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
It’s many of the Senate Democrats that are standing in the way of filibuster reform. They are worried about not having the filibuster if the Democrats are in the minority again. The argument is not entirely wrong. But it shows a lot less confidence in our party and ideals and most importantly democracy (with a small d) than we Democrats should have. The filibuster we have today is not only undemocratic, it is unconstitutional. Continue reading
Barack Obama is back in office and moving in a liberal direction. So now it’s time to think ahead about building progressive power. The most important thing we can do in Pennsylvania is to replace Tom Corbett as Governor. So it’s a little surprising to me is that, with all the talk about this candidate or that, the one Pennsylvania politician who is best placed to defeat Governor Corbett, Congresswoman Allyson Schwartz, is not being asked by everyone to run. The main reason, I suspect, is that most people who pay close attention to politics don’t think she will do so. And some folks, for the usual reasons, have trouble getting their head around the idea of a woman as Governor. I have no inside knowledge about whether Congresswoman Schwartz is considering a race. But I strongly believe that she should run. After explaining why, I’ll come back to the issue of… Continue reading
An earlier and very different version of this paper appears under this title in Craig de Paulo, Patrick Messina, and Marc Stier, eds. Ambiguity in the Western Mind(Peter Lang, Inc. International Academic Publishers, 2005). The current text is a substantial revision that brings out some themes that were only implicit in the early version. The original text was written to be delivered as a talk at conference sponsored by the Intellectual Heritage Program of Temple University entitled “Ambiguity in the Western Tradition.” It was directed not to specialists on Plato but to anyone interested in the issues raised by the text. As such, my argument does not turn on any disputes about the meaning or translation of particular passages. So, it has not seemed necessary to point the reader to the particular passages I paraphrase. 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
It’s not easy to come up with instant analysis of a political speech. But, even if we grade them on a curve, it seems to me that the pundits have utterly missed the point of the President’s speech last night. Most of them seem to have found it uninspiring. Yet there is no question that the audience in Charlotte was moved by the speech. Hell, I was moved by the speech and, frankly, I tend to hold events like this at an analytical distance which makes it hard for me to get caught up in them. The pundits were right to say the speech was about the future not the past and that it proposed a continuation of Obama’s basic approach to governing. And they were right to say that there were no bold new ideas in it. (Few Presidents do something as big and bold as health care reform and then have an… 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