Category: Uncategorized

Jacoby for Bulwark: Ukraine Isn’t Ready for Pro-Putin GOP

Posted on by Max Sherrill

By Tamar Jacoby

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made a couple of unforced errors in the last few weeks. They were all small things, the kind of missteps we all make occasionally, and even on the world stage, they might have gone unnoticed. But the Ukrainian leader had no idea what he was up against—a Republican party determined to turn him and the global conflict in Ukraine into this cycle’s political football.

Zelensky and his team had been working for months to cultivate Donald Trump and his entourage. It wasn’t just, as Zelensky said in the letter he sent to Trump on Thursday, that he had always tried to show “respect” for the former president. Like other governments across Europe, the Ukrainians were well aware that Trump had at least an even chance of retaking the White House, and they were determined to establish a relationship. Some even hoped that Trump could be a friend—that unlike Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, who have given Kyiv just enough help to hold off the Russian army but not enough to win, Trump might be more decisive, forcing a definitive outcome that might benefit Ukraine.

Kyiv worked tirelessly to forge ties to anyone who might have Trump’s ear—former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Sen. Lindsey Graham, former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and others. Zelensky held his tongue no matter what Trump said about Ukraine or what foolish boasts he made about ending the war in 24 hours. The Ukrainian leader even called Trump after the first assassination attempt, and the two had what Trump reported was a “very good” conversation.

Keep reading in The Bulwark.

Marshall for The Hill: What Keir Starmer’s victory means for Kamala Harris

Posted on by Alyssa Brown

By Will Marshall

Vice President Kamala Harris has righted her party’s capsized ship and opened a small but consistent lead over Donald Trump in national polls. Now comes the decisive test: Charting a winning course in the Electoral College.

To attain a majority of 270 votes or more, Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), must carry at least three, and in some scenarios four of the seven battleground states. All look like dead heats today.

They can count on a strong turnout by a reenergized Democratic base, but that won’t be enough. You can’t win swing states without winning swing voters. The campaigns are spending prodigiously in these states to sway roughly 3 million voters who tell pollsters they’ve yet to make up their minds.

Keep reading in The Hill.

Ritz in MSNBC: Trump’s own followers literally laughed at his crypto debt idea

Posted on by Max Sherrill

But the GOP presidential nominee wasn’t kidding about his magical solution for the national debt, which Republicans only seem to care about during Democratic presidencies. In fact, Trump made the same suggestion in a Fox News interview last month, saying that “a little crypto check” could “wipe out” the $35 trillion. If it were that easy, one wonders why he didn’t do it during his first term.

Now, the suggestion — as dumb as it sounds — seems like a way to reward the crypto bros who’ve backed Trump’s campaign. To better understand how disastrous this idea could ultimately be in practice, I recommend reading this Forbes article by analyst Ben Ritz, and this Medium article by crypto entrepreneur Tavonia Evans.

In the meantime, it appears we can add cryptocurrency to wind power, basic economics, climate change and reproductive health to the long list of topics about which Trump is utterly clueless.

Read more in MSNBC.

Trade Fact of the Week: In a hypothetical Trump/Vance economy, a toaster would cost about $300. 

Posted on by Max Sherrill

FACT: In a hypothetical Trump/Vance economy, a toaster would cost about $300.

THE NUMBERS: Toaster prices, September 2024* –
 Model / Range  Made in  Price
 Milantoast  Milan  €335
 Dualit “Classic”  West Sussex  £170 – £249.99
 Mitsubishi Electric TO-ST1-T  Suburbs of Tokyo  $246.68
 Neiman Marcus range  $90 – $900
 Walmart/Amazon/Target/Costco/Macy’s range  $15 – $40

* PPI surveys for mainstream retailers and Neiman Marcus prices; Amazon for the TO-ST1-T; manufacturer sites for Dualit Classic and Milantoast.

WHAT THEY MEAN:

Here’s Vice Presidential aspirant Senator J.D. Vance in Nevada last July: “We believe that a million cheap knockoff toasters aren’t worth the price of a single U.S. manufacturing job.” The unspoken converse (and as explained below, the more realistic interpretation) is that no toaster price would be too high to shift a single worker into U.S.-based pop-up production.  Here’s what this might mean:

Background: If you haven’t recently bought a toaster, mainstream retailers sell them at prices typically between $15 and $40. (We checked Target, Costco, Amazon, Macy’s, and Walmart.  You can pay more if you like, of course.) Your purchase won’t be U.S.-made, unless you’re a specialized buyer: kitchen appliance manufacturers do make toasters here, but only big conveyor types for restaurants and hotels. As an example, Holman Star’s factory in Smithville, Tennessee, produces machines in a range from the $1,487 QCS1-350, which browns 350 slices an hour, to the 2,000-slices-per hour Star DT-14 Double Conveyor at $7,273. No U.S. company, though, makes a small home pop-up here.

Overseas Comparisons: Home toaster-making in wealthy “peer” economies, however, is perfectly possible. Firms in the U.K., Italy, and Japan make them now. They’re pricey, though.  The U.K.’s Dualit Classic, with a silvery ‘retro’ look drawn from 1950s design, is “hand-built” in West Sussex and sells at prices from £170 for a two-slice model to £249.99 for a 6-slicer. (At $1.31 per pound sterling, this is $250 to $360.) Italy’s Milantoast makes an austere designer-black two-slice pop-up in Milan for €335.  ($372, at $1.11 per euro.) And Mitsubishi Electric’s futuristic TO-ST1-T, launched in 2019 and made in two factories outside Tokyo, blends a tea-ceremony-suitable “simple shape and wood grain” look with high-tech programming to provide the precise browning of your choice, preserve the bread’s interior moisture, and offer “fluffy French toast,” “Korean street egg toast,” and DIY options. A connoisseurs’ piece, the TO-ST1-T costs $246.88 and makes one slice at a time, no more. (For purists, yes, it is technically a “bread oven” rather than a pop-up. Close enough, in our opinion.)

In sum, “developed” high-income countries do make home toasters. But they are profitable at prices about ten times those you’d find in mainstream U.S. retail outlets.  Looked at another way, the $300 or so you’d pay for a Dualit Classic, Milantoast, or Mitsubishi is at the midpoint of this week’s Neiman Marcus catalog, whose cheapest toaster option is a $90 polka-dotted Kate Spade, and priciest a $900 Dolce & Gabbana “Sicily is My Love,” both produced in China.

So to achieve Vance’s apparent goal, mainstream toaster prices would probably have to rise to Neiman Marcus levels, say $300 each. More generally, we assume he isn’t fixated on toasters specifically, but uses them as one specific example of a more general aspiration for appliance-type products.  How would this hypothetical Trump/Vance-world look to families? To workers? And could their tariff ideas deliver it?

Family budgets: The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ most recent “Consumer Expenditure Survey” has family budget data for 2022. That year’s average (mean) U.S. household spent $73,000, including about $20,000 on goods purchases excluding restaurant meals. Small appliances cost them $142, and large appliances $408. That means $550 for appliances, 0.8% of the total budget and 2.5% of the goods-purchase budget.* If appliance prices generally rose to levels typical of the Dualits, Milantoasts, and Mitsubishis, family appliance bills would jump from $550 to about $5,000. That would mean a 25% increase in total U.S. household spending on goods. Few working families could afford that, of course. So home appliances would drop out of their present “easily affordable labor-saving device” range into a “scrimp-and-save luxury” tier.  Families would still need some, though, and would presumably scale back their entertainment, education, health, auto repair, and other discretionary choices to buy an occasional vacuum cleaner, microwave, iron, washing machine, microwave, or toaster.

Employment: And what labor impact could we expect? Again by BLS’ estimates, 64,290 Americans, including 36,940 production workers, now work in home appliance manufacturing.  The production workers’ average (mean) hourly earnings are $21.42. (The median wage is a nearly identical $21.23.) By comparison, average U.S. hourly production-worker earnings are $30.27 for the whole private sector, $27.96 for all manufacturing, $23.51 in electronics and appliance retail, and $18.91 in hardware retail. So pushing workers out of the toaster sections of appliance and hardware retailers into hypothetical toaster-making assembly lines would likely leave wages a bit better for some, a bit worse for others, and overall about the same.

Trade policy: Whether or not this is a good idea in principle, could the Trump/Vance tariff program — 10% or 20% tariffs on all goods, and 60% tariffs on Chinese-made products – actually do it?  Pretty clearly not. The U.S. already charges a 5.3% tariff on pop-up toasters (HTS 85167200).  None are made here.  So as with a lot of U.S. tariff lines, the toaster tariff’s only effect is somewhat higher prices.  To get the spectacular ten-fold price-hike that sustains super-toaster making in Japan, Italy, and the U.K., you’d need a 900% tariff or some equivalent policy. (Or, if you need only a five-fold price jump to make less impressive appliances profitable, 400%.) In fact, the additional Trump/Vance tariffs on metals, wiring, buttons, plastics, and other inputs would make U.S.-based toaster-making — including for currently successful producers like Holman Star — harder, not easier.  The differentially higher tariff on Chinese-made popups might push some into Vietnam or the Philippines, or possibly Mexico, but that would be the end of it.

In sum, Vance-world looks very expensive for families, not obviously better for workers, and not realistic anyway.

*  For some more specific cases, the BLS says single-parent families, with lower earnings, spent $438 out of $56,240 on appliances, about the same 0.8% share of the budget. BLS’ top-earner families average $322,000 in household income and put $1084 into appliance-shopping out of $167,088 in total spending (maybe getting the Kate Spade or something similar?) for a slightly smaller 0.6% of the family budget.

FURTHER READING

Special note: Research on U.K. and U.S. toaster-making for this Trade Fact by 2024 PPI Policy Fellow Julia Amann. Research on Japanese toaster-production by PPI Senior Fellow Yuka Hayashi.

Sen. Vance on toasters.

Toasters made in the U.S. –

Holman Star’s restaurant- and hotel-destined conveyor toasters.

And abroad –

Dualit’s Classic line.

Milantoast.

Mitsubishi Electric’s TO-ST1-T.

For comparable prices –

Neiman Marcus options.

Data –

The Bureau of Labor Statistics looks at American appliance-manufacturing workers by job type and wage, and at household spending in 2022.

And just to make it more complicated and more realistic –

The Trump-Vance tariff pitch is for “tariffs on everything”. This includes toasters, but as noted above, also on the things needed to make toasters: metal, wires, buttons, plastics, insulation, etc. Shoppers would pay the toaster-tariff, but companies like Star Holman (and by extension, any business and workers making appliances in the United States) would pay tariffs on the inputs.  As their production costs rose, appliance-production in the United States would grow more difficult.  From the small-government, free-market right, National Review’s Dominic Pino reports on American kitchen appliance-makers’ unhappy experience with Trump-era metals tariffs.

ABOUT ED

Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.

Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.

Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.

Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.

Read the full email and sign up for the Trade Fact of the Week.

Manno for American Compass: U.K.’s Labour Party Gets Learning Right

Posted on by Max Sherrill

By Bruno Manno

The U.K.’s Labour Party recently won an overwhelming victory in the country’s general parliamentary election. Its five-part policy platform contained a commitment to break down barriers to opportunity, including creating diverse education and training pathways so individuals can have an alternative to the college-degree pathway to jobs and opportunity. Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. have proposed similar measures at the national, state, and local levels. This approach is encouraging since it could hold the key to developing the types of pathways needed to ensure that young people and workers acquire the knowledge, skills, and social connections they need for upward mobility and prosperity. I call this “opportunity pluralism.”

Vice President Kamala Harris recently described America’s current pathways problem, and what a better approach could look like: “For far too long, our nation has encouraged only one path to success: a four-year college degree. Our nation needs to recognize the value of other paths, additional paths, such as apprenticeships and technical programs.” This issue can unite Democrats and Republicans, as recent proposals make clear.

While education governance in the U.S. is more decentralized than in the U.K., American policymakers should recognize the appeal of this approach and look to the U.K. example to inform how the U.S. pursues opportunity pluralism.

Keep reading in American Compass.

Winning the Real Youth Voters

Posted on by Max Sherrill

With six weeks until election day, the Harris-Walz campaign is in a final sprint to the polls attempting to win over every voter possible. Nowhere is this more clear than in the campaign’s efforts to win young voters. The Harris campaign announced that they would focus on reaching out to students across 150 campuses in the most important swing states. Other youth groups who have officially partnered with the Harris-Walz campaign have dedicated themselves to calling students across the country. All of these tremendous efforts to mobilize young students only begs one question: What about young voters who don’t go to college?

Many of today’s young leaders cut their teeth working within the party can be traced back to the March For Our Lives organization, a group that was founded to advance gun safety reforms in response to the Parkland shooting of 2018. Some March For Our Lives alumni demonstrate the newest generation of youth activist leaders such as: Representative Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.); David Hogg, president of Leaders We Deserve PAC; and Eve Levenson, the Harris Campaign youth director, all of whom learned their organizing strategy from March For Our Lives.

The reason this distinction matters is that activists who learned from March For Our Lives have shown a clear preference for organizing at either high schools or university campuses. This makes sense since their first action was the Walkout For Our Lives, inspiring students to walk out of class in response to the lack of any action taken to prevent school shootings. When it comes to Get Out The Vote, efforts during an election are the rational path to take. College voters are much more likely to vote Democratic than any other group within the 18-29 demographic. According to a recent poll conducted by Blueprint in May, 50% of college students consider themselves to be liberal as opposed to 36% who consider themselves to be conservative and only 14% who consider themselves to be moderate. Groups like Voters of Tomorrow and NextGen America are taking the lead on mobilizing these voters with days dedicated to calling students or tabling on campuses.

Yet, this strategy leaves wide gaps in the 18-29 demographic. With only 25.8% of the 18-29 demographic actually enrolled in higher education in 2022, there is a massive amount of young Americans who are simply being ignored by these groups. Approximately 39 million, in fact.  If we take the focus off of what most people assume young voters are, far-left and attending a 4-year university, the young voter begins to look like most other voter demographics. For all voters aged 18-29, 36% describe themselves as liberal, a drastic 14-point decrease from college voters, and 31% describe themselves as moderates, another drastic 16% change. A recent poll from NBC highlights that their priorities are much the same as any other voter. By far the largest issue among Gen Z and Millennial voters is inflation and the cost of living, with 31% saying that this is their top issue. No other issue comes close to this level of importance with protecting democracy coming in second with 11% and abortion following close behind with 9%.

There are groups that have broken through the youth vote without focusing primarily on voters on college campuses. Groups like the Center for New Liberalism (CNL) and activists like Olivia Juliana have taken the lead on advocating for policies that appeal to the much broader youth vote. These activists understand that pragmatic policies that address the cost of living for young voters will be key to securing their support for the 2024 Presidential election. The Harris-Walz campaign also realizes this and has been promoting policies that will actually help all young Americans. Chief among them is Harris’ new policy proposal to build 3 million new houses, which will help drive down prices and allow more young Americans to enter the housing market. The rising cost of rent and homeownership is one of the most burdensome costs for young people, and Harris’ new efforts to address it are providing much-needed homes to the 64% of young voters who currently believe that owning their own home will be much more difficult than it was for their parents.

Simple math also explains why the Harris-Walz campaign needs to broaden its outreach to different kinds of young voters. John Della Volpe, the Harvard Institute of Politics Polling Director, has argued that the winning number for a Democratic Presidential candidate is 60% of the youth vote. Yet, the most recent poll of the 18-29 demographic conducted by NBC News has only 50% of young voters choosing Vice President Harris, and only 34% support Donald Trump.

The Harris-Walz campaign and associated youth advocacy groups have done an incredible job tapping into young, progressive, college voters. But if the campaign wants to reach the critical 60% of the youth vote, they will need to step outside their comfort zone and talk to the tens of millions of Gen Z and Millennial voters who are primarily focused on their economic well-being and their future.

Ritz for The Concord Coalition’s Facing the Future Podcast: A Radically Pragmatic Plan to Pay for Progress

Posted on by Max Sherrill

 

Ben Ritz, Vice President of Policy Development at the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), joins Facing the Future. Ben co-authored a PPI plan released in July called “Paying for Progress: A Pragmatic Blueprint to Cut Costs, Boost Growth & Expand American Opportunity.” The plan would balance the budget over 20 years using a mix of spending cuts, revenue increases, and economic growth. It was part of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation’s Solutions Initiative 2024: Charting a Brighter Future, a series of proposals from seven think tanks to set the debt on a sustainable trajectory. Concord Coalition Chief Economist Steve Robinson joined the conversation.

Ritz described the plan as a “vision for long term fiscal policy. It wasn’t just a deficit reduction exercise to us. We wanted to outline what our ideal fiscal policy looks like. We wanted it to be aspirational, but also economically pragmatic.”

According to Ritz, the 20-year balanced budget goal was chosen for two reasons. “The first is that we know there are going to be a lot of unforeseen challenges. Those challenges are going to have costs associated with them. There are going to be emergencies in the future for which we need to borrow, and so we don’t see balancing the budget as a necessary end, but we believe that putting the budget on a long term path to balance will create fiscal space for that future borrowing to not be problematic. The second reason is that this was an aspirational plan. It’s not politically realistic that our plan is going to be enacted in its entirety anytime soon and so, we wanted to overshoot that goal so that even adopting half of our recommended savings would be enough to stabilize the debt.”

Ritz described the policy choices in the plan as designed to favor investment over consumption and to fully fund the level of investment. “We prioritize public investments that will grow the economy,” he explained, and noted that any necessary tax increases should be done “in the least harmful way.”

“We know that anytime you tax something, you get less of it,” he said. “So we started by raising taxes on things that we actually want less of, like carbon pollution. Raising taxes on emissions would make us have a cleaner economy, be good for growth in the long run, and help reduce the deficit.  Beyond that, we prioritize taxing consumption over taxing work and also trying to tax what we call unearned income that you get without having to do any hard work or productive investment to generate it.”

Ritz described a number of proposed changes to both Social Security and Medicare that are designed to lower costs while preserving, or enhancing the programs’ core functions. One innovative change would be in the Social Security benefit calculation.

As Ritz explained, “Right now, Social Security benefits are based on an average of your lifetime earnings and they replace a proportion of those earnings. That proportion declines as your income goes up, and so a higher income person is getting a bigger benefit than somebody who has had a lifetime lower income. A lower percentage of their income is getting replaced, but it’s still the case that we’re giving higher benefits to higher income people. So we propose to change the benefit calculation to be based, not on your lifetime earnings, but how many years you work. Hard work will get rewarded with the same Social Security,  regardless of income. That keeps Social Security as an earned benefit, but it makes it more progressive, and it helps us reduce old age poverty, while at the same time making it more affordable for the next generation.”

“If we’re going to give one message to policymakers, it is that we raise the revenue for the government spending that we support,” he said, relating that message to the upcoming debate in 2025 over how to handle expiring provisions of the 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act (TCJA).

“The original TCJA was not paid for,” Ritz observed. “It added to the deficit, which was already too big. We had a tax code that was not enough to pay for the promises our government was making, and then we raised even less revenue. And so our message to Congress with this plan is, not only do we think you need to not add to the deficit with any TCJA extension, we actually think you should be doing deficit reduction so that we can afford to pay for these investments.”

Manno for Forbes: Hiring A Job And Navigating A Career Begins In K-12 Schools

Posted on by Max Sherrill

By Bruno Manno

The jobs-to-be-done theory has implications for K-12 career education.

A successful move from one job to another is not only about organizations hiring individuals to do something for those organizations. It’s also about individuals hiring organizations to do something for themselves. This makes job moves a mutual engagement between the demands of job needers and the supply of job seekers.

This approach to jobs is an application of the jobs-to-be-done theory, described by Clayton Christensen and his colleagues in a 2016 Harvard Business Review article. They write, “People buy products and services to get jobs done, where ‘job’ is shorthand for what an individual really seeks to accomplish in a given circumstance. Jobs are never simply about function—they have powerful social and emotional dimensions.”

