This month, the Congressional Progressive Caucus got far less attention than a random Donald Trump tweet when it released its annual budget—“The People’s Budget”—for fiscal 2017. The media’s oversight does Americans a disservice. Surprised by Bernie Sanders’s surge in the presidential campaign, the media tend to echo the Clinton campaign’s dismissal of his ideas as unrealistic. In fact, as the CPC budget demonstrates, there is growing political support at all levels for bold ideas that challenge the failed conservative consensus of the previous decades. And those ideas, like Sanders’s, are quite sensible.
The CPC budget is a detailed and sophisticated document. Prepared in conjunction with the Economic Policy Institute, it is projected in parallel with the Congressional Budget Office baseline. Its assumptions, programs, costs, and revenue are laid out for all to see. And it is a ringing indictment of our current course.
Like Sanders, the People’s Budget boldly calls for a new era of public investment–led growth. The budget supports a $1 trillion, 10-year-plan to rebuild our infrastructure, including a specific provision for addressing the decline in safe water illustrated in the Flint, Michigan, calamity. It increases investments dramatically in education from pre-K to debt-free college. It unapologetically increases funds for cracking down on wage theft and enforcing worker rights and environmental protections.
Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.
