Today, the White House announced a temporary pause on future Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) export terminal projects to include consideration of their climate impact. PPI is concerned that the pause announced today overstates and oversimplifies the serious climate, energy, and foreign policy considerations involved in assessing America’s stance on future LNG export expansion. Europe has still not fully recovered from the energy crisis caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, during which U.S. exports were crucial in providing stability to the European Union.
As PPI has previously noted, we do not oppose a well reasoned climate test for LNG export facilities. But the threat of curtailing LNG exports to our allies will put the markets, the EU, and Asia in turmoil, threatening the energy security of our allies with no climate benefit. Since the invasion of Ukraine, LNG shipments to Europe came at the expense of exports to other U.S. allies and developing-world trading partners that were forced to cut back or burn more coal instead; in the longer run, trading partners with manufacturing and chemicals industries that rely on natural gas cannot simply swap in coal, and so will lose out to countries that rely on older and dirtier production methods fed by coal.
As the U.S. works with importing allies like the EU, Japan, and South Korea to develop standards that ensure low-methane LNG purchases, a transparent and rigorous test could help all exports track the progress made through President Biden’s signature IRA methane policies and fairly stack gas emissions against the climate cost of mining and burning more coal or dirtier Russian gas.
But the tenor of today’s announcement belies the real hopes of most test supporters — in their misguided crusade to keep U.S. natural gas “in the ground,” the activists pushing the test could lead to a world of greater global greenhouse gas emissions as countries that import our gas find dirtier sources, or even revert to coal while killing U.S. jobs and increasing Putin’s leverage in Europe. Speeding up zero-carbon clean energy deployment at home and abroad is a much higher priority for the global fight against climate change, and one that doesn’t pit Democratic constituencies or U.S. allies against each other. The urgency of the energy transition cannot excuse counterproductive purity tests: We need to reduce emissions as fast as possible, not stop producing energy and hoping working people around the world stop needing it.
Why has the UK’s Labour Party been out of power for more than a decade? And why are they now heavily favored to win in 2024? Claire Ainsley is the former policy director for Labour leader Keir Starmer and current head of PPI’s Project on Center Left Renewal, and she joins the podcast to talk about the recent history of the Labour Party. We discuss the Blair years, how Labour lost its way, Jeremy Corbyn’s influence on the party, and how and why Keir Starmer seems poised to become the next Prime Minister of the UK.
As a U.S.-led coalition steps up airstrikes to suppress Houthi attacks on international shipping, progressives are accusingPresident Biden of going back on his promise to keep America out of “forever wars” in the Middle East.
It’s a bum rap that confuses cause and effect. What’s the greater evil, an outbreak of maritime terrorism or the United States using force to stop it? On the left, the habit of blaming America first dies hard.
Biden is walking a tightrope between a U.S. public leery of being dragged back into the region’s endemic violence by the Israel-Hamas war, and Houthi attacks that are disrupting routes where about 12 percent of global trade passes through.
Americans don’t relish open-ended military engagements anywhere, but our enemies get a vote, too. Today’s Middle East landscape is littered with Iran-backed jihadist groups who see themselves as waging a Holy War to erase Israel from the map. They know they can’t do that without driving the United States from the region.
From 2014, when Vladimir Putin first invaded Ukraine, until a few months ago, Western opinion was virtually unanimous. “Nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine,” thesaying went, meaning there could be no negotiations with Russia and no concessions except those agreed to by Ukrainians.
Today, that consensus is eroding. No one is talking about negotiating without Kyiv, but there is growingsentiment, especially among Republicans who question U.S. support for the war, that Ukraine should be pressured, whether by a withdrawal of U.S. aid or other means.
What these hardliners forget: unlike Russia, Ukraine is a democracy. The U.S. and other Western allies providing military and financial aid hold enormous sway in a country where their assistance is a de facto lifeline.
Today, tobacco addiction remains a global scourge, with its effects remaining particularly acute in Asia. To turn that tide, government officials will need to be able to parse science from dogma. They need to understand what works, and what doesn’t, to minimize the catastrophic health effects of smoking.
