https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...020-battle-of-ideas/5c8581991b326b2d177d6042/
Power Up: Warren is leading the 2020 battle of ideas
By Jacqueline Alemany
March 11 at 6:14 AM
Several officials said they were surprised by the sentence of 47 months given to former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort on March 7. (The Washington Post)
The People
STARTING LINE: If you didn't see that CNN/ Des Moines Register poll that has Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden leading the field among Iowa voters 11 months out from the Iowa caucuses, what did you do with your Sunday?
That two septuagenarian white guys (one of whom has yet to officially announce a 2020 bid) who have spent most of their careers in politics are leading the field this far out from the first-in-the-nation caucus should not come as a total surprise. The senator and former veep are well-known to voters and have both run for president before, with the fundraising and organizing apparatus that comes with such an undertaking.
Something that polls aren't able to capture, however, is the amount of excitement a candidate generates because of their ideas. And right now, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is winning the ideas battle by injecting ambitious policies into the race for who will challenge President Trump.
- “Elizabeth Warren is trying to position herself as the ideas candidate of the field, and thus far, in the early going, she’s winning that,” Faiz Shakir, the former political director of the American Civil Liberties Union, told the New York Times at the end of January, before being tapped as Sanders's campaign manager. “Others should start thinking about competing in the arena for new ideas.”
- “Elizabeth Warren is really driving the policy debate among the 2020 candidates,” Pod Save America's Jon Favreau tweeted. “It's impressive.”
- Tech: “Today’s big tech companies have too much power — too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy. They’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else. And in the process, they have hurt small businesses and stifled innovation,” Warren wrote in a Medium post first reported by the New York Times's Astead Herndon.
- Child care: Warren has also introduced a $70 billion dollar a year universal childcare plan — to be paid for with a tax on the ultrawealthy — that “would ensure that every American would be able to enroll children up to 5 years old in a child-care program while paying no more than 7 percent of their income in fees,” my colleague Jeff Stein reported last month.
- Wealth tax: Warren floated imposing an annual tax of 2 percent on Americans with more than $50 billion and a 3 percent tax on those worth over $1 billion to address income inequality. The tax would raise $2.75 trillion over ten years from roughly 75,000 families, economists who worked on the plan told my colleagues Jeff and Christopher Ingraham.
- “Wealth inequality in our nation is a national scandal,” Gene Sperling, an economic adviser to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, tweeted “This type of wealth tax that @SenWarren is proposing is essential. It frees up dramatic amounts of resources that make it more likely the vast number Americans can have economic security & a shot at their own small nest egg.”
- Draining the swamp: Warren rolled out an anti-corruption and government reform bill during a speech at the National Press Club in August. The bill includes proposals for lifetime lobbying bans on former lawmakers, federal judges and Cabinet secretaries, a requirement that federal officeholders make their tax returns public, and the creation of a new agency to enforce and oversee existing government ethics rules.
- Housing crisis: Warren also rolled out the American Housing and Economic Mobility Act that would use federal funds to "help bridge the wealth gap between black and white families," per City Lab's Kriston Capps. " . . . Title II of Warren’s proposed bill establishes a new fund within the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. This to-be-determined purse would provide down-payment assistance to first-time home buyers in communities that were once subject to redlining.”
- “It sounds very close to reparations,” says Jenny Schuetz, the David M. Rubenstein fellow at the Brookings Institution told Capps. “It sounds as close as you can go to reparations without making this explicitly funding contingent on the race of the applicant.”
- Reparations: Warren dodged questions Friday about whether "she would support monetary compensation as a form of reparations for African Americans whose ancestors were slaves," CNN's MJ Lee reports, after initially telling the Times she supported such payments.
- “I think it's time for us to have the conversation. We need to address the fact that in this country, we built great fortunes and wealth on the backs of slaves and we need to address that head-on — we need to have that national conversation,” the Massachusetts Democrat told CNN. “There are scholars, there are activists who've talked about a lot of different ways we might structure reparations.”
- 84 percent of voters prefer a candidate who supports in full/steps towards Medicare for all.
- 91 percent of voters prefer a candidate who supports in full/ steps towards the Green New Deal.
- 89 percent of voters prefer a candidate who supports in full/ steps towards taxes that target people with over $50 million in assets.
Something to think about: There was a significant “imbalance” in the coverage of candidates' “traits or characteristics” versus the nation's economy in the 2016 election, according to University of California political science professor Lynn Vavreck. Don't blame it entirely on the media, though, Vavreck wrote post-2016.
- Vavreck looked at the ads run by both Hillary Clinton and Trump in 2016.
- “The content of the ads is revealing. Both candidates spent most of their television advertising time attacking the other person’s character. In fact, the losing candidate’s ads did little else. More than three-quarters of the appeals in Mrs. Clinton’s advertisements (and nearly half of Mr. Trump’s) were about traits, characteristics or dispositions. Only 9 percent of Mrs. Clinton’s appeals in her ads were about jobs or the economy. By contrast, 34 percent of Mr. Trump’s appeals focused on the economy, jobs, taxes and trade.”