Politics Archives - Page 42 of 85 - Progressive Policy Institute

“Cut and Invest” vs. Austerity

Posted on April 19, 2013September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

President Obama’s new budget attempts to define a progressive alternative to conservative demands for a politics of austerity. Having just returned from a gathering of center-left parties in Copenhagen, I can report that European progressives are wrestling with the same challenge, and are reaching similar conclusions.

There was wide agreement that the wrong answer is to revert to “borrow and spend” policies that have mired transatlantic economies in debt, while failing to stimulate sustained economic growth. The right answer is a “cut and invest” approach that shifts spending from programs that support consumption now to investments that will make our workers and companies more productive and competitive down the road.

“You can only have a Nordic model if you’re competitive,” declared conference host Helle Thorning-Schmidt, prime minister of Denmark. “In this country, we cannot tax more; it’s that simple,” she added. “If you like the welfare state, if you want to sustain it, you have to take the tough decisions.” Continue reading ““Cut and Invest” vs. Austerity” →

Obama Took His Time In Calling Boston Marathon Attack ‘Terrorism’

Posted on April 17, 2013 by The Progressive Policy Institute

McClatchy’s Anita Kumar quotes PPI President Will Marshall on the President Obama’s response to the Boston marathon attack:

In his first term, the president was criticized for his responses to several potential incidents of terrorism.

Most notably, he was vacationing in Hawaii in 2009 and waited three days to speak publicly about the attempted bombing of a trans-Atlantic Northwest Airlines flight as it prepared to land in Detroit.

“There’s a suspicion among Republicans that he is only willing to be tough against al Qaida and nobody else,” said Will Marshall, a former Democratic speechwriter who heads the Progressive Policy Institute research center.

Obama, Marshall said, struck the right tone in trying to calm the nation after three people were killed and more than 170 were wounded Monday in two blasts near the finish line of the Boston Marathon.

“When there is a crisis we look to the president to be calm, not to be excitable, not boiling over,” he said.

Read the entire article here.

The Bill Clinton and DLC Model For Reinventing the Republican Party

Posted on March 14, 2013 by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Conservative Political Action Conference, a kind of annual camp meeting for the American right, opens in Washington today amid controversy over who’s in the tent and who’s not. Not invited were two prominent GOP governors, Chris Christie and Bob McDonnell, yet the obnoxious Donald Trump managed to snag a ticket.

This was too much for conservative realists, who think the movement can ill afford to shun Republicans who know how to win elections and govern in blue and purple states like New Jersey and Virginia. “When a party is in the minority, it has to add, not subtract,” huffed Jennifer Rubin. “CPAC’s cardinal sin was in foolishly trying to toss out others instead of building the broadest coalition.”

She’s right. Republicans have failed to win the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. Their message may sound like the revealed truth to the CPAC faithful, but it repels moderate voters. And they blame their losing streak on bad candidates, inept organizing, insufficient funds, beastly attack ads—everything but what they stand for.

I have seen this movie before, only then, in 1989, it starred the Democrats. As one of the original New Democrats who worked with Bill Clinton to turn the party around, I see some striking parallels between then and now.

Democrats had just come off their third straight presidential loss, this time to a candidate, George H.W. Bush, who seemed like pretty weak tea after the intoxicating Ronald Reagan. Their nominee, Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, was no left-wing firebrand, but a smart and utterly decent technocrat. Even so, he could not overcome the electorate’s lingering mistrust of ’70s-style economic and cultural liberalism.

In 2012 Republicans likewise nominated a Massachusetts governor who stressed competence over ideology. They also were confident of victory (despite the consistent findings of voter surveys, which apparently get about as much respect from conservatives as climate science) and so were rudely surprised when Obama beat Mitt Romney handily.

Paul Ryan’s Third Strike

Posted on March 13, 2013 by The Progressive Policy Institute

If Rep. Paul Ryan was chastened by his 2012 election defeat, it doesn’t show in his latest budget. It’s a defiant reaffirmation of libertarian dogma that makes no pretense of being a realistic blueprint for governing.

In fact, the House Budget Committee chairman’s new plan aims to shrink government on an even faster timetable than his previous two, balancing the federal budget in 10 years. He proposes to cut public spending by $4.6 trillion over the next decade, but raises nary a penny in new tax revenue.

That of course makes his plan radioactive to Senate Democrats and President Obama, who campaigned and won on explicit promises to take a “balanced” approach to debt reduction. Nonetheless, Ryan seems quite pleased with his handiwork. “We House Republicans have done our part,” he wrote in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal. “We’re outlining how to solve the greatest problems facing America today.”

