issue: Politics

The Daily Beast – Clinton’s Key: Never Mind the Bernie Bros, Here Come the Swing Voters

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The nominating contest grinds on, but the Acela primary set the stage for a general election faceoff between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Trump’s solid majorities mean that GOP voters, in their inscrutable wisdom, have spoken, choosing a political neophyte who’s never held any public office, has no discernable governing philosophy, and whose campaign consists mainly of bigoted outbursts and vicious personal attacks on anyone who gets in his way.

In contrast, the Democratic center seems to have held. Bernie Sanders’ call for an anti-capitalist “revolution” enthralled millenials, but his dream of turning America into a European-style welfare state—a colossal Denmark—struck out with black and Latino voters, and with women, who preferred the pragmatic Clinton.

What’s more, Clinton now has a cause that can galvanize a campaign that’s been criticized for lacking passion and inspiration—saving America from Donald Trump. Although some diehard Bernie Bros may decide to sit out the November election, she should have little difficulty uniting her party around the goal of keeping the billionaire bully out of the White House.

Continue reading at the Daily Beast.

Politico: Purple Reign?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

A PPI survey was one of the topics of discussion in Politico’s Morning Trade.

Veteran Democratic pollster Peter Brodnitz says there’s a big misconception about how voters view trade, noting a new Progressive Policy Institute poll that shows 65 percent of swing voters in four battleground states think manufacturing jobs have been lost to cheap labor competition overseas, not bad trade deals.

“There’s a very big difference between the perception of where the electorate is [on trade] and where the electorate actually is,” Brodnitz said. He added that respondents favored trade deals with strong labor and environmental standards.”

Read the rest of the article at Politico.

PPI Poll: Swing Voters In Swing States Hold Balance In 2016

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In this era of political polarization, it is tempting to assume the political center no longer exists. If this were true, it would certainly simplify things for political candidates and their strategists. They could stop worrying about how to persuade unaligned voters and concentrate exclusively on mobilizing their core partisans. However, this is not the case. As this new Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) poll by veteran Democratic pollster Peter Brodnitz shows, Swing voters exist, and they hold the balance of power in key 2016 battleground states. For Democrats especially, this survey yields a clear lesson: To hold the White House, recapture the Senate, and reduce the Republican House majority, candidates must craft messages that appeal beyond the party’s base to a substantial body of voters who are not in a fixed ideological camp.

This survey examined the outlook and attitudes of Swing voters in four critical Swing states: Florida, Ohio, Colorado, and Nevada. Constituting about a fifth of the electorate in those states, Swing voters come at today’s major challenges with a perspective different from that of either party. In general, they are less ideological, less partisan, and less angry than base voters. They are pragmatists who are focused mainly on economic growth and competitiveness.

Swing voters give low approval ratings to both parties in Congress, but slightly higher approval ratings to Democrats (32% approve, 59% disapprove), than to Republicans (28% approve, 65% disapprove). While Republicans give their own Members of Congress better marks than Democrats, Republicans in Congress are underwater among their own voters by eleven points (43% approve, 54% disapprove). Democrats, on the other hand, largely approve of the jobs their Members of Congress are doing (73% approve, 24% disapprove).

There is widespread agreement among battleground voters on a number of matters:

  • Most battleground voters rate the economy as fair or poor as opposed to excellent or good. They believe that improving the economy should be the priority, that moving jobs overseas is a key economic problem, and that increasing access to education and job training is essential.
  • Most of them also believe that America’s economy is still strong, and that if people work hard, they can get ahead.
  • Almost all believe it is essential that American companies can compete globally and that workers benefit from that competition and success.
  • While Democrats are the most likely to believe the United States is the strongest economic power in the world (81% agree), most Swing voters (58% agree) and Republicans (61%) hold this view.
  • Despite all the populist rhetoric deployed in both parties’ nominating contests, the voters we interviewed don’t seem particularly angry. Swing voters tend to be worried about the economy and Democrats tend to be optimistic, but few described themselves as angry.

Most believe global competition – more than trade agreements – is the force driving away jobs. There is little support among Swing voters for ending trade agreements, and most believe the benefits of trade agreements outweigh the costs.

