In 1974, Democrats made one of the greatest legislative blunders of the 20th century when they decided to reject Richard Nixon’s surprise offer to pass a universal health insurance plan. Liberals had convinced themselves they could get a better deal after the next election, where they were favored to romp. Instead, health reform stalled for decades.

Today, history is in danger of rhyming. Congress is considering a bipartisan permitting reform bill that would finally clear away the legal hurdles that cripple America’s ability to build new energy infrastructure, like power plants and transmission lines. It’s a potentially landmark piece of legislation that would help combat climate change by speeding the rollout of renewables while also tamping down on electricity prices.

Yet many environmental groups are pressuring Democrats to scrap the bill and start from scratch next year, when they will likely have more control over Congress. That way, they say, the party won’t have to make as many compromises with Republicans to get a deal done.

Democrats should know better. They need to remember their party’s own past, and not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Like the permitting bill, the Nixon health reform plan was the product of a delicate compromise on a notoriously difficult issue. Instead of a national single-payer system, as liberals had sought, the Comprehensive Health Insurance Plan would have been based on employer coverage. It had been hashed out in a three-way negotiation involving the White House, Sen. Ted Kennedy, and House Ways and Means Chairman Wilbur Mills, who’d shepherded Medicare and Medicaid into law.

Nixon, by most accounts, wanted to enact a health reform bill to prevent Democrats from campaigning on one of their own. Kennedy, who had fought hard for a single-payer system, saw the compromise as an opportunity to get real healthcare coverage for working American families. Mills was a fiscal conservative who wanted to keep costs in check.

But the deal they fashioned fell apart, primarily thanks to pressure from powerful labor unions, which believed Democrats could get more sweeping reforms if they waited until the next Congress. Nixon was embroiled in the Watergate scandal, and his opponents were on the verge of winning a veto-proof majority in the midterms. The unions were certain they could roll the Republicans after the elections and get a single-payer system with no compromise.

They were right about the election outcome, but wrong about everything else. The economic downturn and stagflation dried up any public appetite for a massive new federal spending program. Meanwhile, Mills’ political power and career collapsed in scandal after he was caught having an affair with a burlesque performer. Prospects for healthcare reform died; Democrats would have to wait 36 years before they could pass a major overhaul, with the Affordable Care Act.

“I think about, every day, what a huge mistake I made not accepting Nixon’s proposal, and then building on the benefits package,” Kennedy later said.

Which brings us back to today. There is now broad bipartisan consensus that it is too hard to build infrastructure in this country, especially when it comes to energy. Much of the friction is found in our outdated permitting system, which requires expensive mountains of paperwork and allows opponents of projects to delay them to death with lawsuits.

For Democrats, these problems have been made more urgent by the need to fight climate change, since it will require quickly deploying immense amounts of zero-carbon electricity. Doing so will be difficult unless we can build more long-distance transmission lines to carry all that power. But those projects often end up stuck endlessly in permitting purgatory.

Yet reaching a permitting deal has proven challenging because, on both sides of the aisle, stakeholders have insisted that we are in a zero-sum game. A win for one fuel is a loss for another. Many Democrats are influenced by environmental groups who don’t want to lose their power to obstruct projects through litigation. Many Republicans have balked at increased federal control of interstate transmission line buildout because it is a threat to some utility markets.

The acute crisis of electricity supply and high prices has finally forced a reckoning and a potential deal. The key is that the bill doesn’t favor one type of energy over another. Instead, it will make developing both renewables and fossil fuels easier. That is the core compromise that brought together the legislation’s authors, which include Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), one of Washington’s most vocal climate hawks, and Sen. Shelly Moore Capito (R-W. Va.), an avid fossil fuel advocate. Both believe that their favorite fuels can compete and will win.

However, just as in 1974, powerful interest groups from the far left of the Democratic Party are envisioning a world in which no compromise is needed. They see an upcoming landslide in a midterm election where Democrats control both the House and Senate. They dream of a bill that expands only renewable development and makes new fossil fuel infrastructure impossible to build.

If anything, the case for walking away from compromise is weaker now than it was in 1974. While this Republican President is wildly unpopular, no one anticipates a 2027 veto-proof majority in either the House or Senate. In fact, getting to cloture in the Senate on an uncompromising bill will be next to impossible — meaning that no matter what, any permitting deal will need Republican votes.

If the uncompromising obstructionists on the far left derail this permitting bill, we could find ourselves decades away from achieving any meaningful reforms. How many members of Congress will reflect on this period as a lost opportunity that will not be realized in their lifetimes? Let’s not let another generational opportunity slip by.

Neel Brown is managing director of the Progressive Policy Institute.

President Donald Trump’s war on facts has reached the final frontier. Having already undermined federal data sources on everything from hunger to weather for its own self-interested ends, the administration has spent much of this year trying to squelch information about the Iran War by clamping down on the public’s access to data and images shot from space.

Congress looks ready to respond to this blatant censorship effort as part of an upcoming intelligence bill. But while it’s encouraging that lawmakers want to curb this administration’s abuses of power, the solution they are contemplating allows defense and intelligence agencies, organizations with cultures of information sharing on a “need-to-know” basis, to further clamp down on data availability — albeit for less politically charged reasons — without having anyone at the table arguing for the benefits of public access.

Back in March, the government reportedly asked commercial remote sensing companies like Planet Labs to delay release of the data and pictures they gather from space of much of the Middle East, in light of the Iran War. At the time, embarrassing photos of burning oil infrastructure and damaged American bases running in the press had undercut White House claims to have defeated Tehran’s military. The request was framed as voluntary, but as one geospatial analyst put it: “When your largest customer is also the government that regulates you, the line between voluntary and involuntary gets very thin.”

These restrictions were originally slated to last two weeks. Instead, they have lingered for the better part of six months, limiting information about the region to the subset of customers who comply with the companies’ restrictive managed access policies. Publications like the New York Times and The Washington Post, which frequently purchase images for their reporting, have used them to identify evidence of potential war crimes. Their access has been turned off indefinitely.

All of this has deprived everyday Americans of crucial news on the conflict — much to the alarm of some soldiers sent to fight it. Just last month, active service members anonymously sent photos to the press of the destruction of American bases out of concern that, in their words, “this is major damage to our bases that hasn’t been communicated to the American public…we’re standing there with our eyes closed getting punched in the face.”

Trump’s decisions have also had business consequences for America’s satellite imagery and data sector as international customers are shifting their spending to companies outside of the United States to get the data they rely on. In a global industry worth nearly $28 billion, that shifts real money out of the American economy, in some cases to a strategic competitor: China.

While these restrictions aren’t technically what defense experts refer to as “shutter control,” they have a similar effect: blacking out access for a healthy subset of customers and the public. There are times and places where restrictions of this nature are an appropriate tool to protect national security. But such restrictions should only be applied in narrow contexts where their use genuinely benefits military operational security. Foreign adversaries’ access to sophisticated remote sensing systems has made these circumstances rare. Notably, while U.S. media outlets have been cut off from satellite imagery and data, Iran is still obtaining it from China and Russia, whose remote sensing capabilities rival and in some cases surpass America’s. In this case, the administration appears to be focused on saving face rather than protecting the troops.

Thankfully, Congress appears to recognize the need for additional oversight of this issue; lawmakers have included language in the Intelligence Authorization Act that would direct the DoD and IC to develop an orderly process for these requests. A standard process by which the government can evaluate operational security requirements and then make requests to industry — and whose use is accountable to congressional oversight — would provide much-needed clarity and stability to a situation where none currently exists.

But while the legislation could address Trump’s censorship tactics, it risks going backward on a longstanding problem: national security officials, in the words of Breaking Defense, have “traditionally been leery about allowing such imagery to be sold on the market.” During the Afghanistan War in 2001, for instance, the military purchased all domestic high-resolution imagery of the conflict zone to keep it off the market, a feat it was able to pull off because the entire American industry consisted of two providers. In 2020, after a process led by the Department of Commerce, the government loosened restrictions on commercial remote sensing companies for national security reasons. The updated regulations have helped unleash the commercial remote sensing industry’s growth and should have been accompanied by a shift in the national security community’s concept of operational security in a data-rich era.

However, there are indications this shift has not materialized. Just over a year after this regulatory update, new restrictions were placed on certain commercial remote sensing systems in the name of national security. Most of these only lasted two years, but the incident shows that there is still significant tension between the national security enterprise and this industry. At the end of the day, operational security is a process that needs to constantly adapt in light of technological progress to ensure it remains effective. An evolution that acknowledges the widespread availability of commercial remote sensing data is crucial because it isn’t possible to wish away technological progress: doing so simply makes the nation less safe, not more. In its proposed language, Congress runs the risk of giving the national security community the opportunity to stay in its comfort zone and overutilize managed access requests — unless voices pushing for evolution and balance are also at the table.

However much Donald Trump might try to pretend otherwise, there is no putting the genie of widely accessible commercial data back into the bottle. Just as with restrictions on healthcare or educational statistics, removing access to remote sensing data does not magically make the problems it illustrates go away. Congress is right to push for the adoption of a new process around temporary remote sensing restriction requests based on clear national security grounds, but it must ensure that its solution both empowers a booming domestic industry to continue leading on the global stage and pushes modern military approaches to operational security forward rather than backward.

President Donald Trump’s utter failure to address the cost-of-living concerns that put him back in the White House has once again made them the top issue for voters heading into this year’s midterm elections. And the budget-busting policies he’s pitched as his solution to the problem are actually making it worse.

In the short term, high budget deficits fuel inflation and push the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates in response, as it did last week for the first time since 2023. That leads to higher borrowing costs for mortgages, credit cards, and other types of credit that Americans rely on to meet their needs. In the long term, high debt accumulation crowds out investment spending and slows economic growth, thereby reducing household incomes.