Actually, all Ryan’s plan proves is that it is mathematically possible to balance the budget in 10 years with spending cuts alone. So what? You could achieve the same result by raising taxes the same amount. Neither is going to happen. Democrats will never accede to the first, and Republicans will never accede to the second.

Stop the Debt!

Posted on January 29, 2013 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Writing for Politico, Will Marshall argues that President Obama should counter the Republican’s proposal of balancing the federal budget in 10 years with an achievable goal of stopping the debt growth this year:

Republicans have retreated twice this month on the fiscal front, but they aren’t giving up. After having been forced to swallow higher tax rates and a debt ceiling increase, they’ve regrouped behind a new demand: balance the federal budget in 10 years.

That’s not going to happen, but no matter: The GOP is making an ideological statement. President Barack Obama should counter with a realistic fiscal goal, one Congress could actually achieve this year: Stop the debt from growing.

It’s finally dawned on Republicans that control of the House doesn’t entitle them to dictate the nation’s agenda. Still, they want to keep debt reduction front and center in Washington, because it’s a proxy for what conservatives regard as the nation’s overriding priority: shrinking the federal government.

But Obama won the election, and he has other ideas. One of them is not letting the right hold America’s economy hostage to demands for brutally deep cuts in public spending. The public backs the president, as evidenced by polls showing Americans believe GOP rigidity is the chief obstacle to a fiscal compromise.

Read the piece at Politico.

Ending the Endless Election Season

Posted on January 28, 2013September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

National elections in the United States now stretch out over nearly 24 months, with each new electoral cycle seeming to start up almost as soon as the last has ended. By contrast, British law allows elections in the United Kingdom to last no more than 17 working days. In 2005, for instance, the electoral season began on April 11 with the formal dissolution of Parliament and the vote was taken on May 5. The U.K. is not alone in the speed of its elections: the 2008 Canadian federal election began on September 14 and ended on October 7. That same year, elections in Italy lasted a slightly longer seven weeks, while in 2010 in the Netherlands the process took ten weeks.

There are reasons that the United States probably can’t have elections quite as compact as those in parliamentary democracies. But do they really need to last 40 times as long as in Britain, or even 10 times as long as in the Netherlands? And do our elections need to be so exorbitantly expensive? The $49 million cost of the 2010 U.K. parliamentary election was 120 times less than the almost $6 billion cost of the 2012 U.S. presidential election, or about 1/23rd as much per capita.

There is much that the U.S. system can learn from other democracies that would enable it to significantly streamline, simplify, and shorten our interminable electoral process for both the president and Congress, as well as state and local offices. Following are five ideas from around the world. Not all could be easily or directly imported into the U.S. system, but at a minimum they offer food for thought; in some cases they offer the start of blueprints for action.

Download the policy brief.

End the Endless Election Season

Posted on January 28, 2013 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Writing for the Daily Beast, PPI Senior Fellow Raymond A. Smith lays out policies to improve our presidential elections.

President Obama’s second inauguration last week capped a long electoral cycle that began almost two years ago, in early 2011. The stupendous length and cost of America’s presidential elections is a wonder to the world – and not in a good way.

In scarcely 24 months, the whole spectacle will start anew. Then it’s two years of straw polls, fundraising reports, and breathless horserace coverage of non-events. This will be followed by a gauntlet of caucuses and primaries whose arcane rules are understood only by a small priesthood of campaign consultants. And it in the end will yield a general election campaign smothered in attack ads paid for by shadowy “independent” groups accountable to no one.

Does democracy really have to be this way? No, and for proof we need only look to our closest democratic allies, whose national elections are notably brief, efficient and orderly. How do they manage this? Four sets of policies and practices stand out.

Read the complete piece at the Daily Beast.

Make the Cabinet More Effective

Posted on January 11, 2013 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Writing for the New York Times, PPI Senior Fellow Raymond A. Smith argues for strengthening the role of the president’s cabinet.

EVERY four years the cabinet briefly becomes the focus of national attention in December and January — only to fade from view again after Inauguration Day. True, individual cabinet secretaries will be in the news from time to time, but the cabinet as an institution will be all but forgotten. Yet the United States could benefit greatly by strengthening its scope and role.

Although the cabinet is not established in the Constitution, presidents since George Washington have convened a collective body of the heads of the executive departments. Washington used these meetings to tap into the wisdom of Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. Abraham Lincoln assembled a strong “team of rivals” in his cabinet to gird the nation at its time of greatest peril. Franklin D. Roosevelt convened his cabinet the day after the Pearl Harbor attacks, while John F. Kennedy relied on a subset of his cabinet during the Cuban missile crisis.

