At a moment of political division and policy uncertainty, many believe American democracy is in serious danger. Inequality, polarization, the stoking of anger, and the exploitation of weaknesses in our political system all threaten the representative government we once took for granted. We cannot go backward, so how do we move forward to assure that the years of struggle that led to our democracy were not in vain? The Network for Responsible Public Policy discusses in its forum: Democracy in the Balance.
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In swing states, both parties agree on ideas to save Social Security
Sep 13, 2024
A new public consultation survey finds significant bipartisan support for major Social Security proposals — including ideas to increase revenue and cut benefits — that would reduce the program’s long-term shortfall by 78 percent and extend the program’s longevity for decades.
Without any reforms to revenues or benefits, the Social Security Trust Fund will be depleted by 2033, and benefits will be cut for all retirees.
This survey, run by the University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation, is the sixth in the Swing Six Issue Surveys series being conducted in the run-up to the November election in six swing states and nationally. Unlike standard polling, respondents went through an interactive online “policymaking simulation” in which they learned about and then evaluated pro and con arguments for proposed reforms. The survey content was reviewed by experts on different sides of the debate.
(All Americans are invited to go through the same policymaking simulation as the survey sample.)
Revenue increases
Overwhelming majorities of Democrats and Republicans support two proposals to increase revenues that would cover three-quarters of the Social Security shortfall.
- Subjecting wages over $400,000 to the payroll tax: Currently, wages subject to the payroll tax are capped at $169,000. A proposal to make all wages over $400,000 subject to the payroll tax, which would eliminate 60 percent of the shortfall, is supported by an overwhelming 86 percent to 89 percent in the swing states. This includes large majorities of Republicans (83 percent to 89 percent) and Democrats (83 percent to 92 percent). Nationally, 87 percent are in support.
- Increasing the payroll tax: Respondents were given the option of gradually increasing the payroll tax over several years, from 6.2 percent to 6.5 percent by 2030, 6.9 percent by 2038 or 7.2 percent by 2044, or not raise it. Increasing the payroll tax to at least 6.5 percent, which would eliminate 15 percent of the shortfall, is supported by 83 percent to 88 percent in the swing states. This includes majorities of Republicans (83 percent to 88 percent) and Democrats (85 percent to 88 percent). Nationally, 86 percent are in support.
Benefit reductions
Two benefit reductions, which would cover a quarter of the Social Security shortfall, also have robust bipartisan support.
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- Reducing benefits for high-income earners: Respondents were given the options of reducing benefits for the top 20 percent of earners, the top 40 percent or the top 50 percent, or they could not choose any of those options. Reducing benefits for the top 20 percent of income earners, which would eliminate 11 percent of the shortfall, is supported by an overwhelming 91 percent to 94 percent in the swing states. This includes majorities of Republicans (88 percent to 93 percent) and Democrats (91 percent to 94 percent). Nationally, 92 percent are in support.
- Raising the retirement age: Respondents were given options to gradually raise the full retirement age, which is currently set at 67 years old: to 68 by 2033, to 69 by 2041 or to 70 by 2064, or they could not choose any of those options. Raising the retirement age to at least 68, which would eliminate 15 percent of the shortfall, is supported by an overwhelming 88 percent to 91 percent in the swing states. This includes majorities of Republicans (88 percent to 94 percent) and Democrats (87 percent to 92 percent). Nationally, 89 percent are in support
“While some of these proposals — such as raising the retirement age or raising payroll taxes — are not popular in themselves, when Americans consider the full picture, large bipartisan majorities support taking tough steps to secure the Social Security program,” said Steven Kull, director of PPC. “We were struck by how similar the Republican and Democrats are on all these questions.”
Raising benefits
The four reforms endorsed by majorities would eliminate 101 percent of the shortfall. However, majorities also favor benefit increases that grow the shortfall by 23 percent. Combined, all of these proposals would reduce the shortfall by 78 percent.
- Raising the minimum benefit: Increasing the minimum monthly benefit for someone who worked 30 years from $1,066 to $1,570, which would increase the shortfall by 7 percent, is supported by 70 percent to 73 percent in the swing states. This includes majorities of Republicans (65 percent to 72 percent) and Democrats (68 percent to 78 percent). Nationally, 71 percent are in support. The minimum benefit would rise with inflation, and always be set at 125 percent of the federal poverty line.
- Increasing benefits for those 85 and older: Raising benefits for those 85 and over by about $100 a month, which would increase the shortfall by 4 percent, is supported by 64 percent to 67 percent in the swing states. This includes majorities of Republicans (58 percent to 67 percent) and Democrats (61 percent to70 percent). Nationally, 68 percent are in support.
