A bipartisan group of legislators could offer a fix for all three of these-double the money offered by Pell Grants, double the income level at which they begin to phase out, and make them workable for part-time students. Pell Grants, the federal government’s primary subsidy for higher education, have three problems: they are too small (the maximum is only around half of average tuition at public four-year universities) they leave out most of the middle class because the income qualification ceiling is too low and they are insufficiently flexible for part-time students who may be working full time while seeking a new qualification. economy that will require workers to have more skills in order to compete. The pandemic has precipitated an economic and employment crisis and is likely to accelerate automation and other changes in the U.S. Red state constituents would benefit, and their representatives and senators know that. Supporting middle class families should be attractive to Republicans: if you rank states with the highest percentage of population under age 18, not a single one of the top fifteen states is blue. It would also effectively give a significant tax break to middle class families across the country. Progressives have signed on because it would immediately cut child poverty by a third. A tax credit for families with children, like that proposed by Senators Michael Bennet and Sherrod Brown in the American Family Act, should attract broad support. About one in six children in the United States live in poverty, a rate that is higher than that of many other OECD countries including Greece, Russia, and Mexico. Demonstrate family values with a “Value Families” tax credit.And, in addition to supporting an economic recovery, a smart infrastructure package will include investments that help advance related goals: speeding up the transition to green energy, expanding public transit, enhancing resilience to climate-related disasters including hurricanes and forest fires, and achieving broadband coverage for rural America where too many people still don’t have internet access. Every senator who supports it will be able to say that they helped bring new jobs and new opportunity to their state. A Biden administration can commit to an infrastructure investment plan that includes projects in all fifty states and Puerto Rico. But the need for infrastructure remains, and so does the support for it. “Infrastructure week” became a running joke during the Trump administration because of the White House’s ham-handed approach, which was long on bold declarations and short on mechanics. Here are four big ideas that could attract broad popular support next year and help jumpstart the system. This is not a recipe for partisan advantage, but rather for restoring a level of function to the political system that can be felt in the everyday lives of its citizens. It is to find things that a significant majority of Americans already want and deliver them. The way forward, initially, is not for either group of Americans to believe that they can persuade the other to want what they want. And those ideas offer perhaps the best shot at breaking the grip of gridlock. While Americans may be divided politically into roughly equal opposing groups, both of which describe the other in increasingly emotional and negative terms, there remain shared policy ideas that significant majorities of Americans support. Even worse, once these divisions are created, a doom-loop ensues: division decreases the incentives for and possibilities for proper function, particularly when it comes to Congress.ĭan Baer is senior vice president for policy research and director of the Europe Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. That sense of scarcity and pessimism underwrites division. But dysfunction in Washington-in particular, the failure of Congress to deliver meaningful legislation that has a positive material impact on most Americans’ lives and lifts their hopes for the future-has created a shared background belief that Americans are destined to battle each other over a shrinking pie. Dissatisfaction with the status quo is central to both the crude whitewashed nostalgia of Trump-style populism and to the progressive agenda of the American left. President Donald Trump’s and President-elect Joe Biden’s voters would agree that our political system has failed to sufficiently address the concerns of its citizens (though they would point to different examples). It is likely that majorities of both U.S. America is divided because Washington is dysfunctional. Washington is not dysfunctional because America is divided. Conventional wisdom holds that because America emerged from its recent elections as divided-or more divided-than ever, the country is doomed to continued legislative gridlock and dysfunction.
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