Over the past half-century, however, the expansion of the White House staff has centralized deliberation and decision making increasingly within the confines of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW. This reliance on professional staffers, political advisers and media spinmeisters within a constrictive White House “security bubble” deprives presidents not only of the deep substantive policy expertise of top civil servants but also of the political judgment of cabinet members who are often successful politicians.

Read the complete piece at the New York Times.

Fiscal Cliff Deal Could Show the Way Toward a Grand Bargain

Posted on January 3, 2013 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Writing for the Daily Beast, Will Marshall argues that Obama is in a strong position to challenge the new Congress to pass a fiscal grand bargain early in 2013:

The fiscal cliff deal finally passed by the House Tuesday night isn’t likely to lift the public’s rock-bottom esteem for the nation’s elected leaders. It took too long and delivered too little, and the spectacle of a Congress that can’t conduct the nation’s business except under extreme duress from self-imposed deadlines and penalties is infuriating.

Still the outcome wasn’t terrible—and it shows that a grand fiscal bargain is still in reach, as our deeply polarized political class seems to be relearning the art of compromise.

The deal is best understood as ratifying the 2012 election result. President Obama campaigned and won on explicit promises to raise tax rates on the rich. That mandate, plus the automatic expiration of the Bush tax cuts, left Republicans with no choice but to negotiate with the White House over narrowing the scope of the coming tax hike.

Read the entire piece at the Daily Beast.

Democrats Must Step Up on Entitlement Reform for Fiscal Cliff Deal

Posted on November 27, 2012 by The Progressive Policy Institute

PPI President Will Marshall speaks to The Daily Beast regarding the compromises needed from the left to avoid the fiscal cliff:

‘It appears President Obama is serious about slowing the growth of public health and retirement costs, which is the key to bending down the curve of federal spending,’ says Will Marshall, president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute. ‘The big question now is whether leading Democrats in Congress will stand up to the Norquists of the left and put real entitlement reform on the table.’

That is the big question. Labor unions rightly believe that they were essential to the president’s winning coalition and ground-game effort in the November election. They and many liberal partisans will insist that now is not the time to make any concessions, especially on core philosophic policies like Social Security and Medicaid. They will find comfort in the arguments of some party activists and pundits who say there is no problem, that the fiscal cliff is a myth, and that current levels of deficits and debt are perfectly sustainable, especially if we just soak the rich. They are, like their conservative corollaries, embracing a feel-good reality distortion field.

Math isn’t partisan. The Congressional Budget Office has projected that because of our aging population, cumulative spending on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest on the debt could gobble all federal revenues by the end of the next decade. The status quo is unsustainable. We cannot simply tax or spend or borrow our way out of this problem. Striking the right decisive balance is critical to our long-term economic strength as a nation.

Read the entire article at The Daily Beast.

Challenge to Stop the Never-ending Campaign

Posted on November 26, 2012 by The Progressive Policy Institute

PPI Senior Fellow Jim Arkedis calls for members of Congress to take six-month timeout from raising money in Politico.

The 2012 election is over, but don’t tell Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Rep. Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.). No sooner were the votes counted that they were back on the campaign money chase within a week, raising cash for the November 2014 contest.

Even though the culture of unlimited political money was cemented by the Citizens United decision, it’s time we ask our elected representatives a crucial question: Will members of Congress ever stop campaigning?

Congress has a major task ahead of it in the coming session. Members must compromise to strike a delicate balance on spending cuts and revenue increases that begins to control the country’s debt, while consolidating fragile economic momentum and continuing to make necessary investments in the education, infrastructure, and energy sectors among others. Isn’t there something wrong when elected officials are already asking for reelection funds before attempting to achieve results the voters are clearly demanding?

Efforts to reform money in politics have gained traction of late. Many ideas are in the mold of McCain-Feingold bill of 2002: legislative or constitutional fixes that restrict the amount of donations or increase transparency.

In theory, these initiatives are sound. In practice, they’re less viable. In the current climate, it’s doubtful that Congress would vote to handcuff its fundraising prowess, and constitutional amendments are complex endeavors facing long odds. And as McCain-Feingold has proven, megadonors will always find legal loopholes, like super PACs.

Read the entire piece at Politico.

Election Watch: 2012 Is in the Books!