- Increasing cost of living adjustments: Changing the way COLAs are calculated by focusing on the goods and services that older adults tend to buy, which would increase the shortfall by 12 percent, is supported by 65 percent to 68 percent in the swing states. This includes majorities of Republicans (62 percent to 68 percent) and Democrats (62 percent to 70 percent). Nationally, 68 percent are in support.
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Are housing costs driving inflation in 2024?
Sep 13, 2024
This fact brief was originally published by EconoFact. Read the original here. Fact briefs are published by newsrooms in the Gigafact network, and republished by The Fulcrum. Visit Gigafact to learn more.
Are housing costs driving inflation in 2024?
Yes.
The rise in housing costs has been a major source of overall inflation, which was 2.9% in the 12 months ending in July 2024.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics' shelter index, which includes housing costs for renters and homeowners, rose 5.1% in the 12 months ending in July 2024.
Housing costs account for 36.3% of the Consumer Price Index. This represents the largest share of any category.
The Consumer Price Index is an ongoing measure of price changes in a representative "basket" of consumer goods and services.
The only category in the CPI that increased at a greater rate was transportation services at 8.8%.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the rise in housing costs over this period accounted for over 70% of the total 12-month increase in the core CPI – that is, the CPI excluding food and energy prices, which rose 3.2% in this 12 month period.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
Sources
Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index - July 2024
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Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index
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Imagining constitutions
Sep 10, 2024
Breslin is the Joseph C. Palamountain Jr. Chair of Political Science at Skidmore College and author of “A Constitution for the Living: Imagining How Five Generations of Americans Would Rewrite the Nation’s Fundamental Law.”
This is the latest in “A Republic, if we can keep it,” a series to assist American citizens on the bumpy road ahead this election year. By highlighting components, principles and stories of the Constitution, Breslin hopes to remind us that the American political experiment remains, in the words of Alexander Hamilton, the “most interesting in the world.”
America’s Constitution is always under the microscope, but something different is happening of late: The document’s sanctity is being questioned.
In the pages of The New York Times, Jennifer Szalai recently asked whether the Constitution is “dangerous.” Erwin Chemerinsky similarly wonders whether the Constitution is actually a threat to the United States. Ryan Doerfler and Samuel Moyn question whether the “broken” Constitution should even be reclaimed. These questions would scarcely be uttered a generation ago. Today, they’re typical.
As disturbing as alarm over America’s holy charter may be, what is exciting is the way in which critics are responding. Constitutional skeptics have begun to take matters into their own hands and have offered their own versions of a 21st century charter. Leading writers and legal scholars were recently asked to imagine the next constitutional amendment. Before that, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas gathered a bunch of academics to draft a more progressive Constitution for our times, while the National Constitution Center did the same thing with separate teams of liberals, conservatives and libertarians. Hashtags for imaginary draft constitutions are trending.
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Those interesting and laudable efforts are the very definition of creativity. Fictional Framers are being asked to create new constitutions for the 21st century, ones that respond to the hyper-polarization of the moment. The drafters of these invented texts are no doubt influenced by the Trump presidency, the “woke” culture, political tribalism, the pandemic, regional distinctions, and on and on. Unsurprisingly, the progressive drafters emphasize rights, while the conservatives focus on the side of federalism and state power. The libertarians, in contrast, try to reduce government’s imprint while championing individual freedom. In the end, the dialogue is both fascinating and enlightening.
It is also distinctly American.
The United States should be proud of its tradition as a constitutional innovator. Political entrepreneurs were born alongside the new nation. John Dickinson, the primary author of the Articles of Confederation, was a dreamer. So was James Madison, and James Wilson, and Gouverneur Morris, and Alexander Hamilton, and all their colleagues who huddled under a hot Philadelphia sun in 1787 to craft a fresh legal charter. Similarly, state constitutional drafters number in the thousands. State leaders have assembled more than 160 times in American history to rewrite their fundamental documents.
These individuals shared an admirable audaciousness. What they also shared was a fervent commitment to see the constitution-making project through. Each was able to translate their vision for a “more perfect union” into an actual, tangible and eventually ratified constitution. They were critics of the political order they saw outside their windows, and they did something about it.
There are similar constitutional dreamers among us today. Hundreds of them. And yet there is little appetite to take their promising ideas and turn them into a new Constitution. The question is why. I would point to at least six different reasons.
- The fear of a runaway convention: There is concern that every clause, safeguard and protection in the Constitution would be fair game for revision.
- The polarization of America: There is concern that liberals and conservatives could never agree on any reforms to the Constitution.
- The challenge of representation: How do we decide who should be at the drafting convention and who should not?
- America is not really in crisis: Constitutions are generally born out of crises (civil wars, coups, economic disasters, etc.). We are experiencing political malaise right now, but not a genuine crisis.
- The sacred Constitution: For millions of Americans, the Constitution is still sacred. Flawed? Sure. But not irredeemable.
There are more reasons, of course. But these are the main sticking points, and they appear to be intractable. Calls for a constitutional convention — a return to Philadelphia of sorts — pop up fairly often. We should welcome them. Conversation about political improvement begets further conversation. Indeed, it is a demonstration of the strength of our constitutional republic that Americans are encouraged to interrogate the nation’s first principles.
Attempts to rewrite the Constitution are inevitably speculative — hypothetical, academic, abstract — mostly because few believe we’ll soon invoke an Article V constitutional convention. That should not diminish the importance of these imaginary efforts, however, or of the more conventional creative approaches to thinking about our current political and social problems. The U.S. Constitution is the most innovative political invention in the post-Enlightenment age. The way we talk about it should be equally creative.
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Project 2025: The Federal Reserve
Sep 09, 2024
Hill was policy director for the Center for Humane Technology, co-founder of FairVote and political reform director at New America. You can reach him on X @StevenHill1776.
This is part of a series offering a nonpartisan counter to Project 2025, a conservative guideline to reforming government and policymaking during the first 180 days of a second Trump administration. The Fulcrum's cross partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025.
Few federal agencies are as misunderstood by the general public as the little known Federal Reserve Board. The Fed, as it is known, oversees the central banking system of the United States. That means it superintends many of the most crucial levers for making the economy run, including maintaining the stability of the financial system, supervising and regulating banks, moderating interest rates and prices, maximizing employment and more. Often when Congress is too politically polarized and paralyzed to fiscally stimulate the economy, many look to the Fed for faster executive action.
The Federal Reserve system was created by Congress in 1913, when most Americans lived in rural areas and the largest industry was agriculture. It was enacted after a series of financial panics (particularly the panic of 1907), caused by irresponsible banks with overextended credit, led to an outcry for central control of the monetary system as a step toward avoiding future financial crises.
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Since then, other financial meltdowns such as the Great Depression in the 1930s and the Great Recession during the 2000s have led to the expansion of the roles and responsibilities of the Federal Reserve as the “lender of last resort.” The Fed, which is a quasi-public system and in theory makes its decisions independent of the political fray, is nevertheless often at the center of political controversy as both Democrats and Republicans try to alternatively influence it, or in some cases blame it, as a way of deflecting criticisms of their own economic policies.
Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the first 180 days of a second Trump administration, critiques the Federal Reserve based on a controversial reading of economic history. It adopts the debatable view that the Great Depression of 1929 was prolonged by the Federal Reserve’s inept management of the money supply. It observes that there has been an economic downturn roughly every five years, and blames that on “the impossibility of fine-tuning the money supply in real-time,” a task the Fed is seen as ill-equipped to address.
How to solve that? According to Project 2025, it would be better to simply abolish the Federal Reserve system altogether, and return the U.S. economy to some version of the unmanaged financial rawness of the pre-1913 era. The author of this chapter, Trump administration economist Paul Winfree, writes that the Fed should be replaced by a return to a system of so-called “free banking,” where banks are free to issue their own paper currency (banknotes) and would not be subject to any special regulations beyond those applicable to most enterprises.
Under such a system, neither interest rates nor the supply of money would be “controlled by the government.” Free banking, according to this view, would produce a stable and sound currency and a strong financial system, “while allowing lending to flourish.”
All that sounds intriguing except for the fact that there is no strong evidence that free banking actually works as effectively as Winfree describes. In the pre-Fed system, there was no role for a central bank either as a guarantor of money supply or as a “lender of last resort” when the economy is mired in recession or worse. Indeed, the money supply was permanently “frozen,” and the roles filled by the Fed were instead left to the private sector and mega-oligarch bankers like J.P. Morgan. There was no government insurance for bank deposit accounts, and if a bank struggled with solvency or even failed, its currency would become worthless and depositors would lose their savings.
But as the Panic of 1907 showed, under the relentless expansion of the U.S. economy at a certain point even the J.P. Morgans of the world could no longer play this role. Indeed, centralized bank systems like the Federal Reserve were created in response to the failures of the free banking system, which was sometimes referred to as “wildcat banking” because some banks printed more currency than they were capable of redeeming, leading to runs on banks and bank failures. During the Panic of 1837, 343 out of 850 banks (40 percent) closed. Today the United States has over 4,000 banks, so imagine if 1,600 failed today.
Keeping currencies stable, along with prices and inflation, doesn’t just happen by itself. It takes nonpartisan and non-self-interested experts, fed by the right data, to turn the dials and pull the levers of the economy in a way that prevents economic forces from running amok. But Project 2025 doesn’t just stop there with its historical perspective. It further encourages a new Trump administration to combine free banking with another financial chimera: considering “the feasibility of a return to the gold standard.”