National policymakers who actually want to tackle the cost-of-living challenge will need to tackle our government’s growing fiscal imbalance. Unfortunately, both parties’ “affordability agendas” are pushing in the opposite direction.

The president’s first move was to put more money in people’s pockets via a giant tax cut in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which is responsible for roughly a quarter of this year’s roughly $2 trillion budget deficit. Now, he’s promised (somewhat unconvincingly) to send every adult a $5,000 check if Republicans keep Congress in November. That would add another trillion dollars on top.

Although far less reckless, Democrats are campaigning on some expensive plans of their own, including sweeping middle-class tax cuts and subsidies for health care, child care, housing, energy, and virtually every other source of strain on Americans’ pocketbooks. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries will likely draw from that pool of ideas to craft Democrats’ first major bill should they take the majority. Many in the party have proposed raising taxes on the rich to pay for some of these proposals, but those are unlikely to cover the full cost.

Borrowing to pay for current policies, let alone these new initiatives, will become increasingly costly at a moment when the financial system is finally starting to show signs of stress from unchecked deficits. Shortly after the gross national debt passed the symbolic milestone of $40 trillion last month, interest rates for long-term government borrowing reached their highest level in nearly two decades — and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s moves to reverse the surge largely failed.

Unless Washington changes course, the costs will only grow and further pinch the American people’s pocketbooks in several ways:

Budget Deficits Increase Inflationary Pressure on Prices

A budget deficit — the gap between what a government spends and what it raises in revenue over a single year — is not always a bad thing. During recessions, temporary deficit spending can help plug the hole created by depressed private-sector demand. But today’s economy is growing at a typical rate of 2% per year, while the unemployment rate sits at just 4.1%. Despite these relatively healthy economic conditions, the 2026 budget deficit is expected to reach roughly 6% of gross domestic product (GDP) — the highest level recorded outside of a recession or major war before the COVID-19 pandemic, and roughly double what it was when Trump first took office 10 years ago.

When an economy is operating at full employment, like America’s is today, deficit spending can’t meaningfully increase economic output. Instead, deficits inject more money chasing a finite amount of goods and workers to produce them, causing prices to rise. Americans experienced this exact dynamic during the Biden administration. Several analyses showed that excess stimulus contributed up to 3 percentage points of higher inflation, as the new spending sharply increased demand while supply remained limited.

Now, Trump is repeating Biden’s mistakes. Estimates by the Yale Budget Lab found that a permanent increase in the deficit comparable to that of his tax cut would reduce the average household’s purchasing power by at least $300 and up to as much as $1,250 after just five years, negating more than half of the tax cut’s supposed benefit.

Unchecked Government Borrowing Raises Borrowing Costs For Everyone

The Federal Reserve fights inflation by raising short-term interest rates, but that just shifts the pressure families feel from higher prices to higher borrowing costs. Americans have felt that pinch these last several years as the Fed has kept rates well above pre-pandemic levels while struggling to bring down inflation back to its 2% target.

Interest rates on student loans, mortgages, and auto loans are now hovering close to 20-year highs, while interest rates on credit cards have reached the highest level since the Fed started keeping records in 1994. Compared with pre-pandemic rates, a struggling parent with $10,000 in credit card debt now accrues $600 in additional interest every year. A new graduate with $50,000 in student debt accrues another $930. And a new homebuyer taking out a $500,000 mortgage now pays $12,000 more each year. These higher interest rates are especially burdensome for lower-income families, who more frequently need to borrow to meet their day-to-day needs.

More deficit spending will only add to the pain. Neutralizing the inflationary effects of a deficit increase the size of Trump’s $5,000 checks proposal, for example, could require the Federal Reserve to increase short-term interest rates by almost a full percentage point.

Higher government debt loads put additional pressure on interest rates, as greater demand for borrowing forces the Treasury to offer progressively higher rates to attract new lenders. Past studies have found that interest rates rise by roughly 3 basis points for every percentage-point increase in the ratio of federal debt to GDP. That would mean debt added since Trump first took office is responsible for a permanent 0.75 percentage-point interest in borrowing costs already, which could swell to 3 percentage points if debt continues to accumulate as the Congressional Budget Office currently projects it to over the next 30 years.

In reality, the costs might be even higher than those projections suggest. Other countries have seen borrowing costs rise twice as much per point of debt-to-GDP. And new evidence suggests that the premium U.S. debt has historically enjoyed relative to other securities may already be fading, meaning investors may demand higher yields more comparable to those of other borrowers moving forward.

Rising Debt Leads to Slower Growth and Lower Wages

There are two sides of the affordability equation: How much families spend and how much they earn. As the government borrows more, it competes with private companies who in turn also have to pay higher interest rates to find lenders. That hurts business investment, ultimately dampening economic growth and household incomes.

One visible example of how rising government debt and borrowing costs can “crowd out” private investment is the homebuilding industry. Most homebuilders finance new construction with debt, and rising interest rates have forced some developers to cancel projects. The rate of new housing starts has dropped by 20% since interest rates began rising in 2022, leading to falling employment in the residential construction industry while also exacerbating America’s housing shortage.

Private investment is not the only kind crowded out by debt. The government invests in public goods like education, infrastructure, and scientific research that make private investment possible and create the foundation for growth. Analyses by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found that every dollar of public investment spending generated two dollars of private investment spending, and permanently increasing public investment spending by 1 percent increases potential GDP by an average of 5 percent over the long-term.

But this category of spending is hovering near its lowest level as a percent of GDP since the 1950s. Meanwhile, federal spending on annual interest costs is higher than it has ever been in U.S. history — and more than double what the federal government spends on non-defense investments. This imbalance will likely only grow worse as rising interest rates, along with the growing size of the debt on which interest is paid, push annual interest payments to new heights and increase competition for resources currently going to public investment.

If the national debt continues on its current trajectory, the Congressional Budget Office projects it will reduce national income by 4% — equivalent to $4,600 per person — by 2055, relative to a scenario where the debt is stabilized at current levels. But this projection could actually understate the cost: numerous studies suggest the consequences of additional debt are higher the more indebted a country already is, and the United States has never before experienced the debt levels it is projected to reach beyond 2030.

Washington Must Confront the Problem Soon

The senators elected in November’s midterm elections, and the next president, will have to confront the problem over their term in a way none of their predecessors have for a generation. At the end of 2028, several of Trump’s tax cuts will expire. In just over six years, major trust funds that have been used to finance Social Security’s and Medicare’s growing shortfalls will run out of money. If Congress fails to act, it would trigger across-the-board benefit cuts.

Addressing the problem in a fiscally responsible way could stabilize our national debt and begin reversing its contributions to today’s cost-of-living challenges. On the other hand, adding to these shortfalls and financing them with open-ended borrowing would embed those costs in our economy for the long run. And in the worst-case scenario, it could signal to investors that Washington is too dysfunctional to ever address its fiscal challenges and potentially provoke a true fiscal crisis.

At this pivotal moment, candidates for national office must start treating the national debt as the real cost-of-living issue it really is. That means seriously considering the policies it will take to get our fiscal house in order and putting aside many of the budget-busting ambitions they have been flocking to in recent months.

Before the public began to worry in recent weeks that AI would destroy humanity altogether, we mostly worried it would take our jobs. For the past several years, we’ve heard a stream of corporate executives and economists warning about the looming AI employment apocalypse. The media seized on tech layoffs and a spike in the youth unemployment rate in 2025 as the first signs of the great job disappearance.

But in reality, economists are seeing few signs of AI disruption in the labor market. Youth unemployment fell to 7.1% in August 2026, down from an average of 8.3% in 2025. Employment in computer and mathematical occupations such as software developers and information security specialists reached an all-time high in August, according to government surveys. And overall private employment keeps climbing month after month, buoyed in part by data center spending, which is pushing up demand and wages for occupations such as electricians.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) recently released its assessment of which occupations had “very high,” “high,” “moderate,” and “low” exposure to AI. The BLS warns that “[a]n exposure category is not a forecast of employment growth or decline.”

Indeed, many occupations that have “very high” or “high” exposure to AI grew over the past year, while other occupations with “low” exposure to AI are shrinking. For example, in the first eight months of 2026 compared to the first eight months of 2025, employment is up by 1.3% in computer and mathematical occupations (which include computer programmers, software developers, data scientists, and mathematicians), all of which uniformly have “very high” exposure to AI. Similarly, employment is up by 1.7% in architectural and engineering occupations, all with high or very high exposure to AI. Employment is up by 1.8% in life, physical, and social science occupations (which include biologists, physicists, historians, and economists), almost all of which have high or very high exposure to AI.

Meanwhile, employment in many hands-on and high-touch occupations, which were supposed to fare well in the AI age, has declined. Employment in health care support occupations (which include home health aides, nursing assistants, dental aides, and pharmacy aides) with low to moderate exposure to AI is down 2.7% over the last year, perhaps reflecting the Trump Administration’s unceasing war on foreign-born workers. Similarly, employment of personal care and service workers (which include barbers, hair stylists, manicurists, and personal trainers), with low to moderate exposure to AI, is down by 1.6%. Protective service occupations (which include firefighters, police officers, security guards, and lifeguards) saw a 4.5% decrease. And installation, maintenance, and repair occupations (which include auto mechanics, HVAC technicians, and linemen) saw a 2.1% decrease.

Health care support deserves particular attention. The general consensus has been that health care occupations would continue to grow as the U.S. population ages, and the sector even became the only reliable source of job growth as the labor market cooled in 2025. The latest employment projections from the BLS call for the private health care and social assistance sector to add 2.2 million jobs by 2035.

