Surely the point is to have items on the list that there of quite a bit of support for. Abolishing suburbs is not going to make it, however well it Plays in the Bay Area.
Given how often Matt calls for a strategy for political success, which then gets derailed as "you're just saying that because you really don't believe in X", I think it is wise for him to not put out a list immediately.
I want to see if Matt can get more anti-popularists to agree there should be a list.
@matt, if you do, I'd be curious in how you'd handle this if you were Pelosi / Schumer's chief-of-staff, not just as a journalist / pundit (i.e. consider the possibility of actually getting most of the party power centers on board with the plan).
Any platform that offers no material benefits to working stiffs but promises the moon to climate activists is not populist. Rather than promising net carbon neutrality, it should promise to build cool shit, like nuclear power plants, solar and wind generation and EV factories. At a minimum, it should do something to reduce the cost of health care.
the key is to reduce costs. open borders for non-felon english and spanish speaking doctors would be great. letting foreign radiologists read scans would also rock.
I think the public option in the sense of "there's a government plan you can buy into on ACA exchanges" is popular. The problem is that progressives take "public option is popular" to mean "people want to rip apart the insurance-based healthcare system and replace with an American version of NHS" and...that's not popular.
Or put a little differently, "status quo plus public option as the end goal" appeals to a different demographic than "public option as step one towards monolithic YankNHS".
Sign me up for the former; I have no interest in the latter.
I think the carbon-neutrality plank is very much a "devil is in the details" kind of thing. It can be popular - or at least not so unpopular as to become a liability - but it depends on what's under the hood and how you brand it.
1. National education reform. First two years of college or technical training free. Existing debt made eligible for bankruptcy discharge. Reform of future student loan system that gives schools skin in the game.
2. Increased national investment in research. Making the US technological leader.
3. National minimum wage raised to $14 and tied to CPI.
4. Program for energy independence. Massive spending on improving transmission lines, investment in solar and other new technologies. Investment in pipelines and refineries.
5. workplace reform. Lower standard work week to 36 hours. Toughen overtime rules so that time and a half required for all more people. Require schedules to be posted for two weeks. Require two weeks of paid vacation for any business with more than 10 employees.
6. Property freedom bill. Restrict the zoning requirements that states and cities can put on peoples property.
7. Increase federal taxes on a second homes.
8. Bring back monthly child allowance. Commit to childcare spending.
9. Increased background checks for guns. Toughen gun laws for people who commit crimes with guns. Raise firearm purchase age to 21. Increase spending on police and social services in areas suffering from gun violence.
10. Raise income and capital gains tax for all people earning more that one million a year.
Yes! My friend at Chipotle keeps getting his schedules super last minute. Like his manager will text at 4:30 saying he's got a shift from 4 to 9 that day. Incredibly annoying for him, would love to have that fixed.
Something that you'd have to add to this law to get it closer to ironclad is to explicitly allow class action suits. Otherwise, this SCOTUS will find a way to ensure that these disputes get kicked into private arbitration.
AT&T v. Concepcion is one of those cases that makes my blood boil. It's a great example of a failure mode of textualism. The recent situation where a few entrepreneurial lawyers have started filing kajillions of individual arbitrations is a source of grim satisfaction.
I agree wholeheartedly. My son has started working at a local pizzeria and I sure wish I had something better to say than “this is why you don’t want to work at a pizza place for the rest of your life.“
IIRC John Paul Stevens's concurrence in Moore v City of East Cleveland implies that at a certain level, zoning rises to the level of a taking, so there is a tradition of this kind of thinking on the left side of the Court. A strategy based on that could work on this Court, though it's a long shot.
Yeah, you'd want to find a universally sympathetic plaintiff like Inez Moore was in that case, but those are of course difficult to find. The left wing would also more likely to want cite some other part of the Constitution, like the Equal Protection Clause, only leaving a plurality while Thomas and Gorsuch concur in the judgment.
Ok, this was fun... here's my quick pass, cribbing off yours but obviously with my own pet topics:
1. Inflation Bill: Do something
2. Women and Pregnancy Rights Bill: Federal protection for the rights of women to continue or end a pregnancy during the first trimester (14 weeks); federal protection for the right to life for the unborn post-viability (22 weeks) with exceptions for the physical health of the mother (or in the case of rape/incest, mental health of mother), fetal abnormalities incompatible with life; protection for religious beliefs of health practitioners but requirement to provide timely referrals; investment in reducing maternal mortality, maternal and infant healthcare; increased funding to support foster care and adoption programs
3. Romney's Child allowance bill
4. Voting Rights and Representation Bill: All representative districts must be drawn by non-partisan commissions; No-cause absentee voting and 2 weeks of early in-person voting nationwide; election day is a national holiday
5. Worker's Rights Bill: National minimum wage boosted to $14/hr and raised annually to track with CPI; schedules posted 2 weeks in advance with guaranteed minimum and maximum weekly hours; Mandatory paid overtime beyond 40 hours/wk for all workers; Caps on CEO pay to be no more than 100(?)x median worker pay in HQ country; publicly traded companies have an elected employee representative on the board
6. National education reform. Each state must have at least one state university and one technical college per 500,000(?) residents between the ages of 18 and 25 that any state resident can attend for free for up to 4 years. Existing debt made eligible for bankruptcy discharge. Reform student loan system that gives schools skin in the game.