Ethan Bernstein, Michael Horn, and Bob Moesta in their forthcoming book Job Moves: 9 Steps for Making Progress in Your Career, make this theory central to their approach to career development. For well over a decade, they’ve analyzed the activities of thousands of job switchers to distill 9 steps that help job seekers make their next job move.

Keep reading in Forbes.

The Oregon Rebate: A Well-Intentioned Policy with Flawed Outcomes

Posted on by Max Sherrill

Getting public policy right is never easy. There are almost always unintended consequences and miscalculations that can lead to negative outcomes. However, when it becomes clear that a policy will not work as promised, policymakers have a responsibility to reconsider and withdraw the proposal.

This is the case with Oregon Measure 118, also known as the Oregon Rebate. The ballot measure proposes a 3% tax on a business’s gross sales above $25 million, and would apply to both S corporations and C Corporations. The revenue generated from this tax will be distributed equally among Oregonians of all ages and income levels, providing, according to the measure’s proponents, a $1,600 rebate for each person in the state.

Unfortunately, despite its good intentions, this measure will hurt, not help Oregon families.

It would create a budget shortfall. Several nonpartisan studies indicate that a 3% tax on corporate sales is unlikely to raise enough revenue to sustain a statewide $1,600 per person rebate. To maintain the rebate, the state legislature would have to cut expenses elsewhere, potentially affecting critical services like road maintenance, firefighting, and addiction recovery. Some estimates suggest that if the rebate were to become law, the state could end up with about $400 million less to spend on basic government services in the 2025-27 budget cycle.

The most vulnerable in Oregon would be left worse off. Although the Oregon Rebate was designed to create a basic level of income for all state residents, in reality, the budget shortfall will likely encourage cuts to vital safety net programs.

It would lead to higher prices for goods and services. The sales revenue tax established to fund the rebate would likely lead to higher prices, including for basic goods like food and transportation. The Legislative Revenue Office estimated that the gross receipts tax established in the measure is expected to increase prices by 1.3%. With average annual personal consumption expenditures estimated at $52,200 by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, a 1.3% increase in prices would add $679 in expenses per household. This would effectively diminish the value of the $1600 rebate, making it far less beneficial than it initially appears.

It would create unnecessary job losses. While historically low at 4.1%, the unemployment rate in Oregon has risen since last year, and many predict job creation will slow nationally. Unfortunately, Measure 118 could exacerbate this trend because a tax on gross corporate sales would harm businesses that have low profit margins.  Unlike a traditional corporate income tax which is levied on net income or profits, the Oregon Rebate proposes a tax on gross sales, applying the same tax rate regardless of a company’s profitability. This would place a disproportionate burden on businesses with high revenues but low profit margins. In response, companies with marginal profits might choose to move out of Oregon or distort their business decisions by reducing sales to minimize tax exposure, which would negatively impact corporate growth and innovation.

Given the problems with the design of the Oregon Rebate, it is not surprising that the proposal is opposed by leaders from both political parties, including Oregon House Speaker Julie Fahey, Senate President Rob Wagner, House Majority Leader Ben Bowman, Senate Majority Leader Kathleen Taylor, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek, and Senate Republican Leader Daniel Bonham. Ensuring corporations pay their fair share is an important goal and one that should be pursued. But that is not what would be achieved should Measure 118 become law.

Weinstein Jr. for Forbes: Kamala Harris Breaks With The “College For All” Orthodoxy

Posted on by Max Sherrill

By Paul Weinstein Jr.

“As president, I will get rid of the unnecessary degree requirements for federal jobs to increase jobs for folks without a four-year degree.” Those words from Vice President Kamala Harris signal a major shift in higher education policy, one which recognizes that earning a college degree costs too much, and not every job should require one.

Since the late 1960s, progressives have supported the expansion of financial aid for college in the belief that a college degree was the key to expanding the American Dream. Pell Grants, student loans, and college tax incentives were all enacted and expanded under Democratic Administrations.

For many years this strategy worked. College enrollments dramatically increased, rising from 8.5 million in 1970 and peaking at around 21 million in 2010. In addition, there are now more women undergraduates than men and some 45% of students come from diverse populations.

Keep reading in Forbes.

Trade Fact of the Week: “Sometimes countries make big and fateful choices … and sometimes their big and fateful choices go badly wrong.”

Posted on by Max Sherrill

FACT: “Sometimes countries make big and fateful choices … and sometimes their big and fateful choices go badly wrong.”

THE NUMBERS: U.S. hourly-wage and comparable workers, 2023* –
Total Employed: 161.0 million
Hourly wages or equivalent   80.5 million
“Industrial” hourly-wage workers**   15.7 million
“Non-industrial” hourly-wage workers   64.8 million

*  Bureau of Labor Statistics, full-year averages
** “Industrial” includes 8.9 million manufacturing workers, 5.7 million in construction, 0.3 million in energy and mining, and 0.8 million in agriculture. Top “non-industrial” categories include 12.5 million workers in health and social assistance, 10.9 million in retail, and 7.3 million in restaurants and other food service jobs.

