This is a progressive moment, when we have an opportunity to once again reinvent the government to meet our goals. We have to recognize our opportunities, and also recognize that our task is not to mimic the right and talk only to ourselves but capture the imagination of the public as a whole. We have to articulate new innovative public policies that articulate the progressive ideals that Americans broadly share. Continue reading
Originally published in the Philadelphia Inquirer, February 11, 2013 By Valerie Arkoosh and Marc Stier Imagine a new federal program guaranteed to provide Pennsylvania with $43.3 billion between 2013 and 2022 for repairs to roads and bridges. Imagine that the program is paid for entirely by the federal government for the first three years. After that, Pennsylvania will have to put in $4 billion. Imagine that despite the expenditure, Pennsylvania saves a greater amount because the new federal funding would replace almost $4 billion in state funding. And imagine that the new funding would create tens of thousands of jobs in the state and generate millions of dollars in state and local tax revenue. Can anyone imagine Gov. Corbett turning down this deal? Of course not. Yet in his budget address Tuesday, Corbett did just that, failing to embrace $43.3 billion from the federal government over 10 years to expand… Continue reading
Originally published by Newsworks, January 31, 2013 It appears that Congressman Bob Brady has followed up on his promise to do “everything we can” to save the 2013 Manayunk Bike Race. I’m glad Brady has come through again. The Bike Race plays an important part in the life of the Northwest where I live. Losing it would hurt businesses here — and our civic spirit. But while a great deal of heated effort has gone into saving the bike race, the city and region may yet face a devastating blow: the loss of our two daily newspapers. The new owners of the Inquirer and Daily News, Interstate General Media (IGM), have threatened to “liquidate” the newspapers if the Newspaper Guild, which represents reporters, and nine other unions, doesn’t agree to substantial concessions. And not only are our leading politicians not raising a stink about that, outside of the City Paper… Continue reading
Ever since the Affordable Care Act was passed, the left wing critics of it—especially the single payer advocates—have said, wrongly, that it was passed at the behest of the insurance companies and that subsidies in the exchanges are a handout to them. This was never true for few reasons, not least because the insurance companies spend at least a hundred and forty million or so opposing the ACA. Now, to my great surprise, one of the leaders of the single payer movement in PA, Chuck Pennacchio, has posted an article on Facebook in which he seems to entirely reverse direction without noticing it. Continue reading
David Books outdid himself today in writing post about education and health care that is completely misleading about improvements in both in the last fifty years and about the limits of productivity increases in both areas. It takes more than a FB status update to explain why. Read this blog post for details. The short story though, is that if you really think there haven’t been any improvements in either education or medical care in this country since 1960, you don’t deserve to have your opinions appear on the op-ed page of The New York Times. And if you think that huge productivity increases in labor intensive fields are possible, then maybe you should explain why NY Times columnists do only two columns a week instead of the three they did in the 1960s. Continue reading
We got very good news from the Supreme Court today. There are no constitutional barriers to the ACA going fully into effect. The exchanges, subsidies for insurance and the expansion of Medicaid will provide affordable insurance for over thirty million people who don’t have it now. Over a hundred million people will be protected from losing their insurance or paying more if they have pre-existing conditions or are older or women. And the provisions already in place—that make preventive care free, that reduce pharmaceutical costs for seniors, that enable people 26 and younger to stay on the insurance of the parents—will remain in place. This is all great news. And it would not have happened without all the hard work you did in support of what became the ACA. That work didn’t stop after the legislation was passed. As I explain more below, the decision today was in no small… Continue reading
Can we progressives not attack each other after the decision? I’m going to be writing more about the ACA and the Court after we hear the decision. But here is one plea in advance of the decision: can we progressives not get in a circle and start shooting at one another? That means, can the single payer folks not lead off with “if Obama only had pushed single payer through Congress we wouldn’t have to worry about the Court today?” Everyone who pays any attention to Congress knows that single payer had no chance in 2009-2010 and it does the progressive cause no good to make up stories about what is politically possible and what is not. More importantly we need to unite against the enemy, which is not the supporters of Obamacare but the corporate conservatives who, if they get their way today, are going to go after Medicare… Continue reading
One of the last accomplishments of long time progressive Councilmember David Cohen—a rebate on the wage tax for those with low incomes—may be repealed tomorrow. It shouldn’t be. There are good policy arguments both for and against the wage tax rebate. I’ll come to some of them in a moment. But, frankly, at the moment those arguments are secondary. The key reason not to repeal the legislation tomorrow is that the decision to put off AVI for a year means that Council is going carry out a broad examination of taxation in the city next year. The Cohen wage tax rebate is not scheduled to go into effect until 2016 anyway. So there is plenty of time to reconsider it as we think through the future of taxation in Philadelphia. Any city like Philadelphia has to balance considerations of progressivity and economic growth. While, progressive taxation has very little negative… Continue reading
I have an op-ed in today’s Daily News about AVI. I think the argument there is correct, but it is highly compressed. I’ve tried to set out my argument at a little greater length here. (Note that in the op-ed and in this piece I made a mistake and said that AVI shifts the tax burden from residential to commercial property. It does the opposite. I’ve corrected it here. Councilman Green’s proposals minimize the shift.) So much has gone wrong in the city’s move to the Actual Value Initiative (AVI), that many people are fearful about its consequence. And one of the things that has gone wrong is that people who know better are playing on this fear for their political purposes, I think the fear is over blown. AVI is a good thing if it is implemented properly and I think it can be implemented properly this year. Continue reading
Originally published in the Daily News, May 29, 2012 A great fear seems to have come over the city as the heavy footsteps of a monster called AVI come ever closer to us. It’s time to recognize, however, that that monster is a friendly creature who will benefit most of us. Partly because tax matters are hard to understand and partly because Mayor Nutter wants to raise more revenue for schools from the real-estate tax, public discussion of AVI — Actual Value Initiative — has become confused. No one trusts any government, and some people in office or thinking of running for office can’t resist the temptation to be demagogues about any issue. So, the confusion has created the false belief that AVI is just a tax increase in disguise. We desperately need to get back to some basics: AVI is about tax fairness. And, under it, most Philadelphians will see… Continue reading