7. Program for energy independence. Massive spending on improving transmission lines, investment in solar and other new technologies. Investment in pipelines and refineries.
8. Increased background checks for guns. Toughen gun laws for people who commit crimes with guns. Raise firearm purchase age to 21. Increase spending on police and social services in areas suffering from gun violence. Funding for state-level Red Flag laws. Funding for enforcing state & local gun laws. Funding/legalizing CDC research on gun violence.
9. Health care: Medicare for anyone who wants it
10. Income tax reform: Raise capital gains taxes to match income tax; increase federal income tax for households with over $500k annual income; bring back SALT deduction (for Bob)
**None of the above are allowed to be marketed as being primarily aimed at achieving racial justice.
Listing it all out though, I'll admit this might be asking for too much.
Below the line, but I'd be open to a swap:
-Parent's Rights Bill- Parents get access to detailed school curriculum, method to file a complaint (but not sue) local school boards; 10% of seats in a public school must be open to students in neighboring school districts by lottery; legal protection for parents who support hormonal intervention or open-ended exploratory therapy for minors who identify as trans (neither would justify removal from home)
-Something something housing/YIMBY
-Covid response, investment in pandemic readiness...
I like it. For inflation I would concentrate on tariffs, and shipping regulations.
I would probably stay out of the abortion thing, because I am personally pro life, but in a let’s leave it up to the state way. But I would be OK with the first trimester thing.
I disagree with the free for four years thing. The majority of people don’t get four year degree’s. But not something that is too terrible.
I’d be willing to go down to two years; I just want to push states to re-work public colleges and universities to serve a function more like K-12, addressing the needs of their populations.
I’d refine the inflation point with something on key infrastructure & I’d add a point about national defense that links military strength with diplomacy
I think this is impressive for something you dashed off in the morning, and it just makes me wonder why you would ever consider voting for Republicans when they are often the opponents of many of these issues. I think the work week thing is very popular and intriguing -- as someone who has worked a 4 day week since having kids, you can get a lot done in 32 hours if you want to and it is a huge quality of life change to have three days off a week.
The reason I would vote Republican… Which is selective. Think of me as a Mitt Romney type guy. Is to vote against democratic ideas that I don’t like. I’m a pretty dedicated moderate. For instance the student loan forgiveness thing without future reform will earn the Democrats a protest vote barring any other significant issue. I will wait and see what I didn’t comes up with, but this is one of those issues that Dems do that alienates the working class middle who don’t benefit.
Re things the Dems do that alienate voters -- I would hope Republican attempts to overturn the last presidential election, by violence if necessary, would be alienating to *all* voters. After all, why would you vote for someone who won't accept the outcome of your vote?
I like it! Why tax second homes but not yachts, private jets, expensive horses or six figure jewelry. I’m perfectly ok with taxing luxuries, but a cabin in the woods seems more middle class than a yacht.
If your purpose is raising revenue, then stocks, bonds and bank deposits above a certain limit should be taxed
I think the idea of taxing second homes is because, unlike yachts, horses and jewelry, everyone needs a place to live. And given a housing shortage, we can disincentive people from having a second one (that is presumably unoccupied for most of the year). We can have those who do have a second home to subsidize those in need of housing. Not sure this makes sense for the federal level rather than state level, but that would be the answer of why taxing second homes rather than yachts
One relatively clever way to politically secure a second home tax and make it hard to repeal would be to grant an exemption equal to the amount paid in state/local property tax on the second home that is additional to the amount paid on a normal property.
States and local governments would then be strongly incentivised to bring in their own second home taxes (in effect taking money from the federal government rather than second home owners). But then a future federal government that repeals the second home tax doesn't remove the state/local versions - meaning that there is less lobbying effort from second home owners to remove it.
Add to 9: Actually prosecute people for illegal firearm possession and purchases.
Also, how does the federal government tax homes to begin with? There is no federal property tax. And what is a second home? Does a timeshare count? Do rental houses count?
Yeah, this would need some clarification (I own one lot that has two houses on it, so I rent out the smaller one), but I read Rory as mainly aiming at the many houses the super rich own (he can correct me if I'm wrong).
There's a legal distinction of what is your "primary residences." All other owned properties would count as "second homes"... I don;t think a timeshare is an owned property though. Rental houses would be. Can throw a bone to the Left NIMBYs who hate airbnb.
These are all good things to put in the party platform, which no one reads and you never talk about on the trail but then once you win the election you can claim a mandate for.
(And I like all these things! It's just that people will say, "where's health care? where's x, y, z?" and other voters will say "I hate #8". )
I’m surprised an article titled, “A Democratic ‘Contract With America’ for 2022” doesn’t offer anything to address voter’s number one concern: inflation. In fact there is only a single brief mention of this issue:
> I intentionally didn’t include a lot of economic policies on this list. … Inflation, which I realize is a huge problem, poses a different kind of challenge. There is little evidence Democrats know how to address it, and even less that voters trust them on the issue.