  • Almost all believe “most” Americans are not prepared for retirement.
  • Almost all believe increased investments in infrastructure, like roads and bridges, would improve the U.S. economy.

In general, Swing voters are attracted to new ideas for stimulating growth — regulatory improvement, low corporate taxes intended to increase competitiveness and keep jobs from moving overseas, and a robust career pathways system that’s always there to help workers acquire marketable skills.

 

Download “2016.04-PPI-Poll_Swing-Voters-in-Swing-States.pdf”

Financial Times: White House Countdown – Toilet talk

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Financial Times referenced a PPI survey in an article about the American presidential primaries.

As the campaigns inch towards the general election, new polling suggests that the eventual Republican and Democratic nominees will have to perform some nimble adjustments to their policy messages if they are to successfully lure swing voters, my colleague Sam Fleming reports.

In interviews with swing voters in the four big swing states, Florida, Ohio, Colorado and Nevada, Peter Brodnitz, a Democratic pollster for the Progressive Policy Institute, found that despite the populist rhetoric, voters did not seem particularly angry about the economy. Worried, yes. Angry, no.”

Continue the article at The Financial Times.

McClatchy: Who will win over the voters who aren’t angry?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

A recent poll conducted by the PPI was cited in this McClatchy article on swing voters in the upcoming election.

Swing voters aren’t angry. But they’re tired of nasty, strident partisan rhetoric, and they don’t believe the economy is rigged against them.

Those are among the findings of a survey of swing voters in four states that are expected to be crucial to winning the November presidential election: Florida, Colorado, Nevada and Ohio.

The survey, conducted by Democratic pollster Peter Brodnitz for the Progressive Policy Institute, a center-left group that develops pro-growth ideas, illustrates how centrists crucial to a White House victory are not the voices being spotlighted throughout the primary season.”

Read the full article at McClatchy.

The Daily Beast: Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders Are Delusional on Trade Policy

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

In this campaign season of populist anger and demagoguery, bad ideas are bubbling to the surface like marsh gas. Among the worst is protectionism, which would wreak havoc on a U.S. economy that’s finally picking up steam.

Both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have seized on trade as a convenient scapegoat for the nation’s economic woes. There’s deep irony here. The popular frustrations on which they feed stem mainly from the productivity and wage slump America has experienced since 2000. Yet their proposed fix—shredding international treaties and walling off the U.S. economy—is a textbook formula for economic stagnation.

It’s a perfect negative feedback loop. And it won’t be the “one percent” who suffer if the populists get their way; it will be U.S. companies with global supply chains and millions of middle-class American workers and consumers.

Continue reading at The Daily Beast.

U.S. News & World Report: The Weapon Against Inequality That 2016 Forgot

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

If the democratic candidates are serious about combating inequality, they should start by embracing education reform.

For education reformers, the 2016 presidential primaries have been a wasteland. The Republican circus has produced many memorable moments, but few if any have touched on education.

Even on the Democratic side, education has been virtually invisible. The major issue is rising inequality, and public education has long been our society’s major instrument to combat that problem. Yet neither of the candidates has said anything positive about the one strategy that has made a real difference for low-income children: charter schools.

Reducing inequality without reforming our education system is probably impossible, because the tide is flowing so strongly in the opposite direction. Twenty-five years ago only a third of public school students were low-income (eligible for a free or reduced-price lunch). Today, for the first time since the data has been compiled, a majority are low income.

Read more at U.S. News & World Report.

CNN: America needs more than populist message

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

With Donald Trump and Ted Cruz locked in a bitter battle for the Republican nomination, the stakes in 2016 rise dramatically. The likely victory of either one of these deeply flawed candidates will give Democrats a chance not only to hold the White House, but also to realign U.S. politics. No wonder Republicans are panicking.