When considering the decline in employment in health care support occupations, there are factors beyond AI to consider: health care support workers themselves are aging and retiring; there are fewer younger workers to replace them; immigration has fallen under the Trump Administration, removing a key source of labor (foreign-born workers account for an outsized share of health care workers); and there has been consolidation across the health care sector.

We are not arguing that these trends will necessarily persist. Policymakers need to realize that there is a wide range of potential forecasts of the AI impact on the labor market, and we are far from settling which one is right. The increases in employment levels for information-driven occupations and decreases for high-touch occupations could reverse next month or next year. It is noteworthy that many analyses have also found no evidence of AI disruption on workers, though.

The Budget Lab finds no clear evidence of labor market disruption associated with AI, no connection between measures of AI usage and changes in employment or unemployment, and no change in the occupational mix (or the percentage-point shift in the occupational composition of major industry groups such as construction and information) that clearly aligns with the introduction of AI. Put another way, they find no evidence of AI disruption at the broadest level or in underlying shifts within industries. Researchers from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond also find “little evidence of near-term aggregate employment declines due to AI” in a survey of nearly 750 corporate executives. (The researchers do, however, find evidence of compositional reallocation of labor within and across firms, with clerical roles declining and skilled technical roles increasing.)

There are a few important caveats to be sure. First, a growing body of analysis suggests that AI is not destroying jobs but rather shifting the tasks that workers perform. The Burning Glass Institute finds that “AI isn’t simply replacing jobs or enhancing them. It’s doing both—within the same roles, at the same time.” Existing labor market data reveals a lot about industries and occupations, but it doesn’t tell us much about tasks. It is difficult to capture shifts in the tasks that workers perform. Secondly, as Jed Kolko, Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, points out, the prevalence of LLMs is so recent that any lasting economic impact would likely take years to show up in economic data. Next, existing research has focused on labor demand, or the willingness of employers to hire workers, but not on how AI might affect labor supply, or the availability of people to work. And finally, analyses have only evaluated existing occupations and have not analyzed potential job growth associated with AI. This is partially by definition, but AI could spur job creation or create entirely new occupations.

Moving forward, it is also important to remember that forecasts can identify broad trends about industries and the direction of those trends, but they are less accurate in identifying the magnitude of trends or details about specific occupations. Forecasts often rely on historical trends and are less likely to account for unforeseen economic shocks or rapid technological developments.

Analyses of the impact of AI on workers have important implications for workforce development, as policymakers seek strategies to retrain and upskill workers who may be dislocated by AI and as future workers decide between college and non-college career pathways. This is especially true at a time when there is renewed interest in the skilled trades, particularly among Gen Z, and declining perceptions about the value of a college degree. The Progressive Policy Institute will continue to track the impact of AI on workers.

Michael Mandel is vice president and chief economist at the Progressive Policy Institute. Michael Pearson is director of workforce development policy at the Progressive Policy Institute.

Republican Party leaders have promised that their midterm convention, which begins tonight in Dallas, will be a primetime “Trumpapalooza” — a mega pep rally aimed at showcasing the president’s supposed successes and revving up his most hardcore fans so that they’ll turn out to the polls in November.

But judging by the event’s agenda, there appears to be at least one piece of our unpopular president’s record that’s so obviously politically toxic that his party is not even willing to pay it lip service in front of an adoring crowd. Across the two days of speeches, there is not one mention of national defense or foreign policy anywhere in the program.

Historically, the omission of these topics from a Republican Party convention would have been unthinkable. Since the late 1980s, voters have traditionally trusted Republicans over Democrats when it comes to keeping the country safe from international terrorism and military threats — at times by very wide margins. During those years, the GOP embraced the mantle of Reagan’s “peace through strength” Cold War legacy, and attached themselves to the rally-around-the-flag response that carried the George W. Bush administration in the months and years after September 11, 2001.

The programming gap is even more glaring in the middle of war with Iran where at least 18 American servicemembers have lost their lives and over 750 have been wounded in action, with no apparent end in sight.

Could you imagine the 2004 RNC agenda entirely skipping any mention of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, failing to recognize the sacrifices of U.S. servicemembers or make the case to the nation for what America was fighting for? And yet, that is exactly what is happening in 2026. The closest Donald Trump’s Republican Party will come to discussing the foreign policy of the United States is apparently a session on the return of Americans held hostage overseas, consigned to the 4 p.m. hour on day 2. It’s possible Trump or Vance will spend some time on the subject during their speeches, but the rest of the GOP looks ready to treat it as radioactive.

It’s hard to blame them, really. After all, Trump has embraced dictators, alienated allies, and plunged America into a Middle Eastern quagmire after promising no new wars. By the time Americans cast their votes in November, he will have spent the first two years of his second term systematically torching America’s standing in the world, not to mention our munitions stockpiles.

It can be difficult to even keep track of all the embarrassing lowlights. Trump’s threats to turn Canada into the 51^st state failed to win any trade concessions, but did push our northern neighbor closer to China. His fixation on acquiring Greenland deeply rattled our NATO allies, with little to no upside. He literally rolled out the red carpet for Russian leader Vladimir Putin after lambasting Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, only for Russia to offer Iran military assistance. After he scaled back long-planned military drills with South Korea while calling North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un “unthreatening and respectful,” the Kim regime dismissed the gesture as “unworthy of comment.”

Trump’s petty grudges have, of course, even extended into changing the names of international bodies of water in fits of pique. It turns out that the American people consider this behavior better suited to internet trolls than presidents — polling has consistently shown over 70% oppose renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” and initial YouGov poll results put disapproval of “Lake America” at over 60%.

Trump’s foreign policy has been so disastrous, some of America’s oldest allies have begun openly talking of “de-risking” their relationships with the U.S., using a term that originally meant reducing damaging dependencies on an increasingly emboldened China to now mean protecting themselves from Trump.

Despite Republicans’ desire to keep the focus domestic at their party conference, they cannot outrun the shadow that Trump’s war with Iran casts on inflation, energy, and the cost of living. The number of Americans who report feeling financially worse off has skyrocketed since the war began in February, not a surprise when the war has cost the average American household an extra $1,200 in bills and higher costs to date.

Americans have taken on financial hardships during conflicts before, with rationing and victory gardens becoming part of everyday life during the First and Second World Wars. But those Americans also understood why they were being asked to sacrifice and what America was fighting for. The Trump administration’s ever-shifting rationale for the Iran War — explanations have included self-defense from imminent Iranian attack, defense of Iranian protestors, prevention of nuclear capabilities, and regime change, amongst others — has translated to the American public not understanding why we’re there in the first place. Small wonder that public support for the conflict has never even approached net favorability.

This is not to say Democrats should take a victory lap or pat themselves on the back when it comes to defense and foreign policy. However unpopular the president’s policies may be, polls show Republicans still have a small lead on defense issues. And Democrats have yet to craft much of a vision of their own, beyond stopping Trump’s madness.

While rejecting radical flares of antisemitism, the party must find a way to reckon with an Israeli government that seems content to overlook IDF abuses and settler violence, and whose leader has shown his willingness to defy both Democratic and Republican U.S. administrations for domestic political gain. Democrats must also reject far-left calls for retrenchment and isolationism, and reassert that America can prioritize democracy and liberal values both at home and abroad.

There is no going backward from where America is today — no switch will flip in January 2029 that resets everything back to the pre-Trump era. That knowledge presents an opportunity, as does the abject failure of and ceding of ground by Trump and the Republican Party on a longtime trademark issue. At a moment when the GOP won’t even talk about its record abroad, Democrats would be wise to channel the legacy of forebears like FDR and Harry S. Truman and articulate a forward-looking vision for a new American foreign policy they can be proud to run on.

The field of American Studies appears to be in a defensive crouch.

This January, we published a study analyzing the flagship journal of the American Studies Association, American Quarterly. In the report, we objected to Donald Trump’s attempt to whitewash negative aspects of our country’s story but found that the articles in American Quarterly did the reverse by erasing anything good about the United States. Examining nearly 100 articles over a three-year period, we found that 80% were critical of America, 20% neutral, and not a single article was positive.

We published the full report, “The Distortion of American Studies: How the Field’s Leading Journal Has Embraced a Worldview as Slanted as Donald Trump’s,” with the Progressive Policy Institute and a summary in the Wall Street Journal, under the headline “American Studies Can’t Stand Its Subject.” We said there were plenty of valid reasons to critique America, but also asked, how could the articles in American Quarterly show no curiosity about any of America’s worthwhile attributes? How could there be no articles exploring, for instance, why the United States is cited as the most desirable destination for immigrants, or why we have so many Nobel Prize winners?

The response to our findings from leading academics has been as revealing as the original study. We thought professors might argue that particular articles should have been categorized as positive. Alternatively, academics might have seen the study as an opportunity for self-reflection, to ask whether they needed to do a better job of telling the full American story. Instead, with one admirable exception, their responses have been mostly misleading and dismissive, mischaracterizing the way we conducted our review and going so far as to deny the very existence of objective historical truths.

In this article, we focus on three major critiques of our study from several leading scholars: Penn State professor and American Studies Association President Alex Lubin, Agustin Fuentes of Princeton University, Iván Chaar López of the University of Texas at Austin, and Erin McElroy of the University of Washington.1

Mischaracterizing Methodology

In “Misunderstanding American Studies” in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Lubin claims that our analysis employed a “simplistic methodology” of coding articles by relying on a “word search.” In another Chronicle piece, “Are Leftist Professors Really Destroying the Academy’s Credibility?” Fuentes doubled down on this point, claiming that our report reached its conclusions by conducting something similar to “a DOGE-esque word search to find certain disfavored concepts.”

These claims are flatly incorrect. Our report made explicit that conducting a word search was “only the first step” of determining how an article should be categorized.

We did not simply assume that if a critical word (say “imperial”) showed up in a word search that the story was critical. After all, an article that celebrated America for its lack of imperialistic ambition would show up as employing that word (as would a word search of the report you are reading). The word search provided a hint of the likely leaning of the article, but further investigation was necessary to make a final determination on coding. (Indeed, as discussed below, it turned out that all of the articles we coded as “neutral” also contained the critical words). The second crucial step involved a content analysis of the articles. We examined the titles, abstracts, and the articles themselves and provided an initial coding. Third, before providing a final coding for each article, we sought to identify a representative quotation to help ensure that our categorization was correct.

In short, we did the reading. There were no Muskian shortcuts.

In “Who Benefits from Distorting American Studies?” López and McElroy also criticized our methodology, claiming our conclusions are “based only upon selective and superficial readings of American Quarterly.” The authors never explain how our reading was “selective” given that we included every regular edition article published over a three-year period. (The themes from the special editions suggested those articles could be even more negative.) Nor do the authors explain why our reading was “superficial.” They could have tried to demonstrate where they thought we had a shallow understanding of an article’s meaning. But in nearly 3,000 words, the authors don’t cite a single example of where our reading missed the mark.

Denying Objective Truth

López and McElroy also object to our notion that there exists an “objective truth about the past.” The authors contend that history is made up only of subjective truths, which they say are shaped by each individual’s experiences and stories.

In making this claim, López and McElroy seem to provide the left-wing version of the Trump administration’s concept of “alternate facts.” But can we not agree that we once had a terrible system of chattel slavery, and now we do not? Why is it controversial to say that beginning with the founding of the country, women could not vote in America, but that in 1920, ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment changed that? Are these really subjective interpretations?

Alleging Bad Motives

Several of the critiques of our American studies report alleged bad motives on our part. Lubin, for example, questions the timing of publication. “Why now?” he asks. He hints that we’re in cahoots with the Trump administration in creating a “false panic about higher education” in order to “justify federal oversight and meddling in our affairs.” López and McElroy, likewise, claim that we are enabling a larger effort to “seek to silence and eliminate any source of dissent, any knowledge practice that questions their orthodoxy.”

In fact, our report chides the Trump administration for seeking to “erase the negative components of American history” and rejects the administration’s heavy-handed intervention in higher education. We write: “Government intervention should be reserved for instances when universities violate civil rights or civil liberties.” Instead, we call on academe to “reflect upon whether it is guilty of erasing discussion of what is right about America, just as surely as the Trump administration is seeking to erase discussion about what is wrong about America.” We did so specifically because we believe in academic freedom, and think that the best way to improve a field is through open, vigorous debate.

As for our paper’s timing, the reason was simple: It was part of a wider project on American identity that we decided to launch for the country’s 250th anniversary. It’s a news hook, not a conspiracy.

Who is Actually Enabling Trump?

If they did engage in a little self-reflection, professors of American studies might recognize that it is they who are unwittingly enabling the likes of Donald Trump with their absurd views of the American project that discredits the political left with average Americans. Consider how a typical American voter would react to López and McElroy’s dismissal of the idea that the abolition and civil rights movements provided redemption for the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow. The authors write of today’s America: “How are we supposed to maintain ‘redemption’ in the sustained exercise of settler colonialism or structural violence?” Astonishingly, they argue that our call for teaching both the sins of America and positive change “eerily mirrors and facilitates far right maneuvers to ‘teach both sides of slavery.’” The analogy is telling. Just as there is no good side of slavery to teach, they suggest, there is no good side of American history. How, one wonders, does America’s defeat of the Nazis fit into this worldview?

Despite having fewer years of formal education than those in the academy — or perhaps because of it — most average Americans are smart enough to recognize that the United States has made extraordinary progress. In a speech in Selma, Alabama, in 2015, President Barack Obama declared that while racism had not been banished, “we do a disservice to the cause of justice by intimating that bias and discrimination are immutable, that racial division is inherent to America. If you think nothing’s changed in the past 50 years, ask somebody who lived through the Selma or Chicago or Los Angeles of the 1950s. Ask the female CEO who once might have been assigned to the secretarial pool if nothing’s changed. Ask your gay friend if it’s easier to be out and proud in America now than it was thirty years ago. To deny this progress, this hard-won progress — our progress — would be to rob us of our own agency, our own capacity, our responsibility to do what we can to make America better.”

Yet that is exactly what leading scholars of American studies have been doing. Rejecting the overwhelming evidence of progress is empirically dubious and politically toxic. We hoped our report would spur self-reflection in the halls of the academy. So far it has yielded, instead, tendentious responses that distort our methods and our motivations. It’s time for a new generation of American studies scholars to provide a course correction that will take what should be a fascinating field of inquiry in a much better direction.

Adapted from Rachel Canter’s PPI report.

One of the most remarkable aspects of Mississippi’s education reforms has been its durability. Unlike the policy churn familiar to education advocates in most of the country, the state has steadily built on its reform agenda for around 15 years to create a coherent and comprehensive policy framework — one that includes not only strong learning standards and rules that hold schools accountable for their results, but also evidence-based instructional practices like the science of reading and real support for implementation down to the classroom level. As I’ve written, it was this marathon approach that helped propel us to the top of the national leader board in reading and math, when adjusting for demographics, in 2024.

What some may not realize is that our ability to keep going wasn’t simply dumb luck. It was grit. By the time Mississippi began making efforts to dramatically improve learning, the national mood had already begun to sour on ideas like accountability and rigorous standards. The bipartisan consensus for reform was pulling apart at the seams, and states across the country were already starting to turn back, or water down, measures they had enthusiastically adopted only a few years before.

From the left, longstanding complaints about standardized testing found new purchase with the public after several years of No Child Left Behind, which used grade-level scores on exams as the exclusive measure of whether schools could be designated as “in need of improvement” and face consequences. When reformers began to advocate that tests be used to evaluate teachers, their unions saw an opportunity not only to cast the effort as an attack on educators but to delegitimize all standardized testing and the broader concept of school accountability. A 2008 Time Magazine cover of the first mayorally-appointed Chancellor of DC Public Schools, Michelle Rhee, holding a broom became emblematic not of reformers’ desire to clean up overly bureaucratic and ineffective school districts but of the teachers union’s accusation that reformers sought to fire their way to success.

On the right, the Common Core State Standards, adopted by most states in 2010, became the subject of evolving and increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories online and in conservative media. Reasonable critiques — ranging from concerns the standards didn’t emphasize phonics enough in the early grades to philosophical disagreements about whether the federal government should incentivize the adoption of particular state learning standards — were completely blown away by allegations that the standards were a sinister plot to indoctrinate children in left-wing ideologies. Conservatives dubbed the standards “Obamacore,” despite the entire effort preceding Obama’s presidency and having its genesis in a wholly state-driven process, because many states had rushed their adoption to be competitive in the first round of Race to the Top, the president’s signature education grant initiative.

In the lead-up to the 2014 midterm elections, popular conservative talk show host Glenn Beck made Common Core his chosen boogeyman, complete with a nationwide town hall event called “We Will Not Conform” that streamed live in 700 theaters. The anti-Common Core fervor gave rise to a conservative anti-testing movement, which found common cause with anti-test lefties, fueling movements to repeal the standards as well as opt out of aligned state testing.

The national toxicity came to a head in Mississippi in 2015, the year we were set to implement some of our key reforms for the first time. The state planned its inaugural administration of our first Common Core-aligned state assessment, the PARCC exam, which had been developed by a consortium of states to become a shared test. That same May, we would also debut our new policy of holding back students who couldn’t read proficiently by third grade. To top it off, 2015 was an election year for all statewide offices, including every state legislator — a fact that helped set the stage for an explosive legislative session.

Right-leaning media were running an anti-Common Core story every day to turn up the heat. School district leaders were bemoaning the challenges with the computerized PARCC assessment as well as predictions that 30% of third graders might fail the state’s reading benchmark and be retained. Governor Bryant, who was running for reelection, was leading a crusade to dump both Common Core and PARCC, and there were rumors our ed reform champion, Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves, who was also running for reelection, would attract a primary challenger from the right if he didn’t follow along. Rank-and-file legislators who are mostly drawn into politically “safe” districts were suddenly looking over their shoulder at every turn, wondering if they, too, would draw a primary opponent. It was a mess.

At the time, I was the head of Mississippi First, the state’s first and only education reform advocacy group. I was sitting in Room 409 of the Capitol just before 9 a.m. one morning, when the Senate Education Committee was scheduled to hold its standing meeting. That moment, its chair, Sen. Gray Tollison, burst into the crammed committee room, radiating with angry energy and holding what appeared to be a bill. “You!” he pointed at me, “my office!” and stormed out.

Tollison had been the Senate’s leading champion of the state’s education reforms, including its accountability model, charter school bill, and literacy law. We’d worked together closely on a number of bills, and I knew him well enough at that point to realize he wasn’t angry with me. Nonetheless, my heart was pounding as I stumbled into the chairman’s office, wondering what could make him so furious.

He slammed a bill on his small conference table in front of me. “Fix this,” he commanded. I stared at the text for a few moments before it clicked — it was an act to repeal Common Core and replace it with God-knows-what designed entirely by a politically appointed panel. I calmly took out a red pen from my purse (keeping one handy was an old habit from my English teacher days) and began striking through text and writing amendments. I was moving as quickly as possible, but with every second that went by, Tollison was delaying the meeting.