Great! We’re admitting defeat on the number one issue on voter’s minds. We might as well forgo spending time, money, and effort on the midterms and just save all of that for 2024; hoping that inflation is no longer an issue.
Any serious plan for the 2022 midterms needs put inflation front and center. I guess the Biden administration’s inadequate attention and lack of a serious plan for inflation is leading others away from this focus. But we cannot secede this territory to the Republicans. We can’t let Republicans continue to reinforce the false narrative that they offer better economic policy.
We need to embrace something like Skanda Amarnath’s plan to rapidly expand the supply of key commodities, chiefly energy. [1] We need to let Americans know that we Democrats have a serious plan to address our urgent inflation challenges and are well executing that plan.
Any plan for inflation worthy of the name will involve crushing marginal demand - which means raising taxes for ordinary people, and increasing unemployment. That's why Biden isn't going near it.
Also, LOL at enacting sweeping legislation that effectively massively subsidises oil production at the same time as trying to enact a sweeping carbon reduction policy >and< at the same time as closing the few remaining nuclear plants. It's not so much 'Lord make me chaste but not yet' as 'Lord make me chaste and give me hookers and coke for life'.
Germany is actually in danger of having insufficient energy to prevent people from freezing to death this winter.
Even with natural gas prices where they are, reactivating a coal-fired plant makes no sense in the US.
Short of just saying “fuck it, 5 degrees of warming is fine,” there’s no climate change policy that’s not going to push people out of investing in fossil fuels; there’s absolutely no way to square the circle.
Even if you said that, unlike you, the extraction firms have projections saying transportation fuel use is going to peak in the next five years and rapidly fall thereafter, so they *still* will be moving to extract all the value they can from existing capital and shifting to other business models.
Perhaps Germany could have kept its nuclear power plants instead. Part of what is going on with coal plants is that coal miners are a powerful political constituency in Germany and they are pushing back. Germany is making the incorrect choice of eliminating nuclear while gently restricting coal. It's the wrong short and long term choice.
Leaving already-built nuclear power plants to sit while you burn coal is, if not the dictionary definition of insanity, at least getting into the ballpark. The Greens are beyond imbecilic.
Angela Merkel is the one who okayed closing nuclear power plants. You can blame the Greens (and I disagree with their stance on this), but they didn't make the final decisions on this. It's been the CDU and now the SPD.
One thing I think Dems could do on energy is come out in favor of (well-regulated) fracking. Gas is cleaner than oil; a big part of why US emissions have flatlined in the past decade or so is switching from oil to gas for power generation. It would be a nice tack against the expected brand, but it's not as *totally* hypocritical (well, okay, it is a little) as embracing coal or even oil.
"All of the above" energy strategies generally poll pretty well, even if they kinda don't make sense from an ideological perspective. But I think you could put a green-ish tint on it, and say that you're gonna push things toward greener energy in the medium-to-long term, which is probably gonna happen anyway seeing as green energy has become cost-competitive.
Yup, when you run the economy too hot for too long and get comprehensive inflation, there’s no pretty fix. Raising taxes or cutting spending or dropping tariffs have obvious constituencies against them.
Anyone want to take a stab on what would be a campaign plank on inflation that's not only effective and popular, but also very easy for the voters to understand? I know my eyes glaze over most of the time this topic comes up.
“In the short term, the U.S. government could enact measures often used in emergencies following hurricanes or other supply disruptions -- such as waivers of Jones Act provisions and some fuel specifications to increase supplies.”
There is none. That’s why I didn’t address it. The only way to address inflation is to reduce money either via high interest rates or higher taxes or holding wages down.
As a technical matter of economics that’s true. But most people do not differentiate between ‘prices are high because the money supply grew too fast’ and ‘prices are high due to supply-side constraints.’
Congress could rescind requirements for renewable fuel credits or eliminate the program entirely. They won’t, though, because they put such a low priority on inflation.
The simplest one is get rid of regulatory restraints on physical development, building things, and increasing the supply of goods. This won't get inflation back down to 2%, but it will help. I don't think Democrats would say this though, because it would mean that Republicans are sometimes correct about regulations.
The Democrats' 2022 platform on fighting inflation should be to offer no policy solutions at all. Beyond the fact that none of these policies will have any effect on inflation numbers before November, they make the Democrats look feckless. Does anyone remember the dramatic release of oil from the SPR? I do. Does anyone remember how that led to a dramatic decrease in the price of gasoline? I don't.
Sometimes life is unfair and it's unfortunate that something so out of the Democrats' control is of such high visibility now. It sucks. But you do the best you can by saying, yes, we know Americans are suffering from inflation, but we will work day and night now and past November to help get control of it, while all Republicans do is complain gleefully about it while all they really care about is getting control over women's bodies and undermining our democracy.
