Fashion

'Better Off' Budget Attacks Status Quo with Bold Progressive Vision

With the release of what the Congressional Progressive Caucus is calling its ” on Wednesday, the most left-leaning members of Congress once again prove that good ideas do exist on Capitol Hill even if political realities threaten to make sure they go nowhere fast.

Despite being the largest single caucus on the Democratic side of the aisle, the CPC proposal will not see a winning vote in the GOP-controlled House, but that isn’t keeping progressive lawmakers and outside observers from declaring it a blueprint for a more sane U.S. budget and a challenge to both the forthcoming Republican version and a more visionary alternative to the one presented by President Obama last week.

Declaring that it’s possible to reduce inequality, create jobs, make crucial investments, and actually shrink the deficit at the same time, CPC co-chairs Reps. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) and Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) presented the new budget as a direct challenge to the austerity mindset that has dominated Washington, DC since the current economic crisis began in late 2008. By paralyzing job growth and ignoring the clear and present need for public investments and a renewed set of priorities, Grijalva and Ellison argue that the budget paradigm in Congress has allowed for the steady deterioration of the working class even as the wealthiest in society are doing better than ever.

“During our economy’s best decades, Congress invested in the American workforce and every family was better off for it,” the pair said in a joint statement. “But recent years have been dominated by growing inequality and a Republican majority in Congress obsessed with slashing the budget, making it harder for working Americans to find decent jobs and save for the future. The Congressional Progressive Caucus’ reverses the damage their austerity agenda has inflicted on hard-working families and restores our economy to its full potential by creating 8.8 million jobs by 2017.”

Calling the plan a “robust left alternative vision for America,” David Callahan, a policy analyst at the left-leaning Demos think tank, outlined the budget’s big ideas by highlighting these proposals:

  • Mounting a sweeping New Deal-style attack on unemployment, including expansive public works.
  • Overhauling the tax code to raise taxes on the wealthy back to levels that were the norm in the early postwar period, including a 49 percent top bracket, a new financial speculation tax, and making it much harder for corporations to evade taxes on foreign profits.
  • Enacting a public option and other changes that would begin a much-needed next phase of health reform that builds on and improves the Affordable Care Act.
  • Putting a price on carbon to decrease the use of fossil fuels and incentivize a shift to renewables, while also whacking all subsidies to oil and gas companies.
  • Reducing Pentagon spending.
  • Providing funds to publicly finance election campaigns.
  • Actually increasing Social Security benefits.

And while Callahan acknowledges that “that good policy proposals don’t add up to political power,” he says the document represents both the increased capacity of a “progressive left infrastructure” in the country and proof that progressive do, in fact, have real and workable solutions to the nation’s deepest challenges.

In an optimistic declaration, Callahan writes: “We have a vision. We have detailed ideas. We have a rising labor movement. And we have 71 members of Congress who are putting forth an agenda that is pretty damn bold.”

Looking at both this year’s effort and their past budgets, Miriam Pemberton, a research fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, says the CPC has consistently produced “budgets that balance significant deficit reduction over a ten year period with substantial investments in the near term to create jobs, strengthen the safety net, and reduce inequality—the kinds of investments that the budget austerity folks tell us we can’t afford.”

How do they make those achievements? Pemberton says it is easily done, but only if you go after the “wasteful areas of spending that other legislators won’t touch”—namely, she writes, “the enduringly large war budget (aren’t those wars ending?), tax havens for the rich, and oil company subsidies.”

According to Isaiah J. Poole at the Campaign for America’s Future, the ‘Better Off Budget’ should be lauded for putting forward “bold policies that match the severity of the problems facing working-class Americans.”

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