He was still angrily pacing the room minutes later when the arm-twister-in-chief for the lieutenant governor burst through the door to demand why Tollison was holding the meeting. The question sparked a shouting match. Apparently, the right-most flank in the Senate had offered a deal to the lieutenant governor the night before: make concessions on Common Core, and we’ll stop attacking you. Tollison had not been invited to that meeting, it seemed, and until that morning had not seen the actual text, which was written by the anti-Common Core crusaders.

An obvious threat hung in the air. Tollison could go along or be removed as chair. But Tollison didn’t back down. “This is crazy shit, and I don’t do crazy shit,” Tollison told him. When the staffer realized he wasn’t getting anywhere with the senator, he turned his fire on me, “And who do you work for now?” Another obvious threat — he planned to call my boss and have me fired for aiding and abetting Tollison. “The same place I’ve always worked,” I told him, “Mississippi First.” He slammed the door when he left.

I went back to editing while Tollison juggled talking things through with me and taking edits to the drafting office for printing. Although neither of us was truly happy with the outcome, we had pulled together a substitute that prevented a wholesale rewrite of the standards by a politically motivated committee. It also gave the Mississippi Department of Education, which was then headed by a reformer named Carey Wright, more power to control the process, much to the dismay of the dealmaking Common Core antagonists on the committee.

After the meeting, Tollison went straight to the lieutenant governor’s office for an audience. He never told me exactly what happened, but he kept his chairmanship. Mississippi First put out a strong statement opposing the bill and went to work in the House to hamstring the effort further. The bill would ultimately pass two months later in a much watered-down form, so watered down, in fact, that in a great twist of irony, Governor Bryant would veto it because it didn’t do enough to destroy the standards.

In the end, we managed to hold on to most of our reforms, including the standards, the third-grade retention policy, the state accountability model (which depended on having aligned state assessments in grades 3-8 and in high school), and the integrity of the state department of education. But it required a price. Most notably, Mississippi backed out of the PARCC consortium, and the GOP-controlled legislature forbade the department from joining any other state testing consortium.

The state’s Department of Education immediately procured a replacement state assessment that would approximate PARCC in rigor and made as few tweaks as possible to the standards to satisfy the political fervor for burning the house down. We were exhausted, but we had held the line. Within months, politics had moved on to issues that would animate the 2016 presidential election, none of which had to do with K-12 education. Inside the education bubble, the focus turned to how to implement the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, which passed in December 2015.

Had we given up at that moment, I doubt anyone would be talking about us now. But the reform muscle we had built over the preceding years, and the backbone our leaders had grown, didn’t fail us. Amid the misplaced outrage over “Obamacore,” it didn’t hurt that our champions remained equally as angry over the state’s continued underperformance on national rankings. Staying the course became as fundamental to our success as the agenda itself. Big change, even change that people know is needed and that they ask for, will inevitably inspire some level of backlash. Reformers need the stamina to endure it.

As the leaders of NATO’s 32 member nations arrive this week in Turkey to discuss their implementation plans for a record military buildup, some are rightly starting to worry that Donald Trump has plunged them into a classic Catch-22.

On the one hand, the U.S. president has demanded that Europe spend more on its own defense and buy more American-made weapons. On the other hand, his administration is making it increasingly impossible to do just that by delaying the delivery of already-purchased weapons systems and implementing changes restricting future sales.

The paradox is drawing frustrated Joseph Heller references in Europe. And if it isn’t somehow resolved, it could fatally undermine Trump’s own stated goal of having the continent shoulder more of its own protection.

Trump’s pressure was instrumental in nudging America’s NATO allies to commit to spending 5% of GDP each year on defense by 2035 at last year’s summit in the Hague, up from the old 2% threshold that was itself rarely met. Since then, the administration has continued signaling that Europe will not be able to rely on America alone for its defense.

Over the past 8 weeks alone, the U.S. has notified allies that the United States would be reducing its contributions to the NATO Force Model and has announced a six-month review of its military posture in Europe. These actions are being undertaken by the U.S. under the guise of creating “NATO 3.0,” a European-led, “post-Cold War embodiment of the defense alliance” which the Department of Defense describes as “what President Donald J. Trump and Secretary of War Pete Hegseth believe the alliance should be.”

European governments, particularly those that have been on the frontlines of a hybrid fight against Russia for decades now, have gotten the message loud and clear and are looking to invest accordingly. Demand for U.S.-made items like Patriot air defense systems and interceptors, High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (known as HIMARS) rocket launchers, and Tomahawk long-range strike munitions is on the rise as Europe looks to rapidly acquire the types of combat capabilities it needs to defend against threats of Moscow’s aggression. All of that should be music to the ears of a president who views the NATO alliance through a purely transactional lens.

Yet, a number of recent decisions by the Trump administration, including its war with Iran, have restricted the supply of available and desirable American weaponry just as demand has soared. Poland’s military representative to NATO, Lt. Gen. Piotr Błazeusz, recently described the situation as a “Catch-22” for European governments. “When they come to the US and say, ‘We would like to buy the system’ …they are told, ‘Okay, but [it will be delivered in ] 2029-2030 and you know, it still could be delayed.’”

The U.S. has already forced Europe to reckon with the impacts of pauses on planned U.S. munitions deliveries to several European nations, including Estonia. A “model” NATO ally by the administration’s own criteria, Estonia spent $200 million over three years ago to purchase six Lockheed Martin-manufactured HIMARS systems, demonstrating its willingness to “step up” and invest in its own defense. However, shipments of munitions for those HIMARS launchers have now been paused by the Pentagon until at least the end of the U.S. war with Iran, with no clear end to the pause or delivery date in sight. If even those who are model allies to the Trump administration can have their defense acquisitions indefinitely delayed without warning, what message does that send to other European partners?

Germany is in a similar boat — despite submitting an official request in 2025 to purchase Tomahawk missiles, Defense Minister Boris Pistorius stated in May 2026 that Germany was still awaiting a response, a year and a half later. Germany views Tomahawks as a key component in countering Russian medium- and long-range missiles, but is increasingly pessimistic about being able to purchase them anytime soon due to the sheer number expended by the U.S. during its war with Iran. As German Chancellor Friedrich Merz stated, “the Americans don’t have enough for themselves right now.” And while the Department of Defense is working with American companies to accelerate production of high-demand munitions such as Patriot interceptors, it will likely take quite some time before those newly manufactured munitions are released to partners instead of being used to rebuild American stocks.

Even once those stocks are rebuilt, there is no guarantee that so-called “critical munitions” will be available to partners through the traditional Foreign Military Sales (FMS) process. In February 2026, President Trump signed an Executive Order titled “Establishing an America First Arms Transfer Strategy,” which shifts the Foreign Military Sales program from a process driven by partner demand for specific capabilities from U.S. suppliers to one where partners are directed to a “sales catalog of prioritized platforms” assembled by the U.S. government. The administration argues that directing European dollars towards capabilities that the U.S. prioritizes for its own military will allow the use of foreign capital to expand domestic production capacity, essentially relying on partners to underwrite American priorities through the FMS program.

While implementation guidance from the Department of Defense is still unpublished, this reorientation of the FMS program away from partner demand towards “what America is willing to supply” is likely to cause additional heartburn for European partners.

This sales catalog approach only works if European partners have faith that they will be able to buy what they prioritize for their defense, without interference or meddling from the U.S. — faith that the administration’s actions to date have shown would be misplaced. In fact, recent statements from the Army all but confirm that partners will be counted on to subsidize production lines the Department of Defense itself won’t prioritize, even in a $1.5 trillion budget. The takeaway for European partners seems to be that they will be allowed to buy what the U.S. government decides they can buy, with that determination driven at least in part by which domestic production lines Washington has chosen to prioritize.

Instead of recognizing the issues that their policy decisions have caused and working to reassure European partners about the strength and trustworthiness of the U.S. defense industrial base, the Trump administration has chosen threats and coercion to keep Europe buying American. The comments provided by the Department of Defense (and other U.S. government agencies) on the European Commission’s proposed defense policy changes are perhaps the clearest example of these efforts. The Department vociferously objected to any EU effort to favor domestic weapons production, condemning “protectionist and exclusionary policies” that disadvantage American companies and threatening that the implementation of European preference measures would lead to a review of “all existing blanket waivers and exceptions to the ‘Buy American’ laws” on the books in the U.S.

That threat would effectively foreclose access to the U.S. market to European companies, crippling the ability of both major contractors like BAE and Leonardo as well as smaller start-up entrants to compete for American contract dollars. Without the ability to sell to America as well, companies would be hard-pressed to achieve production at scale, driving up prices for their customers in Europe.

European partners are clearly frustrated, and it should come as no surprise that despite the threats of retaliation from Trump, they are taking steps to diversify their defense suppliers and to “de-risk” from the U.S. defense industrial base. With increasing frequency, European leaders are making it clear in public statements and in policy proposals that confidence in the U.S. as a security provider is shaken, driving changes in procurement and discussions on strategic autonomy in European defense production.

At the end of Heller’s novel, the protagonist, Captain John Yossarian, escapes his own Catch-22 dilemma by rejecting the binary choice between a court-martial or an honorable discharge that would compromise his integrity; instead, he opts to escape to Sweden and gain control of his own destiny. There is a lesson to be learned here for the Trump administration — in creating a Catch-22 for Europe as it seeks to build up its defense capability, the U.S. might well push Europe to find its third option. The administration should take stock of the paradox it’s created for Europe before discussions in Ankara lead to a spending spree that benefits Turkish and French industry rather than America.

Capitol Hill has begun waking up to the fact that Social Security now faces insolvency before the end of the next presidential administration, threatening seniors with an automatic 22% benefit cut. In response, some lawmakers are already reaching for the simplest solution they can think of: eliminating the payroll tax cap.