To seize the opportunity, however, Hillary Clinton will need to transcend the limits of a “populist” message based on identity politics, economic victimhood and redistribution. Thus far such themes have dominated the nomination battle with Sen. Bernie Sanders, but they won’t help Democrats forge a broader political coalition that includes suburban moderates, college-educated independents and many Republicans who are aghast at the prospect of branding the White House with a giant “T.”
Of course, with yet another caucus victory on Saturday, this time in Wyoming, Sanders will stay in the race, if only to keep tugging Clinton to the left. But Clinton needs to resist this ideological gravity, because Sanders’ left-wing populism is not an effective answer to the right-wing populism that Trump channels with such diabolic cunning.
Before the Bernie Bots clank into action, let me hasten to say I’m not positing moral equivalence between Sanders and Trump. Sanders is honest, principled and decent; Trump is, well, none of those things. But the lifelong socialist’s dream of turning America into a paternalistic, European-style welfare state isn’t the right prescription for what ails our country.
Continue reading at CNN.

Forbes: The Progressive Policy Institute’s Push to Cut Bureaucracy

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Forbes contributor Jared Meyer recently interviewed PPI’s chief economic strategist Dr. Michael Mandel on regulatory reform and economic growth.

The Progressive Policy Institute recently released a report titled “Unleashing Innovation & Growth.” The report covers a comprehensive list of public policy topics, including reforming America’s growing level of federal regulation. In what follows, PPI’s chief economic strategist Michael Mandel explains why pro-growth regulatory policies offer an alternative to the populist sentiments that are influencing both sides of the political spectrum.”

Read the interview in its entirety at Forbes.

Bernie vs. Hillary: Who Is More Trustworthy?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Washington Post just reviewed a recent dispute between the Sanders and Clinton campaigns and concluded that Sanders earned “three Pinnochios” for dishonesty. This raises broader questions as Bernie’s campaign goes negative.

Bernie has built a mythology that he is a uniquely honest politician, and he has traded on that brand myth to raise money. Now that he is using those funds to attack Hillary Clinton, progressives should consider the factual answers to three questions:

(1) Is Bernie a high-integrity politician, or does he have a history of making compromises when politically convenient?

(2) Do his budgets speak hard truths or promise falsehoods?

(3) Do well-informed, independent observers more frequently trust Bernie or Hillary?

Question #1: Does Bernie Show Courage When The Chips Are Down?

We all know that Bernie attacks Wall Street and the rich, and his attacks often have merit. But those attacks do not require political courage, as neither constituency matters to his campaigns in Vermont or nationally. So, how has Bernie’s integrity held up when his own political career was at stake? The facts are not kind, as Mother Jones recently explained. To take three examples:

Exhibit A: The National Rifle Association. In the largely rural state of Vermont, the left’s bête noire is the National Rifle Association. Did Bernie benefit from the NRA’s money, endorsements, and support? Yes. He had previously lost statewide office six times before the NRA decided to invest tens of thousands to elect him. Upon his election, Bernie reversed the gun-sense positions of his predecessor and voted against the Brady Bill five times.

Exhibit B: Going negative on Hillary. Bernie initially promised a campaign of ideas. He said would advance issues, forcing the party to respond to a substantive agenda of economic justice. He promised he would not attack Hillary personally in ways that might increase the likelihood of a GOP victory in the fall, because (in his words) Hillary would be a vastly better President than Trump or Cruz.

But then Bernie broke his promise. After Iowa and New Hampshire tantalized Bernie with the prospect he might actually win, and then large states such as Florida and Ohio dimmed his prospects, he and his campaign decided to go negative. Sanders is now using his campaign war chest to attack Hillary Clinton personally.

Exhibit C: Free college. When Bernie launched his presidential bid, he had a choice about what to emphasize. He decided to announce a $70 billion investment in education. The funny thing is that $70 billion is almost exactly the figure that would be necessary to fund universal, high-quality early childhood education for young children. Such a program would deliver enormous benefits for economic growth and social justice for all children.

Except … preschool children do not vote, and most families in need of preschool are too poor to give money to political campaigns. So instead,Bernie’s first major campaign pledge was free college. This is a $70 billion handout that would overwhelmingly go to the wealthier half of society (lower income families mostly do not send their kids to college, for reasons that often have little to do with tuition).

Why did Bernie prioritize college for some over preschool for all? Even if Bernie genuinely worried about college affordability, why didn’t he endorse policies that targeted low-income families (such as the policies promoted by President Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton)? The most plausible answer is not very flattering: to appeal to the wallets of middle-class campaign donors,Bernie Sanders disregarded the needs of the poor for political advantage.

