test in 2019, DCPS improved the fastest, continuing a trend that stretches back more than a decade.

In 2003, when only a handful of urban districts participated, DCPS fourth-graders trailed the other cities by 28 points in reading and 29 in math. (Because 10 points is considered a year’s learning, this was an enormous gap.) In 2019, the gap was down to 5 points in both subjects. DCPS should be proud.

Sadly, however, one group has been left out of this good news: low-income children. In 2019, DCPS eighth-graders eligible for free or reduced-price lunch (FRL) scored 25th out of 27 urban districts in reading, 21st out of 27 in math.

The gap between these children and others in DCPS was 49 points in reading — almost five grade levels. In math it was even worse, 53 points.

Though low-income fourth-graders did a little better, they still had a 51-point gap in reading and a 41-point gap in math.

The bottom line: DCPS has improved by leaps and bounds, but it has not figured out how to educate its poorest students. In contrast, many of the city’s charter schools have figured that out. The 2019 NAEP score gap between D.C.’s FRL-eligible charter students and other charter students in eighth grade was 12 points; in fourth grade it averaged just 10 points.

Read the full op-ed here.

Press Release: “PPI, German Partners To Explore Metro Innovation and Governance”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Across the United States and Europe, metropolitan regions have emerged as hubs of public innovation and collaborative problem-solving. A new model for progressive governance is emerging from some of our most dynamic cities, large and small. 

To draw transatlantic policymakers’ attention to this promising development, the Progressive Policy Institute has joined forces with Das Progressive Zentrum and Alfred Herrhausen Gessellschaft in Germany to launch “New Urban Progress.” This three-year project will study and compare notes on metro innovations in three German cities and three U.S. cities, with the aim of sparking a crossfertilization of ideas for encouraging local initiative and ground-up problem-solving. 

“At PPI, we have called for a renewed flexible federalism that will empower more localized innovation. It’s happening around the country—but local innovators need more support,” said PPI’s Director of Policy Innovation Dane Stangler. 

“Today’s urban ferment yields instructive insights for local and national policymakers in the United States and Europe,” said PPI President Will Marshall. “This transatlantic initiative will focus on empowering metros to tackle urgent national challenges — inclusive growth, new infrastructure, social mobility, climate change — from the ground up.”

Support for the New Urban Progress initiative comes from the Transatlantic Program of the Federal Republic of Germany, and funding from the European Recovery Program (ERP) of the Federal Ministry of Economics and Energy (BMWi) along with other key policy leaders. 

The cities chosen for this initiative will be announced in the coming months, including project fellows who will come from county and municipal government, business, the nonprofit sector, and more. 

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Blog post from our partner, Das Progressive Zentrum, on today’s announcement: https://www.progressives-zentrum.org/rejuvenating-transatlantic-dialog-from-the-bottom-up/?lang=en

Contact: media@ppionline.org or 202-525-3931

Stangler for Medium: “Announcing the New Urban Progress Initiative to Foster Metro Problem-Solving”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In its recently published The World in 2020, the editors of The Economist observe that the U.S. presidential race will “hog headlines” globally for the next year. One of the implications of this is that citizens everywhere — not just in America — will be inundated with debate and disagreement over large-scale national issues and policies. Immigration, Medicare-for-all, trade, climate change, and so on.

This is understandable of course: the president is elected by the whole country and will concern himself or herself with matters that are national in scope.

Yet many of the challenges that Americans and their communities struggle to address can best be solved locally. In many cases, they can only be solved locally. Take climate change, for example. On one hand, it doesn’t get any more national and transnational than this. On the other, national solutions, at least in the United States, are not in the offing anytime soon. States, cities, counties, and regions are best placed to adapt to climate change — even Republicans agree.

Read the full announcement.

Ritz for Forbes: “In Warren and Harris Falls, A Warning To Candidates About Overpromising”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Warren bubble has burst. Two months ago, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren was rocketing to the top of the presidential polls, at one point tying former Vice President Joe Biden for first place nationally and leading in both Iowa and New Hampshire. But she’s been in freefall for several weeks following the release of a controversial plan for financing Medicare for All, the single-payer health-care system championed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Where did it all go wrong? Some argue that Warren’s big mistake was in publishing any plan to pay for MFA at all. The reality, however, is that Warren isn’t falling because she planned too much, but rather because she didn’t plan carefully enough.

Read the full piece here.

Lewis for The Gazette: “Finding Common Ground on Net Neutrality”

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Even before impeachment gained momentum, Americans overwhelmingly agreed that our country is “on the wrong track” and disapproved of the performance of the president and Congress. That’s largely because, even on issues where there is broad public agreement, the legislative and executive branches have been unable to find sensible solutions.

Exhibit A is an issue that should be about technology, not ideology: broadband policy. Over two decades, most Americans have come to agree about the basic principle of “net neutrality.” That’s the common-sense idea that all internet traffic must be treated equally, and no company should be able to block or throttle online traffic in order to gain a competitive leg-up.

But still, some progressives insist on all-or-nothing over-regulation of the internet, while some conservatives contend that the best thing the federal government can do is nothing at all. Recent events make it even more urgent for the grownups to break the gridlock.

Read the full op-ed here.

PPI Metro Playbook – Columbia, SC

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Over the final three decades of the 20th century, one of the defining features of American life was the abandonment and deterioration of historic urban centers. In cities large and small, from coast to coast, residents and dollars followed the interstate highways out of the old commercial downtowns and out to the suburbs.

Columbia, S.C., may be an exceptional town in some respects – it is, after all, both a state capital and the home of the University of South Carolina – but even these enviable assets could not save it from the centrifugal forces that were leeching the vitality of Downtown U.S.A. during the Seventies and Eighties. College kids and civil servants weren’t enough to prevent Macy’s and other department stores from either decamping for the ‘burbs or shuttering entirely. Our latest Metro Playbook: