Bunch'a quote-unquote liberal politicians and business owners got together today in Washington to promote a big thinkpiece released by the "Roosevelt Institute", a sort of Keynesian mirror of the Cato Institute. Specifically, it's an unabashedly American-Left-ist federal policy prescription, intended to be the Liberal version of the "Contract With America" of a generation past, and they're front and center with wanting the Democratic presidential candidates to talk about it. You can read the
112 page playbook yourself. I haven't yet since I'm typing this on my lunchbreak. But from the summary, I can find three huge issues with this campaign that have nothing to do with the details of its proposals:
One reason the Contract With America was a great advertisement for its philosophical bent if not necessarily its content was that it was straight to the point and easy to digest. The average voter's attention span is definitely not longer now that it was in 1994, and Newt Gingrich wrote it as an open letter to fit in one of the widest-read sources of information of its day, TV-Guide. Yes, there actually used to be such a publication. I have a hard time believing more than 1% of the people who even hear about this 112-page campaign will make it through the introduction.
The booklet and its sponsors repeatedly mention that piecemeal alterations and experimental compromises will not be sufficient for any of their plans to work, they must be implemented wholesale. Any realist would say that's pretty fucking impossible in 2015 or the foreseeable future. I'll give them a pass on that since people don't get fired up over hedging your bets and talking about a backup plan, but I would like to know if a backup plan exists.
And most of the bulletpoints the plan is built around all revolve on a very common theme. Basically, stop thinking of wage-and-salary incomes as both the backbone of federal tax income and yet ancillary to 'real' economic growth, and go back to actually enforcing existing financial laws and regulations instead of leaving the banking and investment industry in charge of policing itself. Obviously I haven't read the whole report yet, but I'm really hoping they devote some time to discussing exactly how and why those situations came be the accepted normal in the American economy, and more specifically how they intend to roll that back to their goalposts, and not just wish the world wasn't so.
It'll make some nice reading later.