Question #2: Do Bernie’s Budgets Convey Hard Truths or False Promises?

To convey a sense of honesty, Bernie trades in blunt ideas. “College will be free.” “Healthcare will be free.” “Other people — undeserving people—will pay for it.” The sum of these ideas appear in Bernie’s proposed budgets.

Sadly, you can find more climate scientists who reject climate change than credentialed economists who believe that Bernie’s budgets add up.

For example, the Sanders campaign has elevated the analytic work of Professor Gerald Friedman, who concluded that Sanders’ budgets work mathematically. To reach this conclusion, Friedman made aggressive assumptions about the U.S. growth rate under a Sanders presidency.

The credible economic reviews of Friedman’s analysis have been withering:

  • Jared Bernstein, who is friendly to Sanders and leads the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, cited several assumptions as “wishful thinking” in a conversation with the New York Times.
  • Obama’s former chair of his Council of Economic Advisors , Christina Romer, did a deep-dive analysis of Friedman’s work that revealed serious errors.
  • Austan Goolsbee, another former chair of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, wrote that “The numbers don’t remotely add up,” and that “they’ve evolved into magic flying puppies with winning Lotto tickets tied to their collars.”

Why does this matter? As liberal papers such as Slate Magazine and Mother Jones have explained, Bernie’s bad math is a form of dishonesty. His campaign is telling the entire country that we can have something for nothing. This demagoguery weakens America’s capacity for self-government and encourages apathy and anger, because the promises will not ever come true. Since Hillary Clinton chooses budgets that have a relationship with reality, she cannot offer as much. In other words, when Bernie claims that Hillary lacks ambition, the truth is that what she really lacks is reckless mendacity. As Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman wrote:

this controversy is an indication of a campaign, and perhaps a candidate, not ready for prime time. These claims for the Sanders program aren’t just implausible, they’re embarrassing to anyone remotely familiar with economic history (which says that raising long-run growth is very hard) and changing demography. They should have set alarm bells ringing, but obviously didn’t.

Question #3: Do Well Informed, Independent Observers Trust Bernie or Hillary More?

Bernie’s brand for honesty also comes from his claim that, by comparison, Clinton is not trustworthy. In this, he relies upon decades of Republican-led attacks on Hillary, ranging from Vincent Foster’s suicide to the terrorist attacks in Benghazi. But like those other artificial scandals, Bernie’s made-for-politics campaign of character assassination is false. Those who have carefully observed both candidates have concluded that Hillary is the more trustworthy.

A compelling recent example is the former executive editor of the New York Times, Jill Abramson, who has had a long career covering Hillary Clinton from an adversarial perspective. Abramson summarized her research in a column:

As an editor I’ve launched investigations into [Clinton’s] business dealings, her fundraising, her foundation and her marriage. As a reporter my stories stretch back to Whitewater. I’m not a favorite in Hillaryland. That makes what I want to say next surprising.

Hillary Clinton is fundamentally honest and trustworthy.

The yardsticks I use for measuring a politician’s honesty are pretty simple. Ever since I was an investigative reporter covering the nexus of money and politics, I’ve looked for connections between money (including campaign donations, loans, Super Pac funds, speaking fees, foundation ties) and official actions. I’m on the lookout for lies, scrutinizing statements candidates make in the heat of an election.

… There are no instances I know of where Clinton was doing the bidding of a donor or benefactor.

As for her statements on issues, Politifact, a Pulitzer prize-winning fact-checking organization, gives Clinton the best truth-telling record of any of the 2016 presidential candidates. She beats Sanders and Kasich and crushes Cruz and Trump …

Surprised by Abramson’s conclusion? You shouldn’t be. All the remaining candidates have long histories of working with other human beings. Progressives in Burlington, black activists in Vermont, and Bernie’s former colleagues in the House and Senate describe Bernie as a self-promoter with narcissistic tendencies. Hillary, by contrast, has received large numbers of endorsements from political leaders in cities, states, and national governments all over the world. Why? Because, when the chips are down, those people trust Hillary, notwithstanding the decades-long attacks on her character.

Abramson’s column is consistent with the experiences of those who have worked with Hillary. Her caution, and her suspicion of the press, make her appear suspicious to the public, but no one who knows and works with Clinton closely walks away feeling that she is untrustworthy. If you talk with people who know her, you find that they praise her directness and integrity.