So, how can well-intentioned policymakers distinguish wisdom from folly? Fortunately, countries around the globe have been trying to wean smokers (and would-be smokers) off cigarettes for decades — and those campaigns have worked to very different effects. Some campaigns have been remarkably effective: The U.K., the U.S., New Zealand, Canada, and Japan have seen unmistakable drops to the point that cases of lung cancer and emphysema have fallen in almost miraculous ways. But at the same time, several countries in Asia have struggled to stem the tide. In 2019, tobacco was responsible for 4.7 million deaths in the Asia Pacific region. There are still 10 million smokers in Thailand, 100 million smokers in India, and even more in China. So, what exactly distinguishes those countries succeeding on these fronts from those wallowing in failure? What can science teach us?
This much is clear: The difference in national outcomes is decidedly not born from Asia’s failure to adhere to high standards. Rather, many of the countries that have had some of the worst outcomes — Thailand and India, for example — have adhered to the tenets of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) “Framework Convention on Tobacco Control,” or FCTC. But Thailand has seen only a 1% decline over 20 years of effort while the U.S., by contrast, which is not even a signatory to the FCTC, has had much more success. Policymakers need to understand why.
A closer look reveals that the most important factor distinguishing policy success and failure is the clarity with which governments understand that smoking cigarettes is the core of the problem — a behavior that must be distinguished from other forms of tobacco consumption. It would be ideal, of course, if policymakers could convince smokers to abandon tobacco and nicotine consumption altogether. But insofar as some people are simply not able to kick the habit of consuming the nicotine that laces tobacco, there are still enormous health advantages to encouraging smokers to switch to e-cigarettes or other non-combustible alternatives. And that’s the problem with the FCTC. It serves to encourage countries to ban cigarette alternatives. In fact, the WHO has adopted a policy that encourages countries to ban what is perhaps the most important tool available to thwart the epidemics of lung cancer and emphysema that remain a targeted, but global scourge.
Consider the difference. The U.K. recently embraced a program termed “swap to stop,” designed explicitly to wean nicotine addicts off cigarettes — and the program has contributed to Britain’s success in driving down cigarette consumption. Thailand and India, by contrast, have embraced the dogmatic preaching from the WHO leadership by outlawing e-cigarettes, and yet smoking in both countries remains a growing scourge. Correlation may not be causation, as many researchers frequently remind the public. But, in this case, the science provides a compelling explanation. Policymakers are being induced to put dogma ahead of harm reduction. Better to have millions of people consume products that are much less likely to kill than remain steadfast in a dream that they will abandon nicotine sight unseen.
Today, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, and Nepal are all considering how to approach this same problem. Will they follow the successful models on display in the U.K. and elsewhere — or else be convinced to follow a different path? The good news, in this realm, is that we have at our disposal tools capable of saving millions of lives. But to deploy them — to meet the entirely reachable goal of ending the use of combustible cigarettes by 2035 — government will need to separate wisdom from rhetoric. By the miracle of modern innovation, smokers and would-be smokers can address their nicotine addiction with products that are 95% less harmful than cigarettes, cigars, and pipes. Policymakers around the world need to display the courage to follow a path almost sure to save millions of lives.
As the health policy leaders from across South Asia head to COP-10 in Panama, they should embrace the science and join a global alliance to end the use of combustible cigarettes by pushing back against the dogmatic prohibition crowd at FCTC. If the WHO really wants to end the scourge of smoking it must use innovative new products to get smokers off cigarettes. Leaders from the Maldives Islands, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh can help the region join the U.K., U.S., and Japan in switching smokers to scientifically less harmful nicotine devices. The failure of tobacco control in Thailand and India is banning these products. The adult smokers in your region deserve better.
Lindsay Mark Lewis is the Executive Director at Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), a Washington, D.C. based think tank with offices in London, Brussels, and Kyiv.
What is the future of the global App Economy? The average person already spends hours each day on mobile applications, connecting with friends and relatives, watching news and entertainment, playing games, and doing daily tasks such as shopping and banking. People will use apps to interact with their cars, to connect with their health care. Artificial intelligence, low latency and high bandwidth 5G connections, virtual/mixed reality, intensive data processing, and on-device machine learning will give rise to entire new categories of mobile applications. Individuals and businesses will become ever-more dependent on mobile apps for their daily lives.