Currently, the payroll tax that funds Social Security applies to just the first $184,500 of a worker’s wages. In a recent New York Times op-ed, Sens. Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, and Bernie Moreno, a Republican from Ohio, argued that Congress should do away with the limit to stabilize the program’s finances.

“Why should a middle-class nurse pay a larger share of her paycheck than a wealthy corporate lawyer?” the bipartisan duo wrote. “This is doubly unfair in an economy in which top earners’ wages, over time, have pulled far ahead of those of the average worker.”

Warren and Moreno are right to be concerned about the fairness of our present payroll tax system, which makes U.S. income taxes less progressive and eats into wages. And new revenue, particularly from the wealthiest Americans, must be part of any reasonable solution to our fiscal challenges. But simply eliminating the cap and pouring all the new money into Social Security would be an irresponsible waste — one that would put wealthy seniors above working Americans and would make it more difficult to address other pressing national priorities.

It’s important to understand that eliminating the payroll tax cap would not actually fix Social Security’s finances on its own. Without other changes, the program would still run persistent annual deficits and tumble into insolvency several years before people entering the workforce today retire.

Meanwhile, eliminating the cap would make raising taxes on the rich to solve any of our country’s other needs much harder, both politically and as a matter of economic math.

The top federal tax rate on wages is already more than 40%, including 37% for income taxes on individual incomes over $626,000 and 3.8% in Medicare taxes. Adding the full payroll tax on top — 12.4% split equally between employee and employer — would effectively push that rate above 50% through one of the largest tax hikes in American history.

I have no philosophical objection to a top income tax rate near 50%. In fact, I proposed one for incomes over $10 million as part of PPI’s comprehensive budget blueprint. But in the unlikely event Congress raised rates that high for even six-figure incomes, it seems inconceivable they would ever increase them further.

One key reason why is that the combined federal income and payroll tax rate is just the minimum rate Americans pay on their earnings. Many high-earners live in states and cities with income taxes of their own that would face total combined marginal tax rates in the mid-to-high 60s — higher than the top rate in any European country.

Which brings us to the math problem. Multiple studies have found the revenue-maximizing level of income tax is somewhere in the range of 60-70%. Further tax-rate increases are likely to reduce rather than increase revenue, as high earners work less, relocate, and pursue increasingly aggressive tax avoidance strategies.1 In fact, some high-tax states and localities might actually lose revenue just by keeping their policies as they are in the event the payroll tax cap vanishes.

Some additional revenue could still be raised from closing loopholes. And novel taxes like Warren’s proposed wealth tax might raise a bit more on the margin too (though those taxes both have serious structural flaws and would be cannibalizing from the same base of rich-person incomes over the long-term). But for practical purposes, scrapping the payroll tax cap would take the biggest chunk of potential revenue from taxing the rich off the table for any other use.

That’s a big problem considering our other national needs — not just new programs progressives might want, but the promises our government has already made. The total federal budget deficit will be five times the size of Social Security’s annual hole when the trust fund is depleted in 2032. Significant revenue increases should be part of any balanced Social Security reform package, but using one of the biggest potential tax hikes on the table just to calcify a single program’s benefit structure would be a mistake.

In the worst-case scenario, much of that money would end up going to seniors who are already quite well off. Since its conception, Social Security has operated with an “earned-benefit” structure — the more someone pays in payroll taxes, the higher the benefit they receive. If the current benefit formula remains unchanged, half the savings from scrapping the payroll tax cap would eventually be spent providing a massive benefit increase for wealthy Americans. That makes little sense at a time when seniors already hold a greater share of national wealth than ever before.

It would also be at odds with the founding principle of Social Security, which was to ensure older Americans were not condemned to poverty simply for outliving their savings — not to lavish wealthy retirees with six-figure pensions.

The alternative is to raise the tax without awarding additional benefits. But that still wouldn’t be enough to fix the program’s shortfall, and it would be raising taxes on current workers just to keep benefits relatively high for wealthy older Americans.

And speaking philosophically, it would still mean a fundamental change in the structure of Social Security. FDR founded it as a program that workers pay for through their own contributions. Making it an explicit wealth transfer would lay bare the end of that paradigm.

If policymakers are willing to violate the principle that someone’s Social Security benefits should be based on the taxes they paid into the program while working, they should replace it entirely with a smarter system for determining how benefits are earned. As I discussed in our inaugural post last week, awarding benefits based on how many years someone works rather than how much they paid in payroll taxes would strengthen Social Security’s finances, while reinforcing the principle that benefits are earned instead of undermining it. It would also save a great deal of money by lowering benefits for higher earners even as it raises them for needier seniors.

Scrapping the payroll tax cap would be one of the biggest one-time tax increases in American history, leaving us with top tax rates that would make Scandinavians blush — something which should be anathema to anyone who considers themselves a small-government conservative, like Moreno. Using it just to keep funneling ever-larger benefits to wealthy retirees who don’t need them makes little sense when we have so many other pressing national needs — something that should concern anyone who considers themselves a progressive, like Warren. And breaking the core principles upon which Social Security was established without even fixing its finances is something that should alarm everyone. It may sound simple, but just scrapping the payroll tax cap isn’t a serious solution.

Less than two years after returning the Labour Party to power in a political landslide, Keir Starmer has been forced to resign as Britain’s prime minister, after his government experienced a catastrophic collapse in public support.

Starmer is only the second Labour leader in 50 years to take the party from opposition into government, an extraordinary achievement by anyone’s standards. So what went wrong? And what should observers around the world make of his rapid rise and even quicker fall?

Unfortunately, critics have a larger supply of possible reasons than I would like, as a former advisor to Starmer in opposition. I’ve read from the left that he wasn’t left enough on economic and cultural issues; from the right that he was too left. Neither, in my opinion, quite nails the diagnosis.

Labour’s unpopularity now is a consequence primarily of moving away from the strategy that succeeded in gaining power: Of focusing on the everyday concerns of voters, who wanted to improve the economy and health services. Instead, Labour has found itself overwhelmed by reacting to circumstances and failing to provide a clear plan to get the country back on track after over a decade of slow and low growth, stagnating incomes, and rising living costs.

In some ways, the message to the center-left elsewhere is simple: you must maintain just as much focus in government on voters’ everyday concerns as you did in opposition.

During his time in opposition, Starmer engineered a remarkable turnaround that made Labour electable again after 14 years out of power. He rejected former Leader Jeremy Corbyn’s strident leftism, which had been roundly defeated at the ballot box in 2019, and instead sought to recapture the political center, appealing to working-class swing voters in towns and suburbs who felt Labour no longer spoke for them. He addressed them directly in virtually every speech, telling his own party to change to get closer to them, and relentlessly focusing on their core concerns of economic security, defense, the health service, and immigration.

By rebuilding trust in Labour’s credibility to run the economy and taking on vested interests within the party, he steadily took Labour from 26 points behind the Conservatives to win a parliamentary landslide. To a weary and restless electorate, the promise of “Change” in Labour’s election slogan chimed with the public mood to leave behind the chaos of the Tory years.

Labour promised to kickstart the economy and use growth to fund public services rather than through tax rises; to cut energy bills with more homegrown clean energy; and put an end to the political and economic chaos that had dogged Britain since the Brexit referendum ten years ago.

But a series of early missteps set the Starmer-led government off course. The first was the most damaging: As a demonstration of fiscal responsibility, the new government announced a cut to the winter fuel allowance given to all pensioners. Labour’s budget stewardship had long been perceived as a weakness by voters and the financial markets alike. To show that this new government was serious about closing the large hole in the UK’s finances, it announced the removal of the benefit, which is typically worth about £200, with exemptions for the poorest pensioners, a move that wasn’t previewed in their election manifesto. But the ensuing backlash from voters and members of parliament meant that the Treasury had little option but to backtrack and reinstate the allowance for all but the wealthiest.

Still, the desire to be seen as a sober steward of the public’s finances led Starmer to propose further cuts to welfare benefits, including to disabled people, leading to another damaging climbdown when it became clear the party’s members in parliament wouldn’t support them without a long-term plan to support disabled people who would lose out. The changes that did ultimately pass were heavily diluted, but as with the winter fuel U-turn, the political damage was done. Starmer’s own relationship with the parliamentary party never really recovered.

In the end, it was the weight of opinion within the parliamentary party that dealt the final blow to an elected PM, a salutary tale for any future leader. And the impression given to the public was of a government unable to deliver the change it promised.

That desire for change from a status quo, now prevalent in many developed democracies, has so far gone unmet. Labour has embarked on some long-term investment programs meant to energize the economy, such as reforming planning to increase housing development, enabling businesses to reinvest profits more easily, and a “Pride in Place” scheme to put funding back into local areas. But the benefits of these are years away. Meanwhile, growth remains sluggish, tax thresholds have been frozen, which means more people are dragged into higher brackets, and inflation threatens household and national finances alike.

In power, Labour has struggled to provide a unifying message and program that a fragmented electoral coalition can get behind. Progressive voters, mainly in the cities, have been turned off by the party’s firmness on immigration and border control and uninspired by the absence of a central vision; swing voters in the towns and suburbs feel let down by the lack of apparent change in the economy.

Those voters aren’t just souring on Labour, either. Last month’s big winners from the local elections included the extremes on all sides: Reform UK, the Nationalists in Scotland and Wales, and the Green Party — rather than the more mainstream Conservatives or Liberal Democrats. After years of being promised change and not getting it, the British have become fed up with the entire political establishment. That said, Reform UK has underperformed their national polling at recent by-elections, losing to the Greens, the Conservatives, and to Labour, suggesting that they are beatable, particularly when tactical voting is deployed by a canny electorate.