If Sanders had kept running a positive, issues-oriented campaign, he might have eventually won over African American, Hispanic, and female voters. If he’d done that, he might have won the nomination. But he stopped. He is no longer running a campaign to shape the Democratic Party. Those who fund his campaign are now doing Donald Trump’s dirty work with false attacks on Hillary’s character. It is time for Bernie’s donors to turn off the money.

Washington Examiner: Should we care less about inequality?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Jason Russell quotes PPI President Will Marshall on public opinion towards economic inequality and how it can change over time.

“If everybody else is rising then really, in this country, there isn’t a strong appetite for punishing wealth creators,” Will Marshall, president of the liberal Progressive Policy Institute, said Wednesday at an inequality discussion hosted by Economics21 at the Manhattan Institute (my last employer). “Nobody cared about inequality in the late ’90s because all groups were rising.”

Read the full article at the Washington Examiner.

Press Release: PPI Unveils New Blueprint for Shared Prosperity

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 15, 2016

Contact: Cody Tucker, 202-775-0106
or ctucker@ppionline.org

A Progressive Alternative to Populism

PPI Unveils New Blueprint for Shared Prosperity

WASHINGTON—The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) today released Unleashing Innovation and Growth: A Progressive Alternative to Populism, a new blueprint for renewing America’s economic dynamism.

The plan offers an array of creative proposals for accelerating the “digitization” of the physical economy; lowering regulatory obstacles to innovation and entrepreneurship; launching a new public works push; adopting pro-growth tax reform; grooming the world’s most talented workers; and enabling working families to escape poverty and build middle class wealth.

The blueprint also takes aim at the populist anger that has figured prominently in campaign 2016:

…[P]opulists do Americans no favors by claiming the economic game is hopelessly rigged against them, that the leaders they elect are incompetents, or that our democracy is rancid with corruption. None of these claims is true, and such demagoguery undermines public confidence in America’s boundless capacity for self-renewal. Populist anger fosters an ‘us versus them’ mentality that, by reinforcing political tribalism and social mistrust, can only make it harder to build consensus around economic initiatives that benefit all Americans.

“We believe progressives owe U.S. voters a hope-inspiring alternative to populist outrage and the false remedies of nativism, protectionism and democratic socialism,” writes Will Marshall, PPI President.

“I encourage anyone looking for optimistic ideas to create more jobs, wealth, and prosperity for hard working Americans to read PPI’s new report using innovation to spur growth,” said Congressman Ron Kind (D-Wis.), Chairman of the New Democrat Coalition. “This report is full of forward thinking policy initiatives that help grow the American economy.”

“In the midst of today’s populist uprising, it’s up to our leaders to recognize the real reasons why our economy isn’t working for everyone and to fight for effective solutions,” said Governor Jack Markell (D-Del.). “PPI’s blueprint gives policymakers a roadmap to create opportunity for all Americans by harnessing the unstoppable forces of globalization and technological innovation, while opposing the impractical, and sometimes dangerous, proposals offered by the political extremes.”

The anger on which populists feed is rooted in a real economic problem: America has been stuck in a slow growth trap since 2000. This long spell of economic stagnation has held down wages and living standards and shrunk the middle class. What the nation needs is a forward-looking plan for moving the U.S. economy into high gear. Instead, as the PPI blueprint notes, today’s populists peddle nostalgia for our country’s past industrial glory but offer few practical ideas for building new American prosperity in today’s global knowledge economy.

Unleashing Innovation and Growth seeks to fill this vacuum in the presidential campaign, offering bold ideas for unleashing the collective ingenuity of the American people—harnessing disruptive change, raising skills, lowering tax and regulatory barriers to individual initiative and creativity, and experimenting with innovative ways to rebuild middle class wealth and enable more Americans to exit poverty.