WHAT THEY MEAN:

PPI’s newest report, Trump’s Folly, Harris’ Opportunity: Trade and the Blue-Collar Worker, opens with a warning:

“Sometimes countries make big and fateful choices. …  And sometimes big and fateful choices go badly wrong. American isolationism in the 1920s and 1930s helped make World War II possible. The ‘America First Committee’ policies*, had the U.S. adopted them in 1940, might have caused its loss. Hoover’s 1930 tariff hikes, advertised as a way to keep U.S. wages high and jobs at home, provoked retaliations and a deepened economic contraction, leaving exporters bankrupt and workers unemployed. These ideas’ return in 2024 presages a time in which American influence falls abroad, the cost of living soars at home, the U.S. and global economies grow more volatile, and the risks of world politics rise.”

Now as in the past, the best response to bad and dangerous ideas is to reject them and propose good ones instead. As Mr. Trump and Sen. Vance try to re-animate 1920s/1930s isolationism, Vice President Harris is creating a modernized, Roosevelt-like alternative. Starting from the basic conviction that American leadership can make the world safer and better, she affirms core U.S. alliances and support for Ukraine, and directly attacks on Mr. Trump’s neo-Hooverite tariff obsession:

“He wants to impose what is, in effect, a national sales tax on everyday products and basic necessities that we import from other countries.   That will devastate Americans.  It will mean higher prices on just about every one of your daily needs: a Trump tax on gas, a Trump tax on food, a Trump tax on clothing, a Trump tax on over-the-counter medication.   …  Donald Trump’s plan would cost a typical family $3,900 a year.  At this moment when everyday prices are too high, he will make them even higher.” 

Harris’ concise takedown perfectly matches George Orwell’s appeal for clarity and brevity (“use the fewest and shortest words necessary to carry your meaning”) in Politics and the English Language.  From a different angle (Bipartisan Infrastructure Act seaport investments), Transportation Secretary Buttigieg does the same in explaining the benefit Americans can draw from opening markets abroad and lowering the costs of trade: “keep prices down, shelves stocked, and American farms and businesses selling their goods around the world.”

What, then, should replace Mr. Trump’s national sales tax? The report — the fourth in PPI’s “Campaign for Working America” series this year, with others on housing, non-college career paths, and competition — assesses the limitations of “Bidenomics”’ honorable-but-not-quite-successful effort to create a “worker-centred” trade policy, and then suggests ways to connect trade policy to blue-collar aspirations and concerns, organized around a “guidepost” and four policy themes. A precis:

Guidepost: Per data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about half of last year’s 160 million working Americans were “blue-collar” men and women earning hourly wages or an equivalent type of income. Just under 16 million are “industrial” workers in factories, on construction sites, or in mining or farm work; the other 65 million are “non-industrial” workers in health and caregiving, retail, restaurants and bars, repair shops, bus routes, and similar jobs. A successful policy has to consider the interest of the non-industrial workers as well as the industrials.

Theme 1: Bring home goods prices down by purging junk tariffs. Reduce the cost of living by purging the 11,414-line tariff system of lines — for groceries, for clothes and shoes, for small appliances, and table silverware – which raise prices, discriminate against women and lower-income families, and don’t protect any jobs.  The launch for this is the Fletcher/Pettersen Pink Tariffs Study Act introduced by Reps. Lizzie Fletcher and Brittany Pettersen this spring.

Theme 2: Help workers find better jobs by creating more export opportunities. Data from the Census and BEA illustrate the high quality of jobs in exporting firms. As just one example, African American-owned exporting firms average 10 more employees and $10,000 more in payroll per worker than the U.S. business community generally.  Here the next president can build on some creative Biden team policy launches — see Secretary Raimondo’s launch of the Global Diversity Exporter Initiative — and combine this with revived Obama-era themes of opening markets, pooling strengths, and building relationships with friends and allies.

Theme 3: Make the right exceptions. President Biden’s “industrial strategy” program is still a work in progress. Its most ambitious projects, in particular the hope to shift the $180 billion U.S. auto industry toward lower-emissions EV production, are still in their early phases. Here, the Biden team’s decision to use tariffs has a reasonable foundation.  With China having gotten to mass-market, low-price EV first (after a very large barrage of its own subsidies), U.S. battery and plant factories should have some time to catch up. This probably shouldn’t be permanent but it’s the appropriate type of exception.

Theme 4: Give workers more help. By 2028, all dislocated workers — and long-term unemployed, young people looking to move to a second job, workers with mediocre jobs imagining something better ‚ should be able to design a tailored set of supports that fit their needs, from training, career services, apprenticeships, to temporary wage subsidies for older workers.

More detail on each of these in the report, of course. Returning, though, to the big choice ahead, here’s a final thought on risk and an optimistic close:

“The Trump campaign’s attempted resurrection of isolationism — its resurrection of “America First” political isolationism, its economic Hooverism, its disdain for America’s allies and international leadership — is full of risk. Risk of repeating the awful mistakes of the 1930s, risk of new economic shocks and volatility, risk of conflict as America’s friends are demoralized, and aggressive dictators grow bolder. Once made, such a choice takes decades to undo.