I dunno...these 10 points don't really address the things that are difficult in Americans lives. I agree with MY that the Democratic party needs to prioritize, support popular positions and focus on being a big tent.
However, the one thing I could say about the 2020 campaign (and can say it more so than previous Democratic campaigns) was that the Democrats were actually talking about the issues that make Americans' lives difficult and unaffordable--that is healthcare, housing, and higher education costs--and proposing concrete policies to address them.
And any platform that doesn't include these three things I think is out of touch with most Americans. I know MY said these weren't his 10, but I think that any list that doesn't cover the issues that main Americans care about the most is worse than no list at all.
I mean worse than that it doesn't address anything to do with 'the economy', apart from taxing billionaires. Which is a good idea and should be done, but it would obviously be very limited in its effects.
I like these and they're all basically good ideas (for someone with centre-left politics) and I like the idea of a clear plan of action, but having 5 of the 10 be about 'inside baseball' issues connected to politics and civil life (filibuster, democracy reform law, stock trading ban, civics classes, term limits) is definitely Not Good, because as far as I can tell voters mostly don't care too much about any of this stuff.
Agreed. I'm not even sure the billionaire tax is even that good of an idea (billionaires don't make most of their money as income, and I'm not sure how much revenue such a policy would actually generate). It's impact will likely be very small, but it's popular I guess...
But there's no addressing any economic issues at all, like inflation, which is really central to people's concerns.
My other problem is that there's no clear message from these points, including the ones connected to the "inside baseball issues." In 2020, the message was that democracy was under attack and that the American system was becoming increasingly undemocratic and unrepresentative. This messaging allowed Democrats to center process-related issues like like voting rights, DC/Puerto Rico statehood, gerrymandering, and filibuster reform and people to be interested in such issues.
But what's the major message in these list of 10 points? I don't see a common thread or even a clear vision here.
Well I think it's a bit of a muddle because about 50% of it seems to be about attracting voters while the other 50% of it appears to be about tying Dem legislators to institutional reforms that they've so far resisted. And it's understandable, because you might want to do both of these things. But it creates a list with as you say no clear theme and several topics that won't be of much interest to voters.
I think messaging consistency is probably overrated, though. What's the conceptual overlap between opposition to gun control and opposition to abortion? Messaging-wise, I would argue there's basically none other than that they're both planks of GOP politics and popular enough with GOP constituents. Sometimes orthogonal concerns just cluster because reasons.
EDIT: I do agree that the voters really don't care about the stuff like civics classes and even if they care about stock trading, it seems extremely unlikely that it's going to be a huge motivator on any axis. So even if I think message consistency is overrated, some of these list items seem like weak tea.
Matt, you’re really not gonna share your 10??
1) Housing
2) Also housing
…
10) Housing
Surely the point is to have items on the list that there of quite a bit of support for. Abolishing suburbs is not going to make it, however well it Plays in the Bay Area.
Don't forget abolishing mandatory parking minimums.
Not exactly a ”narrow target,” is it? Maybe obscure? Anyway, hard to imagine it being an important campaign move.
Putting housing on top of housing sounds like a great way to densify and reduce the cost of living space!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City. <== housing on top of housing
How does Milan even know who Xzibit is? He wasn’t even alive when Pimp My Ride was a thing.
Meme immortality
I think he should make it a list of 7, just to piss the maximalists off.
Now I know what I'm going to ask him for this week's mailbag!
Milan's list too!
Given how often Matt calls for a strategy for political success, which then gets derailed as "you're just saying that because you really don't believe in X", I think it is wise for him to not put out a list immediately.
I want to see if Matt can get more anti-popularists to agree there should be a list.
That would totally defeat the purpose of this article!
@matt, if you do, I'd be curious in how you'd handle this if you were Pelosi / Schumer's chief-of-staff, not just as a journalist / pundit (i.e. consider the possibility of actually getting most of the party power centers on board with the plan).
Any platform that offers no material benefits to working stiffs but promises the moon to climate activists is not populist. Rather than promising net carbon neutrality, it should promise to build cool shit, like nuclear power plants, solar and wind generation and EV factories. At a minimum, it should do something to reduce the cost of health care.
I will say it's pretty much exactly the sort of list I'd expect from its author.
This. Where is the minimum wage? Where is the public option?
the key is to reduce costs. open borders for non-felon english and spanish speaking doctors would be great. letting foreign radiologists read scans would also rock.
Wouldn’t do much. Providers are 8% of health costs. You could cut provider costs 50% and you would reduce overall prices 4%.
i’ve heard that before, do you have a good link with a rigorous breakdown?
https://hq.citizenhealth.io/posts/physicians-are-paid-73-of-our-total-national-health-expenditure
I think the idea was to be popular.
I think the public option in the sense of "there's a government plan you can buy into on ACA exchanges" is popular. The problem is that progressives take "public option is popular" to mean "people want to rip apart the insurance-based healthcare system and replace with an American version of NHS" and...that's not popular.
Or put a little differently, "status quo plus public option as the end goal" appeals to a different demographic than "public option as step one towards monolithic YankNHS".
Sign me up for the former; I have no interest in the latter.
I think the carbon-neutrality plank is very much a "devil is in the details" kind of thing. It can be popular - or at least not so unpopular as to become a liability - but it depends on what's under the hood and how you brand it.
Getting to net zero by 2050 demands building lots of things. Perry Bacon should rephrase it, but that's the only viable path forward.
I’ll take a stab.
1. National education reform. First two years of college or technical training free. Existing debt made eligible for bankruptcy discharge. Reform of future student loan system that gives schools skin in the game.
2. Increased national investment in research. Making the US technological leader.
3. National minimum wage raised to $14 and tied to CPI.
4. Program for energy independence. Massive spending on improving transmission lines, investment in solar and other new technologies. Investment in pipelines and refineries.
5. workplace reform. Lower standard work week to 36 hours. Toughen overtime rules so that time and a half required for all more people. Require schedules to be posted for two weeks. Require two weeks of paid vacation for any business with more than 10 employees.
6. Property freedom bill. Restrict the zoning requirements that states and cities can put on peoples property.
7. Increase federal taxes on a second homes.
8. Bring back monthly child allowance. Commit to childcare spending.
9. Increased background checks for guns. Toughen gun laws for people who commit crimes with guns. Raise firearm purchase age to 21. Increase spending on police and social services in areas suffering from gun violence.
10. Raise income and capital gains tax for all people earning more that one million a year.
"Require schedules to be posted for two weeks."
Yes! My friend at Chipotle keeps getting his schedules super last minute. Like his manager will text at 4:30 saying he's got a shift from 4 to 9 that day. Incredibly annoying for him, would love to have that fixed.
This is a huge deal for single parents who have to plan day care.
Something that you'd have to add to this law to get it closer to ironclad is to explicitly allow class action suits. Otherwise, this SCOTUS will find a way to ensure that these disputes get kicked into private arbitration.
AT&T v. Concepcion is one of those cases that makes my blood boil. It's a great example of a failure mode of textualism. The recent situation where a few entrepreneurial lawyers have started filing kajillions of individual arbitrations is a source of grim satisfaction.
I agree wholeheartedly. My son has started working at a local pizzeria and I sure wish I had something better to say than “this is why you don’t want to work at a pizza place for the rest of your life.“
I felt so damn lucky that the only time that would happen to me was for coverage. Even when the schedule didn't change we knew a full week in advance
Can I ask, what's the constitutional basis for the federal government controlling how a state chooses to zone its own land?
Probably the most the federal government can do is provide financial incentives for states to adopt more housing-friendly zoning.
None. I just sort of put in a wish list for things I care about.
If you're a left winger, the answer would be pretty bog standard Commerce Clause stuff.
However, since this SCOTUS is pretty right wing, I agree that they would probably strike it down.
Now, if you can convince Thomas and Gorsuch to form some horseshoe alliance that involves declaring zoning to be a taking under the Takings Clause...
IIRC John Paul Stevens's concurrence in Moore v City of East Cleveland implies that at a certain level, zoning rises to the level of a taking, so there is a tradition of this kind of thinking on the left side of the Court. A strategy based on that could work on this Court, though it's a long shot.
Yeah, you'd want to find a universally sympathetic plaintiff like Inez Moore was in that case, but those are of course difficult to find. The left wing would also more likely to want cite some other part of the Constitution, like the Equal Protection Clause, only leaving a plurality while Thomas and Gorsuch concur in the judgment.
That's probably true.
This looks pretty good, I like it. 5 and 6 are tricky, I think, to implement, but that can be worked out.
I think 5 is easy. Covered under Fair Labor Standards.
6 is difficult, but its still zoning reform.
Ok, this was fun... here's my quick pass, cribbing off yours but obviously with my own pet topics:
1. Inflation Bill: Do something
2. Women and Pregnancy Rights Bill: Federal protection for the rights of women to continue or end a pregnancy during the first trimester (14 weeks); federal protection for the right to life for the unborn post-viability (22 weeks) with exceptions for the physical health of the mother (or in the case of rape/incest, mental health of mother), fetal abnormalities incompatible with life; protection for religious beliefs of health practitioners but requirement to provide timely referrals; investment in reducing maternal mortality, maternal and infant healthcare; increased funding to support foster care and adoption programs
3. Romney's Child allowance bill
4. Voting Rights and Representation Bill: All representative districts must be drawn by non-partisan commissions; No-cause absentee voting and 2 weeks of early in-person voting nationwide; election day is a national holiday
5. Worker's Rights Bill: National minimum wage boosted to $14/hr and raised annually to track with CPI; schedules posted 2 weeks in advance with guaranteed minimum and maximum weekly hours; Mandatory paid overtime beyond 40 hours/wk for all workers; Caps on CEO pay to be no more than 100(?)x median worker pay in HQ country; publicly traded companies have an elected employee representative on the board
6. National education reform. Each state must have at least one state university and one technical college per 500,000(?) residents between the ages of 18 and 25 that any state resident can attend for free for up to 4 years. Existing debt made eligible for bankruptcy discharge. Reform student loan system that gives schools skin in the game.
7. Program for energy independence. Massive spending on improving transmission lines, investment in solar and other new technologies. Investment in pipelines and refineries.
8. Increased background checks for guns. Toughen gun laws for people who commit crimes with guns. Raise firearm purchase age to 21. Increase spending on police and social services in areas suffering from gun violence. Funding for state-level Red Flag laws. Funding for enforcing state & local gun laws. Funding/legalizing CDC research on gun violence.
9. Health care: Medicare for anyone who wants it
10. Income tax reform: Raise capital gains taxes to match income tax; increase federal income tax for households with over $500k annual income; bring back SALT deduction (for Bob)
**None of the above are allowed to be marketed as being primarily aimed at achieving racial justice.
Listing it all out though, I'll admit this might be asking for too much.
Below the line, but I'd be open to a swap:
-Parent's Rights Bill- Parents get access to detailed school curriculum, method to file a complaint (but not sue) local school boards; 10% of seats in a public school must be open to students in neighboring school districts by lottery; legal protection for parents who support hormonal intervention or open-ended exploratory therapy for minors who identify as trans (neither would justify removal from home)
-Something something housing/YIMBY
-Covid response, investment in pandemic readiness...
-Immigration?
I like it. For inflation I would concentrate on tariffs, and shipping regulations.
I would probably stay out of the abortion thing, because I am personally pro life, but in a let’s leave it up to the state way. But I would be OK with the first trimester thing.
I disagree with the free for four years thing. The majority of people don’t get four year degree’s. But not something that is too terrible.
I like you more specifics for taxes.
I’d be willing to go down to two years; I just want to push states to re-work public colleges and universities to serve a function more like K-12, addressing the needs of their populations.
I’d refine the inflation point with something on key infrastructure & I’d add a point about national defense that links military strength with diplomacy
I think this is impressive for something you dashed off in the morning, and it just makes me wonder why you would ever consider voting for Republicans when they are often the opponents of many of these issues. I think the work week thing is very popular and intriguing -- as someone who has worked a 4 day week since having kids, you can get a lot done in 32 hours if you want to and it is a huge quality of life change to have three days off a week.
The reason I would vote Republican… Which is selective. Think of me as a Mitt Romney type guy. Is to vote against democratic ideas that I don’t like. I’m a pretty dedicated moderate. For instance the student loan forgiveness thing without future reform will earn the Democrats a protest vote barring any other significant issue. I will wait and see what I didn’t comes up with, but this is one of those issues that Dems do that alienates the working class middle who don’t benefit.
Re things the Dems do that alienate voters -- I would hope Republican attempts to overturn the last presidential election, by violence if necessary, would be alienating to *all* voters. After all, why would you vote for someone who won't accept the outcome of your vote?
Which is exactly why I absolutely will not vote for Trump. I hold the individual candidates responsible.
I like it! Why tax second homes but not yachts, private jets, expensive horses or six figure jewelry. I’m perfectly ok with taxing luxuries, but a cabin in the woods seems more middle class than a yacht.
If your purpose is raising revenue, then stocks, bonds and bank deposits above a certain limit should be taxed
I wasn’t concerned about the luxury aspect of it. More for the housing availability aspect.
I think the idea of taxing second homes is because, unlike yachts, horses and jewelry, everyone needs a place to live. And given a housing shortage, we can disincentive people from having a second one (that is presumably unoccupied for most of the year). We can have those who do have a second home to subsidize those in need of housing. Not sure this makes sense for the federal level rather than state level, but that would be the answer of why taxing second homes rather than yachts
One relatively clever way to politically secure a second home tax and make it hard to repeal would be to grant an exemption equal to the amount paid in state/local property tax on the second home that is additional to the amount paid on a normal property.
States and local governments would then be strongly incentivised to bring in their own second home taxes (in effect taking money from the federal government rather than second home owners). But then a future federal government that repeals the second home tax doesn't remove the state/local versions - meaning that there is less lobbying effort from second home owners to remove it.
Hey you have a point. And I have a cabin in the woods, so this proposal of mine actually works against my own personal interest.
We tried a luxury tax in the 1990s, and it did not work at all.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1993/07/16/how-to-sink-an-industry-and-not-soak-the-rich/08ea5310-4a4b-4674-ab88-fad8c42cf55b/
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/the-lesson-of-economic-damage-from-taxing-the-rich-with-the-punitive-luxury-tax-in-the-1990s/
Add to 9: Actually prosecute people for illegal firearm possession and purchases.
Also, how does the federal government tax homes to begin with? There is no federal property tax. And what is a second home? Does a timeshare count? Do rental houses count?
Yeah, this would need some clarification (I own one lot that has two houses on it, so I rent out the smaller one), but I read Rory as mainly aiming at the many houses the super rich own (he can correct me if I'm wrong).
If you rent out a house long-term that it wouldn’t count against you.
I was addressing vacation properties or unused properties.