For Turkey, the evolving App Economy is a potent source of future jobs since developing, updating, maintaining and securing mobile apps is becoming even more important. Turkey already has 112,000 App Economy jobs, according to PPI’s new estimate (presented in this paper). None of these jobs existed 15 years ago, when Apple first opened the App Store on July 10, 2008, in the middle of the global financial crisis.1 Android Market (which later became Google Play) was announced by Google shortly after.2 These app stores created a new route through which software developers could write programs for smartphones. These mobile applications — called “apps” — could then be distributed to the rapidly growing number of smartphone users around the world.
The jobs generated by the app stores became an important part of the global economic expansion. More than that, app development and the app stores became a key route by which young people can develop tech skills and became an integral part of the global digital economy.
In this paper we estimate the number of App Economy jobs for Turkey, as of August 2023. We calculate the size of the iOS and Android ecosystems for Turkey. We compare Turkey’s App Economy to other peer countries.
Washington, D.C. – Today, the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) announced that Sarah Paden, Vice President and Chief Political Director at PPI, is one of 60 scholars selected to join the prestigious Presidential Leadership Scholars’ (PLS) ninth class. For nearly a decade, PLS has served as a catalyst for a diverse network of leaders brought together to collaborate and create meaningful change in the United States and around the world as they learn about leadership through the lens of the presidential experiences of George W. Bush, William J. Clinton, George H.W. Bush, and Lyndon B. Johnson and their administrations.
Paden has more than a decade of experience in campaigns and government relations at the local, state, and federal levels. Prior to PPI, Sarah served as head of the New York State Federal Affairs office in the Hall of States, during which time she led New York’s federal pandemic response, the state’s 2020 census effort, and former Governor Andrew Cuomo’s chairship at the National Governors Association.
“I’m honored to be selected as a Presidential Leadership Scholar and learn from former administration officials, business and civic leaders, and leading academics as part of this prestigious program,” said Sarah Paden. “I look forward to connecting with other key leaders from across the nation to address our country’s biggest challenges and push our communities forward.”
At PPI, Paden has led the organization’s international, national, and state outreach and shaped its political agenda, including launching the Women in Policy Alliance, a network for women professionals and policymakers. Paden’s previous work includes party and coalition building, leading the campaign to designate June Gun Violence Awareness Month in New York in 2013, building the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington. She has also worked for the Manhattan Democratic Party and New York State Democratic Party, creating and launching the Demmy Awards to highlight up-and-coming stars in the Democratic Party. She also served as Political Director and Senior Advisor on Cuomo 2018 and is a 2016 Hillary for America alum.
Over the course of the program, Scholars will travel to each participating presidential center to learn from key former administration officials, business and civic leaders, and leading academics. They will study and put into practice varying approaches to leadership and exchange ideas to help strengthen their impact in the communities they serve.
The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org. Find an expert at PPI and follow us on Twitter.
Koray Rosati and Jacqueline Duran will be placed on New Democrat Coalition staff to support the policy and communications teams Washington, D.C. – Today, the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) announced Koray Rosati and Jacqueline Duran have been hired as its new Congressional Communications and Policy Fellows, respectively, to be placed in the office of the New Democrat Coalition. PPI’s congressional fellowship program is designed to support the New Dems’ staff as they craft pragmatic policy solutions to address the nation’s toughest challenges.
“The New Dems practice smart, thoughtful, and impactful communications,” said Koray Rosati. “I’m excited to be part of the team and look forward to helping advance the Coalition’s message and priorities.” “I am thrilled to join PPI and the New Democrat Coalition. Working with both teams inspires my passion to find pragmatic legislative solutions in a partisan era of governance,” said JacquelineDuran. PPI’s Congressional Fellowship program provides fellows with a unique opportunity to gain valuable Capitol Hill experience and learn more about the role of ideological caucuses by working within the New Dems. Rosati and Duran will report directly to New Dems’ staff and support the Coalition’s policy and communications operations.