“Vice President Harris is right to reject it. She is right to insist on the centrality of alliances among democracies, right to highlight the costs higher tariffs will impose on families, and right to use her early speeches and September debate victory to explain the risks Trumpism poses on both counts. She can cap this, and underline her own optimism and strength, with a clear and appealing alternative that lowers costs, helps workers find new and better job opportunities, and strengthens security in both personal and national senses. That is the alternative hourly-wage Americans and the nation as a whole need, as their large and fateful choice approaches.”

* The “America First Committee,” founded in 1940, was a group organized to stop the Roosevelt administration from providing “Lend-Lease” military aid to Britain as it fought alone. See below for a book rec.

FURTHER READING

“Trump’s Folly, Harris’ Opportunity: Trade and the Blue-Collar Worker.”

Reading List –

Harris’ North Carolina economic speech.

Buttigieg on port investments, prices, shelves, and exports.

And Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” (1946).

Precursors: isolationism and internationalism – 

Susan Dunn’s 1940: FDR, Willkie, Lindbergh, Hitler – the Election Amid the Storm, has background on the people and goals of the “America First Committee.”

Herbert Hoover pitches tariff increases, 1928.

Roosevelt launches postwar trade negotiations, 1945.

More from PPI’s “Campaign for Working America” series – 

… Taylor Maag on better non-college options for young workers.

… Richard Kahlenburg on housing.

… Diana Moss on competition.

And blue-collar data –

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports on working America; see Table 45 for hourly-wage workers by occupation.

ABOUT ED

Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.

Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.

Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.

Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.

Read the full email and sign up for the Trade Fact of the Week.

PPI Releases New Report on Trade Policy and Its Impact on Hourly-Wage Workers

Posted on by Max Sherrill

WASHINGTON — The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) today released a new report, “Trump’s Folly, Harris’ Opportunity: Trade and the Hourly-Wage Worker,” authored by Edward Gresser, Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI. This report highlights Vice President Kamala Harris’s strong critique of former President Donald Trump’s tariff increases, points out the harm Trump’s 1930s-style isolationism would impose, and offers ideas for trade policy with particular benefit for hourly-wage workers’ cost of living, job opportunities, and security.

This new publication is the fourth in a series of papers published in PPI’s Campaign for Working America, which was launched earlier this year in partnership with former U.S. Representative Tim Ryan of Ohio. The Campaign aims to develop and test new themes, ideas, and policy proposals that help Democrats and other center-left leaders make a compelling economic offer to working Americans, bridge divides on culturally sensitive issues like immigration and education, and rally public support for the defense of democracy and freedom globally.  Other papers cover career paths for non-college workers, housing, and competition.

The report notes that Harris has taken a clear and forceful position against Trump’s trade isolationism in recent speeches and her September debate — an approach quite different and sharper than the softer, “blur-the-difference” tactics Hillary Clinton chose for trade issues in 2016 and the Biden political team adopted in early 2023.

“As Vice President Harris has said, Trump’s proposed tariffs would act as a national sales tax, raising prices on everyday goods like food, fuel, and medicine, which would hit working families the hardest,” said Gresser. “She now has the opportunity to offer an alternative that lowers costs, helps to improve job quality, and strengthens international partnerships.”

The report outlines the risks posed by Trump’s isolationist economic policies, which include higher consumer prices and decreased global influence for the United States. It also offers ideas for a trade policy under Harris with particular though not exclusive attention to blue-collar interests, with one “guidepost” and four themes:

Guidepost: Take the interest of all workers into account, including non-industrial workers worried about rising costs of living, exporting workers, and workers competing against rising competition from China and other producers,

• Theme 1: Cut families’ living costs by purging the U.S. tariff system of outdated but expensive tariffs.

• Theme 2: Improve job opportunities by promoting exports and opening markets.

• Theme 3: Ensuring that tariffs are applied temporarily when justified for emerging or transition industries, as in the case of electric vehicles, but as unusual exceptions with known disadvantages rather than frequent resorts.

• Theme 4: Improve opportunities for all displaced workers to get the services and support they need.

“The Trump campaign’s attempted resurrection of isolationism is full of risk. Vice President Harris is right to reject it. She can underline her own optimism and strength, and Trumpism’s defeatism and risk, with a clear and appealing alternative that lowers costs, helps workers find new and better job opportunities, and strengthens security both for families and for the country,” Gresser concluded.

Read and download the report here.

Ritz for Forbes: No, Welfare Isn’t ‘What’s Eating The Budget’ – This Is

Posted on by Max Sherrill

By Ben Ritz

A column in the Wall Street Journal last week by House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington (R-Texas) and former Senator Phil Gramm (R-Texas), titled “Welfare is What’s Eating the Budget,” argued that “means-tested programs, not Medicare and Social Security, are behind today’s massive debt.” And it’s profoundly wrong.