Summary of Key Proposals

Unleash Innovation
• Spread innovation across the economy: Adopt a new “Innovation Platform” aimed at stimulating public and private investment in new ideas and enterprises, and at diffusing innovation across the entire economy.
• Improve the regulatory climate for innovation: Tackle the mounting costs of regulatory accumulation, the constant layering of new rules atop old ones; Make systemic changes to regulatory agencies to make promoting investment, innovation and new enterprises part of their core mission; Rein in occupational licensing requirements that screen out many low-income entrepreneurs; Lift outdated restrictions on lending to small business; give businesses incentives to offer more flexible work, including paid leave.
• Innovate our way to clean growth: Implement a more innovative energy strategy that simultaneously advances two vital interests: powering economic growth and assuring a healthy environment; Recognize that, for the foreseeable future, the U.S. and the world will have to tap all fuels—renewable, nuclear, and fossil—to meet growing energy demand and sustain global economic growth; Institute a nationwide carbon tax to curb greenhouse emissions while driving investment to clean and efficient energy.
• Democratize trade: Sell more of America’s highly competitive exports to a growing global middle class; promote the free flow of data across global borders; support innovative trade agreements, like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), that lift labor, environment and human rights standards in developing countries and enable more Americans to benefit from trade; Seize new opportunities for U.S. small businesses and entrepreneurs to use low-cost digital platforms to tap into global growth.

Align Fiscal Policy with Innovation and Growth
• Embrace pro-growth tax reform: Advocate for a dramatic shift from income to consumption taxes to stimulate investment in productive economic activities rather than those favored by the current tax code; Close loopholes that benefit special interests and dramatically simplify taxes for most Americans; Raise enough money to cut corporate income taxes down to globally competitive levels, and reduce taxes that penalize innovation and hiring.
• Modernize public works: Accurately measure the true economic impact of infrastructure spending; open infrastructure markets to private capital; define a strategic role for Washington through a national infrastructure bank; impose firm deadlines on project approvals and licensing process.

Groom the World’s Most Talented Workers
• Reinvent public school: Champion new models of school governance that enable more school autonomy and innovation, more customized learning, rigorous standards, and genuine accountability and results.
• Create new pathways into middle class jobs: Create a more promising approach to “career pathways” by combining classroom training and work experience through a sequence of jobs, within or across firms in an industry, and a sequence of credentials that signal their growing skill levels.
• Cut college costs for everyone: Rein in costs and decrease debt by encouraging colleges to offer three-year degrees rather than the traditional four-year program and focus policies on competency, rather than credit hours.

Build Middle Class Wealth
• Narrow the wealth gap with universal pensions: Champion “universal pension” accounts that would enable all workers to save for retirement, navigate the maze of tax-favored retirement plans, and take their pensions with them when changing jobs.
• Help families save for homeownership: Tackle the twin problems of declining homeownership and souring housing costs for both owners and renters by creating a new, tax-preferred mechanism for down payment savings—“Home K”—to lower obstacles to homeownership, like tight credit and down payment requirements, for first-time homebuyers and to promote savings.

Fight Poverty with Empowerment
• Empower people with smart phones: Use modern technology to cut through bureaucratic barriers to government safety net programs, consolidate benefit streams, enable people living in poverty more access to the information they need, and apply online for social supports; Encourage federal, state, and local governments to create online H.O.P.E. (Health, Opportunity, and Personal Empowerment) accounts and action plans.
• Expand housing choices for low-income Americans: Convert some federal rent subsidies into incentives for homeownership to relieve the burden on low-income families of high housing costs and reduce the waiting list for subsidized housing, without raising taxes or adding to the federal deficit.

Download Unleashing Innovation and Growth: A Progressive Alternative to Populism.

Unleashing Innovation and Growth: A Progressive Alternative to Populism

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

As Americans choose a new president in 2016, populist anger dominates the campaign. To hear Donald Trump or Senator Bernie Sanders tell it, America is either a global doormat or a sham democracy controlled by the “one percent.” These dark narratives are caricatures, but they do stem from a real dilemma: America is stuck in a slow- growth trap that holds down wages and living standards. How to break this long spell of economic stagnation is the central question in this election.

Today’s populists peddle nostalgia for our country’s past industrial glory but offer few practical ideas for building a new American prosperity in today’s global knowledge economy. Progressives owe U.S. voters a hopeful alternative to populist outrage and the false panaceas of nativism, protectionism, and democratic socialism. What America needs is a forward-looking plan to unleash innovation, stimulate productive investment, groom the world’s most talented workers, and put our economy back on a high-growth path. It’s time to banish fear and pessimism and trust instead in the liberal and individualist values and enterprising culture that have always made America great.

