(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



The End of Progressive Policies [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-05-12

Are we the Gang That Can’t Shoot Straight? The general consensus from pundits and polls is that democratic party messaging, both during Kamala’s run for the presidency and since then, has sucked. We’ve been tricked into engaging in culture wars defined by the far right e.g., transgender children, being “woke,” and DEI, the latter two of which no one can define. We’ve had no coherent message on immigration (“but we had a bill that the republicans killed” never had traction). And despite having stuck the near-perfect “Goldilocks” landing for the economy, we couldn’t effectively message that success to the public even with an economy described by the Economist a month before the election as “the envy of the World.” And now we play “whack-a-mole” with each unlawful, immoral, and nonsensical Executive Order or DOGE swing of the chainsaw. But the sheer number of actions by the Trump administration has effectively diluted and diffused any responses, making them largely ineffective, save for an occasional “Opps, we’re rehiring them” or “We’re restarting that program.” As a result, polling for the democratic party is at or near an all-time low and pollsters tell us that no one knows what the democratic party currently stands for, except for opposition to Trump.

The next two months provides the best opportunity for us to effectively counter Trump’s efforts and remind voters where the democratic party stands and who it stands for. The real priority for Trump’s billionaire cabinet and his billionaire friends has never been tariffs, immigration, DEI or “wokeness.” In fact, most of them oppose Trumps policies on those topics. The Holy Grail has always been making Trump’s 2017 tax cuts permanent. Full stop. In the words of the immortal Deep Throat, “follow the money.” And if the republican party has its way, they will achieve that objective within the next two months. If they are successful with their “big, beautiful bill,” the deep budget cuts they’re attempting to inflict will also become permanent, because history shows that any future efforts to raise taxes on corporations and the rich to reestablish or rebuild those programs will be unsuccessful. As a brief refresher course, between 1936 and 1963, the top individual income tax rate generally ranged between 80 and 90 percent. The top rate of corporate income taxes was fifty-three percent (53%) in the 1960’s. In 1965 the ratio of CEO pay to worker compensation was 20-to-1. In 2023 the ratio was 290-to-1. In the 1960’s the average hourly wage was $2.75, and the minimum wage was $1, but increased to $1.15 in 1968. Today the average hourly wage is between $33 and $36 and the minimum wage, which last changed in 2009, is $7.25 an hour. Outside of war times, efforts to raise corporate or personal income taxes have failed.

To my mind the democratic party should adopt a single, laser-focused message over the next month—The People vs. The Billionaires. Trump’s budget cuts and DOGE’s deforestation of critical programs provide all the examples to draw the contrast. Ask the American public, do you support giving billions of dollars of tax cuts to corporations and billionaires by cutting Medicaid, the VA, FEMA, the National Institutes of Health, cancer research, closing national parks, terminating the Department of Education, etc., etc? The commercials and memes write themselves. A photo of a Trump cabinet meeting with a “Billionaire” bubble over each one contrasted by some of their most ridiculous, out of touch statements in defense of their cuts, long lines at Social Security offices, veterans with prolonged waits for urgent care, children who no longer receive breakfast before school, victims of national disasters surrounded by supportive FEMA workers who suddenly vaporize., special needs educational programs that disappear. If one were to review all the Trump budget and program cuts you would find that every American will be adversely impacted by at least one—except for the billionaires who will become richer from tax cuts. Income inequality and the increasingly regressive tilt of our income tax structure are the principal evils of the progressive movement.

Speaking of messaging, where are “our” Musks? Musk spends almost $300 million to elect a convicted felon and we can’t find ten progressive billionaires to pitch in $10 million each to fund an educational messaging program to defeat the latest trickle-down economics joke? The greatest barrier to effective messaging is an ill-informed populace that lacks basic understanding of our system of government and what it does. Whether its defending democracy, attacking the increasing authoritarian lean of this administration, or defending against the budget and program cuts, our principal enemy is that those we are trying to reach (I’m excluding the 30% of the population that are Trump cultists) don’t know or understand the issues. We need a basic “School House Rock” approach to messaging. What is a tariff and why is it a tax on consumers? Why do we have Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid? Why does the government fund scientific research and what benefits have we achieved as a result? What does the Department of Education do? Why does Congress decide what to fund and how much to fund and why is it illegal for the President to take that role? What is “soft power” and how has that made America the leader of the free World?

Our time to save the results of decades of progressive actions and policies is the next two months. While the ideals of the progressive movement will not change, its legacy will, unless we act.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/5/12/2321893/-The-End-of-Progressive-Policies?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web

Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/