Rosati joins New Dems as PPI’s Communications Fellow from the Office of U.S. Congressman Jake Auchincloss (D-MA), where he most recently served as a communications assistant. Duran joins as PPI’s Policy Fellow from the Office of Congressman Scott Peters (D-CA), where she most recently served as a staff assistant.
The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org. Find an expert at PPI and follow us on Twitter.
As one of the largest ideological caucuses in the House of Representatives, the New Democrat Coalition is solutions oriented caucus seeking to bridge the gap between left and right by challenging outmoded partisan approaches to governing. Its Members are committed to pro-economic growth, pro-innovation, and fiscally responsible policies. Learn more about the NDC and its members by visiting newdemocratcoalition.house.gov.
FACT: Senegal is the U.S.’ fourth-largest source of wigs.
THE NUMBERS: U.S. imports of wigs from Senegal –
2022:
23.5 million
2020:
19.2 million
2017:
0.1 million
2012:
0.2 million
WHAT THEY MEAN:
A sad prediction by an eminent economist, about a decade ago – In The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It (2008), Paul Collier says the poorest countries — over 50 of them, with a combined population of 1 billion — had entered a development trap. The light-manufacturing-export success of Asia and Latin America had blocked the “trade rout” out of poverty for others, particularly in Africa. Geography, regional conflicts, and resource dependence made economic growth difficult and domestic economic reform often futile. Absent major unexpected change, their future looked bleak:
“In the modern world of globalization, there are some fabulous ladders; most societies are using them. But there are also some chutes, and some societies have hit them. The countries at the bottom [ed. note: about 58 in his count, with a population of a billion] are an unlucky minority, but they are stuck.”
The alternative book, Charles Kenny’s Getting Better: Why Global Development is Succeeding (2012), proposed the contrary: basic domestic-policy measures in the poorest countries were visibly succeeding, incomes were rising and social indicators improving, and life at the “bottom” was not stuck:
“[T]hose countries with the lowest quality of life are making the fastest progress in improving it across a range of measures including health, education, and civil and political liberties. The progress is the result of the global spread of technologies and ideas – technologies like vaccinations, and ideas like ‘send your daughter to school.’”
With the intervening decade’s experience, Kenny’s optimistic side of the debate has gained some strength. Anecdotally, cases like Senegal’s sudden bloom as a wig exporter to the U.S. — 200,000 wigs ten years ago for $4 million, nearly 24 million wigs in 2022 for $44 million, and just a bit fewer in 2023, fourth in the world as a wig supplier behind only China, Indonesia, and fellow-LDC Bangladesh — suggest that the trade route is not blocked. Rather, unique local industries like Dakar’s inventive hair-sculpting salons and wig factories can, with a bit of luck and advertisement, quickly attract international attention, scale up, and become large export earners and employers. (See below for a few mini-case studies: coffee from Timor-Leste, clothes from Cambodia and Haiti, and diamonds from ex-LDC Botswana.) More generally, the World Bank’s estimate of the actual number of poor people in the “bottom” tier — those in absolute poverty, scraping out a living on $2.15 a day or less — has fallen by about 40%, from 1.13 billion in 2010 to 690 million in 2022, as their (real-dollar) per capita income has risen from $896 to $1,117.
From a different angle, the suddenly rapid shrinking of the United Nations’ official list of “least-developed” countries (“LDCs”), suggests a similar national-level trend. The UN has been keeping this list since 1971, with updates every three years to add new countries or remove ones that have grown out of LDC status. (More detail on how it works below.) An observer studying the list 15 years ago would have to conclude along with Dr. Collier that it had a flypaper-like quality of almost never releasing anyone – in the 35 years from 1971 to 2006, only Botswana “graduated” (the U.N.’s term), having managed a surge of diamond wealth particularly well.
In the 18 years since, though, six countries have exited the list – Cabo Verde in 2007, the Maldives in 2011, Samoa in 2014, Equatorial Guinea in 2017, Vanuatu in 2020, and Bhutan last December. A cautious person might be still skeptical that this signifies a trend. The six recent graduates are all quite small, combining for 4.7 million people or 0.5% of the worldwide LDC population; four are tropical island countries able to tap tourism revenue; and the fifth, Equatorial Guinea, has a lot of oil, and the number of people living in LDCs remains above 1.1 billion people and an eighth of the world’s population. But this noted, the U.N. has already scheduled five more graduations in the next three years — Sao Tome e Principe this December; Bangladesh, Laos, and Nepal in December 2026; the Solomon Islands in December 2027 — which will not only shrink the list but reduce the global LDC population by over 200 million.
