Last week the House voted on five budget plans. If you’re reading this, you probably already know how it ended: the conservative majority passed the Ryan Budget with 219 votes, one more than a bare majority, and voted all the others down.
We knew the Republican bill would pass. That’s not the real news here. This year’s Congressional Progressive Caucus budget plan – we call it the Better Off Budget – got 89 votes, five more than last year and the most of any plan since we started writing comprehensive proposals in 2011. Four historically supportive representatives – Sheila Jackson Lee, Al Green, Karen Bass and John Lewis – couldn’t be in Washington that day; without speaking for them, we feel like we had an even bigger vote increase this year than you see on paper. I wanted to take a minute to talk about how we did that and where we go from here.
First off, some thanks are in order. The Economic Policy Institute did incredible work crunching the numbers and providing solid economic analysis to help us write a good plan. Progressive Congress played an important role in bringing groups together and organizing our public awareness efforts. Our friends in labor – AFSCME, SEIU, AFT, NEA – came through big time with institutional support. Progressive allies like Democracy for America, Progressive Democrats of America and MoveOn made sure the activist community and the public knew what was happening and how they could help. Economists – Jeff Madrick, Jared Bernstein, Dean Baker – raised the budget’s profile in the professional world. The more than one hundred thousand grassroots supporters who signed the unified Daily Kos/MoveOn/Social Security Works/Progressive Congress public petition in favor of the budget gave us an important boost and showed Washington the public demand for a better economy. Key allies in the environmental, anti-war, anti-poverty and social justice communities provided more generous support than we can list here.
That’s not all. The Progressive Change Campaign Committee has been building on our momentum and using the Better Off Budget as a cornerstone of its organizing and campaign strategy. Tomorrow they’re highlighting their support with a Tax Day event on economic fairness and better tax policies. Our budget is good policy with or without a vote coming up, and we’re hoping more people take a look. It’s a good way to keep the pressure on and combat all the austerity nonsense we know we’ll keep hearing.
You can imagine what our budget looks like, but there are a few highlights we’re especially proud of:
- We create 8.8 million jobs in three years by investing directly in our working people instead of the super-wealthy.
- We completely repeal the sequester and restore full funding for unemployment insurance and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, affectionately known as SNAP.
- We establish a fair financial transaction tax and stop corporations from deferring taxes on their overseas profits – and close a lot of other outdated loopholes at the same time.
- We implement comprehensive immigration reform and allow states to transition to single-payer health care if they choose.
You can read a good overview here. We think you'll like it.
Its popularity this year wasn't an accident. So why did this plan – which conventional wisdom and the conservative establishment insist is too radical to be taken seriously – get the highest number of votes in years? Why did members in swing districts support our plan? To be honest, this success had many authors.
We had a good number of groups sending out letters. We had people all over the country call their Member of Congress. We had a relentless on-the-Hill education effort to show our colleagues, at the staff and the Member level, why our budget makes the most sense. We took advantage of public demand for job creation, a fairer tax system and an end to crony capitalism to build a budget that really addresses peoples’ needs instead of ticking the out-of-touch Beltway boxes. We couldn’t have done this without a lot of help, insight and support, and the fight is far from over.
What can we do from here? We can keep holding up the Better Off Budget as the blueprint we need. Instead of getting discouraged at the Ryan Budget and the Republican refusal to listen to reason, we can engage in a conversation about realistic alternatives and what we need, not just what we don’t need. The Better Off Budget is a smart, responsible and very doable plan to get this country back on track. This is far from the end. We feel like this is just the beginning.