I thought about adding in something addressing Air BnBs, but I think that’s best addressed locally.
Also, I should mention that I own a second vacation home. So this actually hurts me.
There's a legal distinction of what is your "primary residences." All other owned properties would count as "second homes"... I don;t think a timeshare is an owned property though. Rental houses would be. Can throw a bone to the Left NIMBYs who hate airbnb.
I was trying to target vacation homes. If people wanna own rental homes that’s just the free market.
Most (all?) timeshares have deeds.
Agreed. It's unspoken.
These are all good things to put in the party platform, which no one reads and you never talk about on the trail but then once you win the election you can claim a mandate for.
(And I like all these things! It's just that people will say, "where's health care? where's x, y, z?" and other voters will say "I hate #8". )
I should’ve added healthcare. But I didn’t really have anything sort of obvious.
Is healthcare not a top 10 issue? Polls show Americans viewing it as the second most important problem they are facing, after inflation.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/05/12/by-a-wide-margin-americans-view-inflation-as-the-top-problem-facing-the-country-today/
Oh yeah. I forget about healthcare because mine is so awesome. (retired military).
Throw something in there about a public option.
You can combine 7 with 10 to make room :)
Yeah. Some of my list could probably be consolidated. Hi post first thing in the morning before my brain is fully awake though
I’m surprised an article titled, “A Democratic ‘Contract With America’ for 2022” doesn’t offer anything to address voter’s number one concern: inflation. In fact there is only a single brief mention of this issue:
> I intentionally didn’t include a lot of economic policies on this list. … Inflation, which I realize is a huge problem, poses a different kind of challenge. There is little evidence Democrats know how to address it, and even less that voters trust them on the issue.
Great! We’re admitting defeat on the number one issue on voter’s minds. We might as well forgo spending time, money, and effort on the midterms and just save all of that for 2024; hoping that inflation is no longer an issue.
Any serious plan for the 2022 midterms needs put inflation front and center. I guess the Biden administration’s inadequate attention and lack of a serious plan for inflation is leading others away from this focus. But we cannot secede this territory to the Republicans. We can’t let Republicans continue to reinforce the false narrative that they offer better economic policy.
We need to embrace something like Skanda Amarnath’s plan to rapidly expand the supply of key commodities, chiefly energy. [1] We need to let Americans know that we Democrats have a serious plan to address our urgent inflation challenges and are well executing that plan.
[1] https://www.employamerica.org/researchreports/the-break-glass-moment/
Any plan for inflation worthy of the name will involve crushing marginal demand - which means raising taxes for ordinary people, and increasing unemployment. That's why Biden isn't going near it.
Also, LOL at enacting sweeping legislation that effectively massively subsidises oil production at the same time as trying to enact a sweeping carbon reduction policy >and< at the same time as closing the few remaining nuclear plants. It's not so much 'Lord make me chaste but not yet' as 'Lord make me chaste and give me hookers and coke for life'.
Really took the wind out of my sails here, I had written down hookers and coke as the first two things on my 10 point agenda.
Meanwhile, Germany is reopening coal-fired power plants. Becoming chaste isn't possible (yet).
Germany is actually in danger of having insufficient energy to prevent people from freezing to death this winter.
Even with natural gas prices where they are, reactivating a coal-fired plant makes no sense in the US.
Short of just saying “fuck it, 5 degrees of warming is fine,” there’s no climate change policy that’s not going to push people out of investing in fossil fuels; there’s absolutely no way to square the circle.
Even if you said that, unlike you, the extraction firms have projections saying transportation fuel use is going to peak in the next five years and rapidly fall thereafter, so they *still* will be moving to extract all the value they can from existing capital and shifting to other business models.
Perhaps Germany could have kept its nuclear power plants instead. Part of what is going on with coal plants is that coal miners are a powerful political constituency in Germany and they are pushing back. Germany is making the incorrect choice of eliminating nuclear while gently restricting coal. It's the wrong short and long term choice.
That goes without saying.
Leaving already-built nuclear power plants to sit while you burn coal is, if not the dictionary definition of insanity, at least getting into the ballpark. The Greens are beyond imbecilic.
Angela Merkel is the one who okayed closing nuclear power plants. You can blame the Greens (and I disagree with their stance on this), but they didn't make the final decisions on this. It's been the CDU and now the SPD.
One thing I think Dems could do on energy is come out in favor of (well-regulated) fracking. Gas is cleaner than oil; a big part of why US emissions have flatlined in the past decade or so is switching from oil to gas for power generation. It would be a nice tack against the expected brand, but it's not as *totally* hypocritical (well, okay, it is a little) as embracing coal or even oil.
"All of the above" energy strategies generally poll pretty well, even if they kinda don't make sense from an ideological perspective. But I think you could put a green-ish tint on it, and say that you're gonna push things toward greener energy in the medium-to-long term, which is probably gonna happen anyway seeing as green energy has become cost-competitive.
Yup, when you run the economy too hot for too long and get comprehensive inflation, there’s no pretty fix. Raising taxes or cutting spending or dropping tariffs have obvious constituencies against them.