Looking only slightly further ahead, the U.N.’s spring 2024 “Triennial Review” of the LDC list will consider nine more potential graduates with 110 million more people for 2027 and 2028, including Cambodia, Comoros, Djibouti, Kiribati, Myanmar, Timor-Leste, Tuvalu, and Zambia. Senegal, with its suddenly booming wig industry, is also on the possible-graduate list, with a Senegal’s figures mirror this, with the same GNI per capita up from $1,117 to $1,410, literacy up ten points, life expectancy three years longer, and the count of Senegalese people in deep poverty down from 42% to 9%.
Not all are likely to go through — Myanmar’s economy has spiraled downward since the coup d’etat late in 2020, and Tuvalu and Kiribati have extreme climate-change vulnerability. But the list by 2028, along with the count of looks likely to be a lot smaller. To borrow Kenny’s phrase, it does seem that things are getting better. And not slowly.
By “least-developed country,” the UN does not mean “poorest relative to other countries” — say, the twenty poorest as against the 20 richest of the world’s 197 countries. Rather, the term “LDC” is meant as an objective descriptor, using a stable set of three metrics for income, health and education, and economic and environmental “vulnerability” to describe a country in difficult straits. The metrics as of the 2021 “Triennial Review” are:
(a) A national per capita income below $1,088, essentially $3 per person per day;
(b) A low “Human Assets Index” number which combines three health indicators (maternal mortality, under-five mortality, stunting) and three education indicators (middle school graduation, adult literacy, and gender parity in middle-school-level education); and
(c) An “Economic and Environmental Vulnerability Index” similarly calculated from a set of five economy-related topics (the agriculture + fisheries + mining share of GDP, “remoteness and landlockedness,” high export reliance on single products or industries, and export volatility), and four environmental or geographical issues (share of people in low-lying coastal areas and arid zones, instability of farm production, and number of disaster victims).
To get off the LDC list, a country must exceed the indicators in two of these three areas. This can involve bringing GDP per capita up above $1,388 and reaching designated above-LDC scores on one of the two indexes, or meeting the indexes without the GDP growth. (Though this latter option seems quite rare.) Having done it once, the country gets a second review three years later. If it passes this second exam, it can “graduate” (in the U.N.’s phrasing) and leave the list. A quick table of the list’s extent since its first edition 53 years ago, and the beginnings of dramatic change around 2020:
2028:
33-40?
2027:
42
2024:
45
2020:
47
2010:
48
2000:
51
1971:
52**
* Note that the numbers in this list are anachronistic, as over half of the current LDCs were colonies or parts of other countries in 1971. The original list had 24 countries at the time, and tended to grow larger for about 40 years as countries became independent. For example, the U.N. added Eritrea, Timor-Leste, and South Sudan after their official independence dates in 1993, 2002, and 2011.
Trade routes out:
Cambodia: Congress reopened normal trade with Cambodia in 1992. A generation later, Cambodia is the U.S.’ seventh-largest source of clothing, at $11 billion for about 1.25 billion articles of clothing weighing 240,000 tons. Better Work Cambodia, the International Labour Organization’s flagship garment-industry monitoring and training program, is the brainchild of former Commerce Minister Cham Prasidh and negotiations with the Clinton administration in the garment industry’s early 1990s days. Launched in 2001 and replicated in seven other countries, it provides safety inspection and training, rights on the job, and skill development for women workers in 703 garment factories around Phnom Penh.
Timor-Leste: Independent since 1999, Timor-Leste sells Americans about 1700 tons of top-tier coffee each year. The U.N’s look at Timor-Leste’s potential graduation later this decade worries about the possible loss of special LDC trade benefits (in this case the EU’s “Everything But Arms” duty-free program), as the EU oddly applies a 7.5% tariff to roasted coffee (though zero for non-roasted). The U.S. is zero-tariff all the way down for coffee and tea.
