Congressional Progressives Ready To Shower Us With Reasonable Policies That Make Life More Affordable
Nicetime!
This week, while Donald Trump and friends were busy arguing that the American taxpayers ought to foot at least $400 million of the bill for the gold-plated ballroom of his and Liberace’s dreams, the Congressional Progressive Caucus was focused on, well, pretty much the complete opposite of that.
On Wednesday, the CPC released the New Affordability Agenda, an exciting (really!) new plan to make life more manageable for those Americans who spend slightly less time in tuxedos and evening gowns. The proposal includes a slate of recently introduced and soon-to-be introduced pieces of legislation aimed at lowering the cost of groceries, utilities, housing, and prescription drugs as well as taking on the special interests that are making everything so expensive.
Not only are they good policies that will help people, they are also extremely popular policies that people actually want. According to the paper released by the CPC, “The New Affordability Agenda focuses on easily explainable policies that deliver economic relief broadly and quickly. That is why every single one of these policies is supported by supermajorities of Americans, including 3 in 5 Republicans.”
The first plank is making prescription drugs affordable, which the committee wants to do by enacting Rep. Jan Schakowsky’s Affordable Drug Manufacturing Act. This bill would establish an Office of Drug Manufacturing that would actually have the US manufacturing its own generic versions of drugs like “insulin, asthma inhalers, naloxone, epinephrine auto-injectors, and antibiotics” and offering them to consumers at a discounted price.
The second is bringing down the cost of groceries, which we would surely all be grateful for. For this, we have Rep. Maxine Waters’s Fair Competition for Small Business Act, which will crack down on grocery store price fixing, and a forthcoming bill from Jim McGovern addressing seed patents, so that farmers don’t have to buy new seeds every year.
Third up, we have affordable housing and a soon-to-be introduced bill from Maxine Waters that will provide first-time homeowners with $20,000 in down payment assistance and set aside 1 trillion dollars to build, “create and preserve affordable and accessible housing, support public housing, expand homeownership opportunities, and expand rental assistance.”
Fourth? Utilities. A new bill from Rep. Greg Casar will create a federal standard for “just and reasonable” price increases from for-profit utility companies in order to keep those companies from gouging us.
The fifth plank is affordable childcare. Now, a few weeks ago, we saw Donald Trump ramble on for a minute-and-a-half about how the United States can’t pay for daycare because we have to pay for fighting wars …
But we can, and the Child Care for Every Community Act, which has been introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the House and Elizabeth Warren in the Senate, is how. The Act will provide federal funding to all states and principalities to fund universal daycare, ensuring that half of all families will pay no more than $10 a day per kid and that all families will have their childcare capped at 7 percent of their income.
Sixth, we have affordable gas. Rep. Ro Khanna’s Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act will make it so that “large oil companies that produce or import at least 300,000 barrels of oil per day will pay a tax that is half the difference between the current price per barrel of oil and the average price per barrel last year” and all the money collected from that tax will be sent back to consumers as a quarterly rebate. Not only will this mean lower prices at the pump, it will mean that we won’t have to hear the big oil companies brag about their incredible profits after they gouge us.
The seventh plank will ban AI price gouging and wage fixing, via a bill from Rep. Greg Casar. This will end incredibly gross surveillance pricing practices, like “an airline raising prices for someone who searches for a family obituary or a rideshare app paying a driver less after seeing that she visited a pawn shop.”
With the eighth plank comes the roses — vacation time. The United States is the only industrialized nation that does not guarantee any paid time off to full-time workers. Seriously, it’s like us and a few micronations in the Pacific that are so tiny we can’t even really see them on this map of countries and their respective number of guaranteed paid days off.
The PTO Act, introduced by Rep. Seth Magaziner, would give all full-time workers 10 paid days off a year and also make us less slightly less embarrassing on the world stage. Call me crazy, but I think people should be able to get sick and not come to work and infect their co-workers without worrying about how they’re going to make rent that month if they do.
The ninth plank will make it so overtime wages are twice one’s regular wage, rather than 1.5 times their regular wage — which will put more money in the pockets of workers and also keep employers from making people work a ridiculous amount of hours. Nice! The forthcoming bill will be introduced by Rep. Greg Casar and Rep. Pramila Jayapal.
The final plank, however, may be the most important — “Getting Big Money Out of Politics,” and its accompanying bill, Summer Lee’s Abolish Super PACs Act, which would limit the amount that people and corporations are allowed to contribute to Super PACs to $5000 a year. Because let’s be real, these policies could be beloved by 99 percent of the country and we’d still have a hell of a time getting them enacted, because the people and corporations who are able to give obscene amounts of money to Super PACs often don’t want them to be.
In the last presidential election, Super PACs collectively raised $865 million from people who gave $5 million or more. That comes to about 75 percent of the total money raised by Super PACs, in general. It’s also twice what they raised in 2020. The horrible ruling in Citizens United made it so we can’t keep corporations and the rich from donating to these PACs, because “money is speech,” but there’s no reason it has to be an unlimited amount of money. We regulate how much people can donate directly to a candidate, there should be no reason why we shouldn’t regulate how much they can donate to PACs.
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To reiterate, these policies are incredibly popular and supported by the vast majority of Americans, as you can see in the graph below.
We all know how much some legislators love a focus group, so hopefully the popularity of these policies will help get everyone on board. It’s time to stop it with the “Oh no, I hope we’re not scaring people!” shit and get on the “Everyone likes these things we want to do!” train.
The CPC writes:
Every single Democrat should be able to unite around this agenda. The CPC is proud to present the New Affordability Agenda as a path for moderates, progressives, swing- and safe-district Democrats alike to address the top problem facing working people. Pairing this proactive vision with a commitment to aggressively hold this administration accountable, Democrats can defeat Trumpism and deliver for the American people.
And that’s how we win. Well, that and opposing this stupid ass war, this stupid ass ballroom and all the other stupid ass things that no one wants.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
I just want the Social Security benefits I’m being illegally denied after 30 years in the workforce.
“Every single Democrat should be able to unite around this agenda.”
John Fetterman says “Hold my beer.”