Anyone want to take a stab on what would be a campaign plank on inflation that's not only effective and popular, but also very easy for the voters to understand? I know my eyes glaze over most of the time this topic comes up.
Raise taxes on anyone who can afford a vacation to Europe
“In the short term, the U.S. government could enact measures often used in emergencies following hurricanes or other supply disruptions -- such as waivers of Jones Act provisions and some fuel specifications to increase supplies.”
There is none. That’s why I didn’t address it. The only way to address inflation is to reduce money either via high interest rates or higher taxes or holding wages down.
As a technical matter of economics that’s true. But most people do not differentiate between ‘prices are high because the money supply grew too fast’ and ‘prices are high due to supply-side constraints.’
Yeah. Addressing tariffs and shipping and supply would probably be something I support. Honestly I just didn’t think of it. But it is a good idea.
Congress could rescind requirements for renewable fuel credits or eliminate the program entirely. They won’t, though, because they put such a low priority on inflation.
I wonder if it would be feasible (or even halfway true) for a senior politician to say “we’re going to do 5 things and knock out half our problems.”
The simplest one is get rid of regulatory restraints on physical development, building things, and increasing the supply of goods. This won't get inflation back down to 2%, but it will help. I don't think Democrats would say this though, because it would mean that Republicans are sometimes correct about regulations.
“We can’t let Republicans continue to reinforce the false narrative that they offer better economic policy”
Not a single Republican voted for the American Rescue Plan. You know, that massive and unnecessary spending bill that created inflation.
Yeah, honestly this looks like a list from the AOC/Bernie/Warren wing of the party that is only dialed up to 5 instead of the usual 11.
The Democrats' 2022 platform on fighting inflation should be to offer no policy solutions at all. Beyond the fact that none of these policies will have any effect on inflation numbers before November, they make the Democrats look feckless. Does anyone remember the dramatic release of oil from the SPR? I do. Does anyone remember how that led to a dramatic decrease in the price of gasoline? I don't.
Sometimes life is unfair and it's unfortunate that something so out of the Democrats' control is of such high visibility now. It sucks. But you do the best you can by saying, yes, we know Americans are suffering from inflation, but we will work day and night now and past November to help get control of it, while all Republicans do is complain gleefully about it while all they really care about is getting control over women's bodies and undermining our democracy.
I dunno...these 10 points don't really address the things that are difficult in Americans lives. I agree with MY that the Democratic party needs to prioritize, support popular positions and focus on being a big tent.
However, the one thing I could say about the 2020 campaign (and can say it more so than previous Democratic campaigns) was that the Democrats were actually talking about the issues that make Americans' lives difficult and unaffordable--that is healthcare, housing, and higher education costs--and proposing concrete policies to address them.
And any platform that doesn't include these three things I think is out of touch with most Americans. I know MY said these weren't his 10, but I think that any list that doesn't cover the issues that main Americans care about the most is worse than no list at all.
I mean worse than that it doesn't address anything to do with 'the economy', apart from taxing billionaires. Which is a good idea and should be done, but it would obviously be very limited in its effects.
I like these and they're all basically good ideas (for someone with centre-left politics) and I like the idea of a clear plan of action, but having 5 of the 10 be about 'inside baseball' issues connected to politics and civil life (filibuster, democracy reform law, stock trading ban, civics classes, term limits) is definitely Not Good, because as far as I can tell voters mostly don't care too much about any of this stuff.
Agreed. I'm not even sure the billionaire tax is even that good of an idea (billionaires don't make most of their money as income, and I'm not sure how much revenue such a policy would actually generate). It's impact will likely be very small, but it's popular I guess...
But there's no addressing any economic issues at all, like inflation, which is really central to people's concerns.
My other problem is that there's no clear message from these points, including the ones connected to the "inside baseball issues." In 2020, the message was that democracy was under attack and that the American system was becoming increasingly undemocratic and unrepresentative. This messaging allowed Democrats to center process-related issues like like voting rights, DC/Puerto Rico statehood, gerrymandering, and filibuster reform and people to be interested in such issues.
But what's the major message in these list of 10 points? I don't see a common thread or even a clear vision here.
Well I think it's a bit of a muddle because about 50% of it seems to be about attracting voters while the other 50% of it appears to be about tying Dem legislators to institutional reforms that they've so far resisted. And it's understandable, because you might want to do both of these things. But it creates a list with as you say no clear theme and several topics that won't be of much interest to voters.
I think messaging consistency is probably overrated, though. What's the conceptual overlap between opposition to gun control and opposition to abortion? Messaging-wise, I would argue there's basically none other than that they're both planks of GOP politics and popular enough with GOP constituents. Sometimes orthogonal concerns just cluster because reasons.
EDIT: I do agree that the voters really don't care about the stuff like civics classes and even if they care about stock trading, it seems extremely unlikely that it's going to be a huge motivator on any axis. So even if I think message consistency is overrated, some of these list items seem like weak tea.
Taxing billionaires is a perfectly fine plank. Billiona