Botswana: The Diamond Technology Park just outside Gaborone looks to help Botswanans add value to the stones before they leave Africa. Space for cutters, jewelry-makers, gem and mineral research, and more.
Haiti: The U.S.’ HOPE & HELP programs provide duty-free treatment for about $1 billion in Haitian-made clothing each year, supporting most of Haiti’s industrial jobs and about 7% of GDP. The program is set to expire in just over a year. PPI’s take last summer.
Senegal: Not much written on Senegal’s wig-export boom so far, but QZ has an in-depth and prescient look at Dakar’s very large domestic hair-sculpting, wig-making, and salon industry just before the international takeoff.
And some data and intellectual background on the “bottom billion”:
Charles Kenny thinks it’s going better than many realize (2012).
… and a 2023 data update from the World Bank, estimating the number of people in absolute poverty through 2022 and assessing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic as three lost years for poverty reduction.
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.
Washington, D.C. — Government programs that benefit most Americans can only be sustained if most Americans are willing to pay for them. But for more than two decades, U.S. political leaders have kept taxes far below the level needed to pay for growing social spending on programs like Social Security and Medicare. America can afford to borrow when addressing temporary emergencies, but it cannot continue to sustain debts growing faster than our economy in perpetuity.
Today, the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) released a new report titled “How The $400K Tax Pledge Undermines Policymaking,” which argues that President Biden and the Democratic Party should move beyond Biden’s 2020 pledge not to raise taxes on any household making under $400,000. Report author Ben Ritz, Director of PPI’s Center for Funding America’s Future, explains the need for pragmatic progressives to push Democrats to soften this tax pledge if they want to bolster public investment in a fiscally sustainable way.
The report argues that raising taxes only on households with incomes over $400,000 is insufficient to fund current promises, let alone the new initiatives Biden has proposed during his presidency or the wish list of expanded programs sought by progressives. While it made for a popular campaign promise, President Biden’s pledge undermines prudent democratic governance by severing the crucial link between citizens’ demands for more government spending and their willingness to pay for it. In addition, the report contends that the pledge prevents the adoption of common-sense tax simplification measures and efficient revenue-raisers that most other advanced economies use to fund their welfare states.
“The reality is that some form of higher tax revenue is necessary to finance the needs of our aging population — and asking only families that make $400K to bear an increased burden is neither fair nor practical,” said Ben Ritz. “Pragmatic progressives must start making the case to voters why progressive programs are worth paying for. That means advocating for not only progressive tax increases, but also for broadening the tax base and closing inefficient loopholes — even those that benefit the middle class. At the same time, progressives must propose to modernize rather than simply expand existing spending programs, because the public’s tolerance for taxation only goes so high.”
Read more about the report in Politico and download the report here.
PPI’s Center for Funding America’s Future works to promote a fiscally responsible public investment agenda that fosters robust and inclusive economic growth. It tackles issues of public finance in the United States and offers innovative proposals to strengthen public investments in the foundation of our economy, modernize health and retirement programs to reflect an aging society, and transform our tax code to reward work over wealth.
The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org. Find an expert at PPI and follow us on Twitter.
A MINORITY POINT OF VIEW: One of the big questions about the big tax negotiation of 2025, perhaps somewhat counterintuitively, is how narrow it might be.
That’s because Republicans largely want to preserve all of the individual provisions from their 2017 tax law, while President Joe Biden repeatedly has vowed not to raise taxes on any households making less than $400,000 a year.
Other Democrats haven’t really pushed to dissuade the White House from that position, though it’s clearly also quite possible that Donald Trump will be in the Oval Office for those 2025 talks.
In any event, Ben Ritz of the Progressive Policy Institute is out with a new paper arguing that Democrats should get rid of that pledge, even if it means that more middle-income people pay more in taxes.
There are fiscal reasons for that, according to Ritz, who argues that deficits currently at an unsustainable path, with long-term mismatches between spending and revenues that will require higher taxes on more than just the wealthiest.
But it’s not just a numbers issue either, Ritz maintains — a government where the very few end up providing the money to pay for a wide range of services just won’t work over the long haul, because those who aren’t providing the resources won’t care enough about whether those services are needed or well run.