To make their argument, Arrington and Gramm rely upon a measure called “unobligated general revenue,” which they define as “total revenue net of Medicare and Social Security payroll taxes and premiums and mandatory interest on the public debt.” They argue that means-tested “welfare” programs – those that provide benefits only to people below a certain income threshold – claim a higher share of this revenue than Medicare and Social Security, making them the bigger fiscal challenge facing the federal government. Even if this metric were the appropriate one for comparison (and I’ll explain why it isn’t), it wouldn’t support the assertion that welfare is a bigger contributor to today’s budget deficits than Medicare and Social Security.

The chart below shows the change in total spending on means-tested programs and general revenue used to cover the gap between dedicated revenue and spending on Medicare and Social Security benefits each year since 2001 – the last year in which the federal budget was balanced. In almost every year, the increase in annual welfare spending relative to 2001 levels was less than or equal to 1% of gross domestic product (GDP). The only exceptions were the years following the 2008 financial crisis and COVID-19 pandemic, both of which were times in which unemployment sharply increased and so more people fell into the social safety net. By comparison, the same measurement for general revenue used to pay for Medicare and Social Security was roughly twice that amount in every one of the last 15 years.

Keep reading in Forbes.

Trump’s Folly, Harris’ Opportunity: Trade and the Hourly-Wage Worker

Posted on by Max Sherrill

Introduction

Sometimes countries make big and fateful choices, and one is coming soon. Eighty years after the birth of postwar liberal internationalism, with its system of alliances among democracies, trade liberalization, and international law, Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign aims to recreate the policies of Franklin Roosevelt’s isolationist predecessors and opponents.

Lifting the name and ideology of the “America First Committee” — a group organized to oppose military aid for Britain as it fought alone in 1940 — Trump’s program implies rupturing NATO and other core alliances, and ending aid to Ukraine. Matching this political retreat, it attempts to resurrect the economic isolationism Herbert Hoover ran on in 1928, proposing tariffs of 10% or 20% on all goods — energy, cars, peaches, OTC medicine, all the rest — and of 60% on Chinese-made goods.

And sometimes big choices go badly wrong. American isolationism in the 1920s and 1930s helped make World War II possible. The “America First Committee” policies, had the U.S. adopted them in 1940, might have caused its loss. Hoover’s 1930 tariff hikes, advertised as a way to keep U.S. wages high and jobs at home, provoked retaliations and a deepened economic contraction, leaving exporters bankrupt and workers unemployed. These ideas’ return in 2024 presages a time in which American influence falls abroad, the cost of living soars at home, the U.S. and global economies grow more volatile,
and the risks of world politics rise.

The right response to bad and dangerous ideas is to reject them and propose something better. Vice President Harris has made a very good start on this as nominee. Politically she has chosen continuity, underlining the importance of NATO and U.S. alliances generally, and maintaining military aid to Ukraine. Economically, from an August economic speech to the first volley of her September debate victory over Trump, she has replaced the soft, “blur-the-differences” approach Hillary Clinton took in 2016 by opposing President Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Biden administration adopted in early 2023 with a direct attack on Trump’s Hooverite tariff obsession. Here’s the speech version, which calmly and precisely explains Trumpism’s cost for working families:

“He wants to impose what is, in effect, a national sales tax on everyday products and basic necessities that we import from other countries. That will devastate Americans. It will mean higher prices on just about every one of your daily needs: a Trump tax on gas, a Trump tax on food, a Trump tax on clothing, a Trump tax on over-the-counter medication. … Donald Trump’s plan would cost a typical family $3,900 a year. At this moment when everyday prices are too high, he will make them even higher.”

Here, Harris accurately describes Trumpist economic isolationism and connects it to a core public concern. The next step is to offer a choice between Trumpism’s risks and resentments on one hand, and on the other a plan to lower costs for families, strengthen relations with America’s friends, and help workers raise their pay and improve their jobs. To envision what it might
be, keep the basics in mind, assess the places in which “Bidenomics” fell short, and look at a model of the way clear and simple language can help organize thought and policy.

Read the full report.

Ainsley in The Times: Kamala Harris told to woo ‘hero voters’ by Starmer’s strategist

Posted on by Max Sherrill

There is a very strong sense among these voters that the American middle class is in decline, she added. “They feel that the deal of middle-class aspiration is over, and almost a sense of betrayal by the political classes.”

Mattinson carried out her research alongside Starmer’s former director of policy, Claire Ainsley, who now works for the US-based Progressive Policy Institute.

Ainsley, who went with Mattinson to Wilmington, added: “Hero voters told us they want stability. They don’t want the chaos of Trump particularly, but they do want to know what is the change that [Harris] is going to bring about for them.

“The research also confirmed the centre-left can’t duck immigration,” she added. “This is also a really big priority for people. So a signature policy on immigration that she could speak to, perhaps around border control, would be important.”

Mattinson and Ainsley’s work is the latest example of ever closer co-operation between the Labour Party and the Democrats. Other key party figures have also flown over recently to share knowledge with Harris aides, such as Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s head of political strategy in No 10, and the former shadow cabinet minister Jonathan Ashworth.

Read more in The Times.