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.