To the British public, Labour in power has just looked like too much of the same, when it promised a decisive break with the chaos of the past. A general election in the U.K. is up to three years away, so the Labour Government led by a new PM needs to be utterly focused on turning that around before then.

Starmer’s success in reviving Labour’s fortunes two years ago still stands as a sterling accomplishment that offers important lessons to center-left parties across the world. Above all, they have to move closer to ordinary voters and understand their everyday live while offering hope for the future. For Labour, that meant unifying the country around a belief that politics should serve the country, not party interests, and restoring the belief that if you work hard, you get a fair chance to get on.

But winning is one thing. Governing is another. And the PM’s ousting by his own MPs is a reminder of what happens when a government fails to deliver tangible results and communicate a vision about where the country is headed.

Could Labour make a comeback from government under a new PM? Quite possibly. Consider the recent fortunes of the Australian Labor Party, which lost a major mid-term referendum, but last year went on to win a second parliamentary term with an increased majority. It did so by doubling down on policies that make a tangible difference on issues like the cost of living and health care, for example, by providing households and businesses with an energy bill rebate and rolling out new Urgent Care Centres, as visible “proof points” of delivery that made a difference in voters’ everyday lives. When PPI ran a series of focus groups immediately after the May 2025 Australian federal election, voters cited these specific examples as evidence for why they re-elected Labor as the better choice for the future. The ALP is facing a new challenger on the right, too, the One Nation Party, but its first term refocusing on the everyday concerns of voters is instructive for all center-left parties.

It is possible to unite progressives in the cities and working-class voters by showing you have the candidate and the plan to take the country forward together. But the only center-left party strategy that is winning globally is the one that places non-college, working-class voters at the heart. As Labour’s trials in government show, you must be prepared to stand for them, deliver change for them, and continuously show them you are on their side. Otherwise, you can’t expect to keep their support.

Claire Ainsley is Director of the Project on Center-Left Renewal at the D.C.-based Progressive Policy Institute, and was Executive Director of Policy for Labour and Keir Starmer in opposition 2020-22.

The Trump administration has launched the next big fight over affirmative action. In doing so, it is not only rejecting decades of conservative orthodoxy, but is also taking the Republican party from a position of great political and legal strength to one of vulnerability.

Earlier this month, the Justice Department issued a 12-page letter finding that the University of California Davis Medical School has engaged in illegal “proxy” discrimination, favoring Black and Hispanic applicants by giving a leg up in admissions to students of all races who come from less privileged backgrounds.

The complaint focuses on the medical school’s “Davis Scale,” which provides a “continuous measure of socioeconomic disadvantage,” including“parental income and education,” and “growing up in a medically underserved area.” The DOJ claims that because this policy is especially helpful to minority applicants, who tend to be poorer, and because Davis values racial diversity, the practice is tantamount to the kind of explicit racial preferences the Supreme Court struck down in 2023.

That the administration would go after economic affirmative action at U.C. Davis is a story layered with ironies.

U.C. Davis Medical School was the defendant in the famous 1978 Bakke case in which the Supreme Court banned the use of explicit racial quotas in university admissions. The school had set aside 16 of 100 seats for racial minorities, which the court concluded violated the Constitution and the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

The justices in Bakke allowed racial preferences to survive, as long as race was one of many factors. But for decades, conservatives (along with a few liberals like me) argued that economic affirmative action would be the fairest way to achieve racial and economic diversity.

Commenting on the Bakke case in 1979, future Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia wrote: “I am entirely in favor of according the poor inner-city child, who happens to be black, advantages and preferences not given to my own children because they don’t need them. But I am not willing to prefer the son of a prosperous and well-educated black doctor or lawyer — solely because of his race — to the son of a recent refugee from Eastern Europe who is working as a manual laborer to get his family ahead.”

Other conservative justices, such as Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, were also fans of economic affirmative action. In his 1991confirmation hearings, Thomas said he favored such programs: “The kid could be a white kid from Appalachia, could be a Cajun from Louisiana, or could be a black kid or Hispanic kid from the inner cities or from the barrios, but I defended that sort of a program [in the 1970s] and I would defend it today.” Likewise, Alito excoriated the University of Texas at Austin for claiming it needed racial preferences to admit “the African-American or Hispanic child of successful professionals in Dallas.”

“I thought that the whole purpose of affirmative action was to help students who come from underprivileged backgrounds,” Alito said.

The UC Davis program — which focuses on economic disadvantage – avoids the Achilles heel of racial preference programs: their focus on privileged minorities. As I testified in the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case, 71% of the Black, Hispanic, and Native American students at Harvard came from the richest 20% of the Black, Hispanic, and Native American populations.

When the Supreme Court struck down racial preferences at Harvard in 2023, it suggested economic affirmative action provided a legal path forward. Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, for example, cited my testimony finding that “Harvard could nearly replicate the current racial composition of its student body without resorting to race-based practices if it: (1) provided socioeconomically disadvantaged applicants just half of the tip it gives recruited athletes; and (2) eliminated tips for the children of donors, alumni and faculty ” Presumably, Gorsuch was not encouraging Harvard to engage in something he believed to constitute illegal “proxy discrimination.”

The justices in Students for Fair Admissions went after the means of racial preferences, which have also long been unpopular with the public. They never said using race-neutral means to achieve racial diversity was illegal. To the contrary, the justices said diversity goals such as “promoting cross-racial understanding” were “commendable,” and “worthy.”

To be sure, universities have put themselves in a predicament. For decades, they claimed that economic affirmative action could not work to produce racial diversity. Now, when an institution like U.C. Davis Medical School triples the number of underrepresented minority students using economic means, it raises eyebrows. Conservative critics ask: Were they lying then, or are they lying now?

The evidence has long shown that economic affirmative action, by capturing the legacy of racial discrimination, can produce considerable amounts of racial diversity. The main reason universities preferred racial preferences is that they were cheaper: Admitting full-pay privileged minority students costs less than providing financial aid to meaningful numbers of working-class students of all races.

If the Trump administration is looking for cheating, it should examine institutions whose racial diversity numbers have magically remained high, despite their failure to adopt new economic affirmative action programs. UC Davis Medical School, by contrast, has an affirmative defense for its good racial diversity numbers: the socioeconomic boost it provides.

Fifty years ago, when conservatives attacked racial quotas at U.C. Davis Medical School, they had the upper hand politically. The new attack on economic affirmative action at Davis provides Democrats a golden opportunity to ask: What’s wrong with Scalia’s idea of giving a break to “the poor inner-city child, who happens to be black”?

Ever since Franklin Roosevelt created Social Security in 1935, it has rested on the principle that Americans should earn their retirement benefits. The president was a deep believer in the moral importance of work, who also knew his plan would be more politically durable if voters felt as if they had personally paid into it. So the program was designed to mimic a traditional pension, where payroll taxes represented a worker’s contributions and benefits increased for higher earners.

Nearly a century later, the social compact behind Social Security is fraying. Americans have not paid nearly enough into the program to cover the benefits they’ve been promised. As a result, its primary trust fund is now officially projected to run out of money in 2032. If policymakers fail to act in the next president’s term, beneficiaries will face an automatic 22% cut in order to keep payouts in line with contributions.

Policymakers could have saved the system as we know it with modest tweaks had they acted earlier. For example, today’s retirees could have paid slightly higher tax rates over their working lives to adequately fund their benefits. But instead, they elected lawmakers who either ignored the problem or actively made it worse.

Now, it’s effectively too late to prevent massive cuts without abandoning the notion that today’s Social Security beneficiaries actually paid for their benefits. Every dollar that must be raised from higher taxes on today’s workers to prevent a cut for current retirees is a wealth transfer from young to old — from a generation that inherited this shortfall to the one that let it grow.

But policymakers can uphold FDR’s vision of a program in which benefits are earned through work without binding themselves to the false pretense that seniors paid for their benefits. It just requires them to redefine the mechanism by which benefits are earned.

To show them how, my team at the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) developed a package of reforms built around an innovative new concept: Instead of calculating benefits based on how much income a person earns throughout their career, Social Security would award benefits based on how many years someone works. In other words, a riveter who earns $60,000 annually and a lawyer who earns $300,000 would get the same monthly check in retirement as long as they put in the same number of years on the job.

This redesign would strengthen Social Security’s finances by reducing the outsized benefits that go to high-earners. It would also increase support for seniors with the greatest financial need: under our plan, anyone who works for at least 20 years would receive a benefit large enough to keep them out of poverty, which isn’t guaranteed under today’s system. And it would protect older Americans by preventing automatic benefit cuts slated to take effect in just six years — all without drastically higher taxes on today’s workers.

Importantly, this reform would reinforce Social Security’s premise as a benefit people earn rather than transforming it into a stereotypical redistributive welfare program, affirming the basic Rooseveltian vision.

Our proposal is not without its critics, however. Wendell Primus —– a longtime aide to former Speaker Nancy Pelosi —– and three of his colleagues at Brookings earlier this year published a critique titled “Insufficient financing should not provoke dramatic changes to Social Security.” Notably, the authors did not object to the specific merits of PPI’s proposal. Instead, they argued that policymakers should reject any plan that weakens the link between an individual’s Social Security benefits and their tax contributions into the program. In short, they want to maintain the popular fiction that Social Security works sort of like a normal retirement account.

I don’t want to get into an endless debate over the merits of every specific detail of each proposal, because those will almost certainly be iterated upon between now and when Congress ultimately comes around to seriously considering solutions. But exploring the fundamental weaknesses of their criticism and the alternatives they propose actually shows the impracticality of clinging to the thin pretense that seniors have paid for their benefits — namely, that tying benefits to income necessitates showering benefits on rich seniors who don’t need them or cutting benefits for poor seniors who actually depend on them. It’d be better for policymakers to unshackle themselves from the failing approach of yesteryear and embrace some unconventional ideas.