Posted on November 22, 2012September 18, 2024 by The Progressive Policy Institute

I won’t bore readers with much about what they already know: Obama won; Democrats increased their margins in the Senate; Republicans lost House seats but easily hung onto control. Many of the scenarios we all spent a lot of time discussing during the General Election cycle are now moot: there was no “disputed election;” no electoral vote/popular vote “split;” no Republican Senate that would have allowed the GOP (in conjunction with a Romney win) to enact its agenda on a party-line vote; no Romney presidency without a Republican Senate that might (in theory, anyway) have enabled him to abandon his many promises to conservatives and pursue a bipartisan fiscal agreement.

As the final votes trickle in, it’s increasingly clear total voting will be down a relatively small amount from 2008, though not in most of the battleground states. And the composition of the electorate was very similar to that of 2008, despite widespread predictions that under-30 voters and Latinos would not turn out at anything like 2008 levels. In the end, the main difference between 2008 and 2012 from a demographic point of view is that Obama’s percentage among white voters dropped from 43% to 39%, which was partially offset by an increase in his percentage among Latinos from 67% to 71%. Yes, Obama’s percentage of under-30 voters dropped, but it was partially offset by a small gain among voters aged 30-44 (probably reflecting late-twenties voters from 2008 who moved into the next category). The only two states Romney “swung” to the GOP were the two closest Obama states in 2008, Indiana and North Carolina. Obama’s final popular-vote percentage will be very similar to George W. Bush’s in 2004. It does, as you may have heard, make him the first Democrat to win a majority of the popular vote in two consecutive elections since FDR.

Democratic gains of two net seats in the Senate were the most remarkable result, given the vastly pro-Republican landscape. A lot of the post-election talk was about the unforced errors of Tea Party candidates in Missouri and Indiana, but Republicans would have still fallen four seats short of a majority had both those states fallen into the GOP column. In the House, although there is some controversy over how to measure the national popular vote (some states don’t collect or report votes for unopposed candidates), it’s reasonably clear Democrats won a small plurality even though they only picked up ten net seats, leaving Republicans with a 232-203 majority. Continue reading “Election Watch: 2012 Is in the Books!” →

The 4 Issues Dragging Down the Economic Recovery

Posted on November 18, 2012 by The Progressive Policy Institute

PPI Chief Economic Strategist Michael Mandel was featured in the National Journal on regulatory reform:

Mitchell suggests creating a commission, modeled on the process that Congress has used to determine which military bases to realign or close, to weed out and eliminate federal spending that benefits certain businesses at the expense of others. Economist Michael Mandel of the Progressive Policy Institute suggests a similar body to reduce the government’s impact on business growth by identifying federal regulations to repeal or modify.

Read the entire National Journal article here.

Trickle-Down Bribery, or, The Butch Cassidy Congress

Posted on November 17, 2012 by The Progressive Policy Institute

Lindsay Lewis writes in the Daily Beast that the real corruption in Congress is facilitated by congressional staff whose main goal is to keep their boss and donors happy:

The House of Representatives in the 112th Congress has earned its single digit approval rating with aplomb. Gridlock, brinksmanship, mistrust, and meaningless partisan votes make today’s Congress the most dysfunctional I’ve seen in twenty years working on and around Capitol Hill.

Today, it pays to be an ardent partisan. Both parties now have super PACs—outside political organizations established by the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United decision—that accept millions in unlimited donations to support candidates. Democrats have House Majority PAC and Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) has established the Young Guns Action Fund for Republicans. Members may not be able to coordinate their activities with a super PAC, but they sure can raise money for them.

Though a July poll found two-thirds of Americans uncomfortable with unrestricted money in politics, the Supreme Court ruled that this influx of cash will not jeopardize our democratic process. Donors “might have influence or access to elected officials,” reads the Citizen’s United decision, but it “does not mean that those officials are corrupt.”

That interpretation may be technically correct, but it’s clear a majority of Supreme Court Justices have no idea how politics really works. I do. I’ve seen first hand how corruption infiltrates Congress. While Members’ votes are not necessarily for sale, America’s legislative process most certainly is. And the super PAC era is making the situation exponentially worse.

Congressional corruption is facilitated by Hill staff. Members of Congress are in the customer service business. Members must track down lost Social Security checks, listen to complaints in the district, and take feedback on proposed legislation.

Read the entire piece.

Obama Counts Capital Gains

Posted on November 15, 2012 by The Progressive Policy Institute

The Herald Scotland quotes PPI President Will Marshall on Obama’s tax strategy for his second term:

It was a very close race and it showed a country that’s still very divided,” said Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute. “But I think that the president does have a specific mandate for an end to tax breaks for the rich.”

Read the entire article here.