“Pragmatic progressives must pressure the Biden administration to soften the president’s misguided tax pledge heading into a potential second term. They must start making the case to voters why progressive programs are worth paying for,” Ritz writes.
Erin Delaney, Director of Health Care Policy at the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), released the following statement on the would-be 51st anniversary of the passage of Roe v. Wade, the United States Supreme Court’s landmark decision that recognized the constitutional right to an abortion and legalized the procedure nationwide:
“Thanks to former President Donald Trump and his appointments of right-wing activist judges to the Supreme Court, a new generation of Americans are now living with a reversal of rights that their parents and grandparents fought for. The onslaught of restrictions and bans to reproductive health care that have come in the wake of Dobbs further inflicts suffering on families and their ability to make their own decisions about their own health and when and how to grow their family.
“The Republican Party is out of touch with working-class Americans who are increasingly distressed about the state of abortion access since the end of Roe. In PPI’s Winning Back Working America poll, 56% of participants said they are concerned about abortion access. Republican’s relentless effort to curtail access to reproductive health care is directly opposed to the majority of Americans’ wishes, eroding the foundation of democracy and their personal liberty.
“Democrats must continue to expand their majority by appealing to working-class voters, including Independents and Republicans who are anxious about the fragile state of access to reproductive care in the 2024 election and beyond.
“PPI firmly believes in and will always defend reproductive freedom by fighting against far-right extremism and working to expand access to comprehensive reproductive health care for all Americans.”
The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org.
This essay is the first part of an exchange with historian Nelson Lichtenstein. Read responses 2, 3, and 4.
Is it really necessary to debate progressives again over Bill Clinton’s legacy? With a vengeful Donald Trump thrashing about our political waters like a blood-frenzied shark, it seems like a distraction.
What’s more, the left’s revisionist history of the Clinton years strikes me as a facile exercise in presentism—reinterpreting the past to score present-day ideological points. Nonetheless, the “neoliberal” legend seems to be gaining currency outside the activist and academic circles from which it sprang.
In a widely noted speech last April, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan took errant potshots at Clinton’s trade policies by way of touting the Biden Administration’s turn to industrial policy as a bold new departure in economic philosophy. Rolling out Bidenomics in July, President Biden confusingly described it as a rejection of the “trickle-down economics” that has supposedly held sway for the last 40 years—a period that includes the eight years of the Obama-Biden Administration.
Americans have always understood that our nation’s prosperity rests on two pillars: A vibrant free-enterprise system that rewards innovation and risk-taking, and a fiscally responsible government that invests in basic public goods and services that cannot be provided by the private sector. But to benefit from these investments, citizens must pay sufficient taxes to finance them — and for more than two decades now, U.S. political leaders have not asked them to do so.
Last year alone, the federal government spent $2 trillion more than it raised in tax revenue. Our country can afford to borrow when addressing temporary emergencies, but it cannot sustain debts growing faster than our economy in perpetuity. Unfortunately, that’s the path we’re on today, as the costs of health-care and retirement programs such as Medicare and Social Security continue growing faster than the revenues needed to finance them. If this structural mismatch between taxes and spending continues unabated, rapidly rising interest costs will further crowd out critical public investments and smother our economy.
Anti-tax zealots on the right have argued the imbalance can be solved entirely through spending cuts. Yet they have been unable to produce a plausible plan to do so without eviscerating core functions of government, such as food safety and basic scientific research that plants the seeds for innovation. The reality is some higher tax revenue is necessary to finance the needs of our aging population.
President Joe Biden at least partially grasps this reality and has called for raising taxes by almost $5 trillion over the next decade. However, his approach also is marred by political expediency. In Biden’s telling, our current spending trajectory can largely be sustained — and even raised — simply by raising taxes on the top 2% of income-earners, without any contribution from the vast majority of Americans. During his 2020 presidential campaign, Biden famously pledged not to raise taxes on households making under $400,000 (hereafter referred to as “the $400K pledge”). Since taking office, his administration has reinforced this pledge by saying no household earning under $400,000 will pay a penny more in taxes from his policies and proposing to prevent $1.7 trillion of temporary tax cuts that benefit these households from expiring.