Again, the United States withdrew from the gold standard in 1933 because, at a certain point in the growth trajectory of the national economy, it no longer worked very well. The evidence shows that both inflation and economic growth were quite volatile under the gold standard. During an economic crunch, the gold standard contributed to a run on banks by those who wanted to withdraw their gold before the bank ran out. This problem materialized during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when the gold standard contributed to instability and unemployment. Economist Barry Eichengreen wrote: “Far from being synonymous with stability, the gold standard itself was the principal threat to financial stability and economic prosperity between the wars.”
In short, Project 2025 has not learned from past economic failures, and it pedals economic snake oil that is both wrongheaded and ahistorical. However, it also proposes a number of less ambitious plans.
Project 2025 sounds more reasonable when it calls for a focus on regulations to maintain bank capital adequacy, so that during an economic downturn, if depositors get nervous and start withdrawing their savings, banks will have enough reserves to cover withdrawals without spurring a financial panic.
But then Project 2025 quickly goes off the rails again, decrying what it views as the Federal Reserve using its “big government” financial levers to improperly regulate banks as a way to promote politically favorable initiatives, such as those aligned with environmental, social, and governance objectives. It also criticizes the recent Fed policy of “quantitative easing” to increase the money supply and stimulate economic activity. And Project 2025, true to its far-right conservative roots, says that “full employment” should be eliminated from the Federal Reserve’s mandate to focus only on price and monetary stability.
Finally, Project 2025 claims that the Fed, through its lender-of-last-resort function, amplifies “moral hazard” by bailing out irresponsible private firms and banks, such as during the economic collapse of 2008-09. While moral hazard is a real concern, it doesn’t justify abolishing the Federal Reserve altogether.
In short, Project 2025 ignores history and 150 years of economic experience to push a boulder uphill proposing radical and unrealistic reforms that even most Trump Republicans probably don’t support.
More in The Fulcrum about Project 2025
- A cross-partisan approach
- An Introduction
- Rumors of Project 2025’s Demise are Greatly Exaggerated
- Department of Education
- Managing the bureaucracy
- Department of Defense
- Department of Energy
- The Environmental Protection Agency
- Education Savings Accounts
- Department of Veterans Affairs
- Department of Homeland Security
- U.S. Agency for International Development
- Affirmative action
- A federal Parents' Bill of Rights
- Department of Labor
- Intelligence community
- Department of State
- Department of the Interior
- Federal Communications Commission
- A perspective from Europe
- Department of Health and Human Services
- Voting Rights Act
- Another look at the Federal Communications Commission
- A Christo-fascist manifesto designing a theocracy
- The Schedule F threat to democracy
- The Department of Justice
- A blueprint for Christian nationalist regime change
- How anti-trans proposals could impact all families
- A threat to American values
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Have 25 million undocumented immigrants entered the U.S. and stayed during the Biden-Harris administration?
Sep 09, 2024
This fact brief was originally published by Wisconsin Watch. Read the original here. Fact briefs are published by newsrooms in the Gigafact network, and republished by The Fulcrum. Visit Gigafact to learn more.
Have 25 million undocumented immigrants entered the U.S. and stayed during the Biden-Harris administration?
No.
Authorities estimate the number of undocumented immigrants who entered the U.S. during the Biden-Harris administration and remained at far less than the 25 million that Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance claimed.
Vance said Aug. 28, 2024, in De Pere, Wis.:
"Kamala Harris let in 25 million illegal aliens ... the 25 million people who are here in this country illegally."
U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported 10 million migrant encounters — one person one or more times — from February 2021 through July 2024.
However, millions were turned away, returned or deported.
The nonprofit Migration Policy Institute estimates there were 6 million entries between January 2021 and April 2024.
Customs and Border Protection also estimated about 2 million “got-aways” — border crossers who evaded authorities — 385,707 in 2021, 737,244 in 2022, and 694,685 in 2023.
Vance's spokesperson cited conservative media reports, including one saying there may have been 1 million got-aways in one year.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
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Sources
WLUK-TV FOX 11 JD Vance rallies voters in Wisconsin
Customs and Border Protection Nationwide Encounters
News release Chairman Green for RealClearPolitics: No, Biden and Harris’ Border Crisis Is Not Over
USA Today No, 51M 'illegals' have not entered US under Biden, Harris | Fact check
PolitiFact There aren’t 20 million to 30 million immigrants in the U.S. illegally, as Sen. Marco Rubio claimed
Google Docs Migration Policy Institute Aug. 29, 2024
Department of Homeland Security Fiscal Year 2025 Congressional Justification
Department of Homeland Security Fiscal Year 2024 Congressional Justification
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