Nobody Really Has a Plan to Save Social Security “As We Know It”

To demonstrate that Social Security can be salvaged without what he calls “radical changes,” Primus points to two alternative proposals: one he developed at Brookings, and one developed by the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Commission on Retirement Security and Personal Savings in 2016.

Let’s start with the BPC plan. I am intimately familiar with its strengths and weaknesses, perhaps more than almost anyone else, because I helped write it as the staffer specializing in Social Security on that commission.

The BPC plan was an attempt to adhere as closely as possible to the original design and goals of Social Security. To the extent policymakers are rigidly committed to that approach, I believe the BPC blueprint remains the best starting point for them. But even it struggles to achieve those aims.

The BPC plan would seek to fix Social Security’s financial trouble in part by raising the cap on how much of an individual’s income is subject to payroll taxes, which currently sits at $184,000. In return, higher earners would also receive some extra benefits when they retire — but they’d be extremely modest. The highest earners would receive just $1 in monthly benefits for every additional $20 of wages subject to new annual taxes, compared to a minimum of $3 under the current formula. At the same time, BPC’s plan would increase benefits for low earners more than it would increase their taxes.

The end result is a much, much flatter benefit structure than exists today. If the BPC formula were fully in place now, someone with $300,000 of average lifetime earnings would receive a monthly benefit just 50% more than someone who earned $60,000 despite having paid 400% more in payroll taxes.1 Although the link between contributions and benefits would technically remain, it would exist more in principle than in practice.

Even then, it is an incomplete solution to Social Security’s financial troubles. Had the BPC plan been enacted when we first proposed it, the program would have been made sustainably solvent. But enacting the plan today wouldn’t be enough to close the shortfall. Moreover, the burden of these reforms would fall more heavily onto younger Americans if the reforms began phasing in now, because people retiring over the past decade will have avoided most of the package’s benefit reforms as well as taxes on their final years of earnings. Both these problems will only grow worse the longer policymakers wait to act — further straining the link between contributions and benefits.

We Shouldn’t Give Even Bigger Benefits to Wealthy Seniors

Primus’s proposal also flattens benefits relative to contributions, although not quite as much as BPC’s does (the $300,000-earner would get monthly benefits approximately twice those of the $60,000-earner in his formulation, while paying five times as much in payroll taxes). But to adhere more closely to the principle that benefits reflect past contributions, Primus’s proposal would increase high-earners’ Social Security benefits relative to current law, in conjunction with their taxes. Ultimately, a future beneficiary who consistently earned more than $300,000 annually in today’s dollars would get benefits roughly 20% greater than they would under the current formula.2

It’s worth stopping here to point out that Social Security was not created to lavish wealthy seniors with large pensions. When the Social Security Act was passed, nearly half of older Americans lived in poverty. Even previously well-off seniors were left destitute by the Great Depression and in worse shape than working-age Americans. That problem was what a wage-replacement style retirement program needed to solve. FDR was clear about his intention: While signing the Social Security Act, he called it “a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against … poverty-ridden old age.”

Thanks in large part to Social Security, today’s seniors are in much better shape relative to workers. In Primus’s estimation, just 6% of older Americans are in poverty — that’s lower than the poverty rate for Americans overall. Sixty-three percent of America’s wealth is owned by Baby Boomers and earlier generations. The top 10% of senior households have net worths exceeding $2.5 million. And the ratio of a senior’s income to a worker’s income is higher in the United States than in social democratic states like Sweden and Denmark.

Yet working Americans are paying a much bigger price tag to support today’s retirees, despite now being positioned worse relative to them. For Social Security’s first 20 years, the program cost less than 2% of GDP. Social Security now costs more than 5% of GDP, and is projected to hit 6% of GDP by 2050. In the context of America’s growing budget deficits and many national needs, it makes little sense to continue paying massive benefits to high-income retirees who do not need them — let alone pay them even more.

Social Security Reforms Have to Fit Within the Broader Budget

One of the biggest problems with Primus’s plan is that it ignores the broader fiscal challenge facing the federal government. Yes, it would technically make Social Security solvent for the foreseeable future. But to do so, it depends on diverting taxes currently going to a Medicare trust fund into Social Security. So how would Primus plug that revenue gap? He doesn’t say — which is particularly ironic given that he complains that other plans “do not include any specific solutions for revenue changes.”3 This approach is especially problematic considering that the gap between spending and dedicated revenue for Medicare is growing much faster than it is for Social Security. And Primus has proposed costly benefit expansions that would make the gap even bigger, paid for by unspecified tax increases.

Primus’s approach demonstrates the dangers of trying to solve Social Security’s problems without taking into consideration the rest of the federal budget. When one looks at Social Security in isolation, even simplistic solutions like just eliminating the payroll tax cap make a lot of sense — why shouldn’t the richest of the rich pay at least the same rate as everyone else?

The problem is that scrapping the payroll tax cap is effectively a 12.4 percentage-point increase in the top marginal income tax rate. Combined with ordinary income taxes at the federal and state level, taxes at the top would approach the revenue-maximizing rate, making it difficult to raise taxes on the rich to pay for anything else. Yet when Social Security hits its cliff in 2032, the total federal budget deficit projected by the Congressional Budget Office will be roughly five times the size of Social Security’s annual deficit. If Congress has completely tapped out the reservoir of politically palatable tax hikes on the rich, where will they get revenue to pay for the bigger deficits facing other federal programs?

Unlike Primus, PPI developed and proposed our Social Security reforms as part of a comprehensive budget blueprint. Although PPI left open the question of which revenue source policymakers earmark for which spending program as a matter of accounting, we made sure the totality of our specified tax and spending changes would put the federal budget on a path to eventual balance (as did BPC in their most-recent budget plan).

To be sure, one need not solve the entirety of our nation’s fiscal problems to fix Social Security’s. But at the very least, it is essential for any plan that claims to shore up Social Security to work within a broader budgetary context instead of creating new problems.

Unconventional Reforms Can Help Social Security Better Fulfill its Mission

If even the most-balanced attempts to preserve the current system strain the link between contributions and benefits beyond reason, shower benefits on wealthy retirees who don’t need them, and/or worsen structural deficits in other programs, it’s time to ask ourselves: Does it really make sense for policymakers to bind themselves to it?

When it came time for me to re-evaluate Social Security in the context of PPI’s budget plan, I concluded the answer was no. My team believed we should develop a new offering — one that maintains the popular premise of Social Security as an “earned benefit,” but without having to give the biggest benefits to the people who need them least.

Our approach also unlocks additional benefits beyond reigning in Social Security’s deficits and refocusing the program on its original purpose of keeping older Americans from falling into poverty.

One upside to ditching the convoluted link between earnings and benefits is that it would make benefits more predictable and more reliable. To determine an individual’s benefit under the current system, they have to know exactly how much they earned every single year of their career and adjust it using formulas for wage growth in the time between the year of their earnings and when they become eligible for benefits. Furthermore, the specter of automatic benefit cuts makes it impossible to consider the benefit determined by the formula reliable.

By contrast, PPI’s proposal is simple for the vast majority of workers: add up the number of years they earned a credit for working, multiply it by the monthly benefit per credit, and boom — that’s their benefit. Because it has no shortfall, our proposal gives certainty that the current system cannot.

Another upside of our approach is that it allows policymakers to consider better alternatives to the current payroll tax. As it exists today, the payroll tax is regressive, imposing higher rates on people whose earnings fall below the cap than on those whose earnings fall above. Even the progressivity of federal income taxes does not totally offset this: someone who earns $200,000 pays a lower marginal tax rate than someone who earns half as much. That revenue structure may be a necessity if policymakers want to maintain the pretense that benefits are linked to contributions, but it is far from the most equitable or efficient tax policy.

Reform Plans Have More Common Ground Than They Appear

Despite the limits of their approach, I believe Primus and his colleagues at Brookings should be commended for trying to offer a constructive solution to the rapidly approaching Social Security crisis.

There is actually a lot of common ground among the Primus, BPC, and PPI proposals. All three propose to raise enough revenue to close at least half of the solvency gap. They all raise a disproportionate share of this revenue from higher-income Americans, who can afford to pay the most. And unlike those of some delusional politicians, all three plans recognize that some additional revenue will need to come from Americans across the income spectrum.

On the benefits side, all three plans propose to preserve or increase benefits for Americans most vulnerable in retirement. They propose to reduce the benefits of higher earners, at least as a proportion of the taxes they pay into the system (and thus flatten the benefit structure). And they aim to uphold the principle that Social Security should remain a benefit people can credibly claim they earn through work.

The big difference is whether we seek to give people greater benefits in retirement simply because they earned more when they were working, in an effort to maintain the fiction that Social Security beneficiaries paid for their benefits. Primus’s insistence that we do forces him to adopt policies that lead to undesirable outcomes, such as increasing benefits paid to the highest earners who need them least, paid for by a higher tax burden on future workers. Even though, as I argued earlier, it doesn’t really succeed in meaningfully keeping the link.

By contrast, PPI’s willingness to abandon the fiction allows us to refocus on optimal policy — what will lead to the greatest welfare for workers and retirees alike, while imposing the minimum intergenerational wealth transfer necessary. At the same time, we have found a way to preserve the earned nature of benefits. We acknowledge a fundamental truth: Today’s Social Security beneficiaries did earn their benefits through a lifetime of hard work. But they did not pay for their benefits. Let’s pursue a solution that reckons with this reality and better fulfills the promise of Social Security for everyone.