Biden is right that the rich need to pay more in taxes but that simply isn’t enough. As this report demonstrates, raising taxes only on households with incomes over $400,000 is insufficient to fund current promises, let alone the new initiatives Biden has proposed during his presidency or the wish list of expanded programs sought by progressives. In addition to starving the government of needed revenue, the $400K pledge prevents the adoption of commonsense tax simplification measures and efficient revenue-raisers that most other advanced economies use to fund their welfare states
But the final problem with the $400K pledge is perhaps the most serious: it destabilizes our democracy. Asking fewer than 3 million households to bear the burden of financing a government meant to serve 330 million people is neither fair nor practical. It removes the incentive for prudent fiscal policy by severing the crucial link between citizens’ demands for more government spending and their willingness to pay for it. After all, why should voters care about wasteful or corrupt government spending if “somebody else” is paying for it? Meanwhile, the few households that are footing the bill will likely reduce their output in response to confiscatory levels of taxation. Government programs in a democratic society can only be sustained if most of the citizens who can contribute are willing to do so.
Pragmatic progressives must pressure the Biden administration to soften the president’s misguided tax pledge heading into a potential second term. They must start making the case to voters why progressive programs are worth paying for. That means advocating for not only progressive tax increases, but also for broadening the tax base to close inefficient loopholes — even those that benefit the middle class — and adopting new taxes, such as the consumption taxes that fund European welfare states. Beyond that, progressives must propose to modernize rather than expand existing spending programs, because the public’s tolerance for taxation only goes so high. Bringing spending into alignment with revenues at a sustainable level voters truly support is essential for Biden to establish a durable legacy.
After years of uncertainty, Congress may be on the verge of passing a $78 billion tax package to partially revive an expanded Child Tax Credit and business tax incentives for research and development that expired at the end of 2021. These popular — yet costly — provisions became linked in 2022 by Democrats arguing that benefits for working families should accompany tax breaks for businesses, but compromise has remained elusive until now. Although the deal, introduced Monday by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and House Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith (R-Mo.), is imperfect, it would temporarily reduce child poverty, incentivize innovation and minimally add to the national debt.
Expanding the Child Tax Credit (CTC) can play a key role in reducing child poverty, which is both a moral imperative and a smart investment in children’s health, educational and economic outcomes later in life. In 2021, Congress temporarily provided a pandemic-era expansion to the CTC to all families. These changes were expensive: If made permanent, they would have cost $1.6 trillion between 2022 and 2031. Yet, instead of adjusting the policy to provide more targeted support, lawmakers allowed the changes to completely expire.
Currently, the full $2,000-per-child value of the CTC isn’t available to many families that need it most.
Under pressure from green activists, the Biden administration is considering adopting a climate test in permits for new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export facilities. Coming out of the pandemic-driven supply shocks and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, American LNG exports were the largest of any single country in 2023 and served crucial roles in the U.S. economy, the environment and geopolitical support for European allies.
The activists hope to stop LNG infrastructure projects in spite of these benefits, apparently out of misguided trust for a single study and seemingly without concern for the political backlash among working-class and swing-state voters at home and allies abroad. The form of policy demand these left-wing activists have adopted is to require the inclusion of climate impacts in the federal government’s calculation of public interest in permits for LNG export facilities. Based on an unreviewed paper with what we view as overly narrow calculations and sorely outdated evidence, it seems the activists assume that the inclusion of climate criteria in the permit decision would end the export of LNG — which they believe would constitute climate progress. But gas is cleaner than coal, and because U.S. gas is relatively clean and getting even cleaner due to signature Biden policies, the climate calculus of growing liquefied gas exports does not mean that a comprehensive test of their impact would bear out the anti-export position of some environmental activists.
The economic and political risk for Democrats is enormous. President Biden knows that his political future is tied directly to issues like inflation and to winning back working-class voters in swing states like Pennsylvania. Remember that Biden made a late 2020 campaign stop in Pennsylvania for the explicit purpose of letting voters know that he was not against fracking. To allow the far left to derail the natural gas successes of this administration would be electorally disastrous.