Download Unleashing Innovation and Growth: A Progressive Alternative to Populism

Washington Post: The new Democratic Party proposal to rival Bernie Sanders’ socialism

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Simplicity is one of Bernie Sanders’ great strengths: Corporations and the rich have rigged the economy. His solutions sound simple, even when the plans behind them are complicated: college for all, health care for all, tax the rich, break up big banks. He trails Hillary Clinton in presidential delegates to this point, and he remains an underdog for the Democratic nomination, but Sanders has already pulled Clinton, and the party, toward a more populist, more socialist policy agenda, thanks in part to that clarity of message.

The centrist Democrats who oppose that leftward lurch have struggled to match his simplicity. They tend to view the economy through a lens of skills and adaptation, not power and treachery. Many of them pushed in the 1990s, under President Bill Clinton, to expand global trade and deregulate the financial sector. They now concede those efforts did not go according to script, particularly for middle-class workers, but they are not calling for a full rewrite in response.

Their risk, in this election and moving forward, is to define themselves solely as anti-Democratic-socialist – the folks who don’t like the stuff that a lot of Democrats like about Sanders.

The Progressive Policy Institute is the latest centrist Democratic institution to try to counter that image. Today it will release what its president, Will Marshall, calls a “radical” agenda to get America working for the working class again. The report is called “Unleashing Innovation and Growth: a Progressive Alternative to Populism,” and it is organized around a straightforward, if not perfectly simple, principle.

Read more at The Washington Post

Memo to the Presidential Candidates: To Reduce Inequality, Reinvent Public Schools

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Growing inequality has emerged as a central issue in the 2016 presidential election. Yet none of you has paid much attention to a major source of economic inequality in America: the uneven quality of our public schools.

As far as we can determine, GOP frontrunner Donald Trump has no thoughts on how to improve K-12 education. With the exception of Jeb Bush, now out of the race, and Gov. John Kasich, the Republican candidates have said little about education on the stump, beyond ritual denunciations of the Common Core standards.

On the Democratic side, both candidates want to make public colleges more affordable, Sen. Bernie Sanders by eliminating tuition, Hillary Clinton by spending $350 billion for financial aid. Both also want to invest heavily in early childhood education. But Sanders’s web page lists 21 priorities, and K-12 education reform is not among them. Clinton includes it but offers only platitudes, such as “Make high-quality education available to every child—in every ZIP code—in America,”and “Ensure that teachers receive the training, mentorship, and support they need to succeed and thrive in the classroom.”

Given the glaring inequities in our public schools, we are mystified by the absence of K-12 reform from your campaigns. Frankly, this appears to reflect what is worst about each party. Republicans, in blind obedience to the ideology of local control, seem more upset by the prospect of “federal meddling” in public schools than by their endemic failure to give low-income students a quality education. Democrats tolerate failure for another reason, namely fear of alienating teachers’ unions. None of you, it seems, is prepared to stand up for poor children trapped in poor public schools.

Download “2016.03.09 Osborne_Marshall-Memo-to-Presidential-Candidates_Education-Policy”

The Hill: Which past presidential election offers this year’s closest parallel?

Posted on by The Progressive Policy Institute

Every four years since 2000, during the fall semester, I’ve taught a college course on that year’s unfolding presidential election. In the past, it’s been fairly easy to point to a prior election year that offers illuminating historical parallels. But this time, I’m finding that the problem is not in identifying a parallel year; it’s that the best comparison election keeps changing. Below are the main contenders.

The 2000 election: Last summer, it looked like 2000 would offer an almost perfect analogy. That year, Vice President Al Gore represented continuity with the incumbent administration and faced mostly token opposition in the Democratic primaries from a respected liberal sitting senator, Bill Bradley (N.J.). The Republican side was more heavily contested, but it seemed most likely that a son of former President George H.W. Bush would prevail.

However, this relatively placid 2000 parallel has long since fallen apart: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is proving much more formidable than Bradley, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is already out of the running for the Republican nomination, and many other factors have come into play.

Continue reading at The Hill.