America needs a new public narrative, with new leaders. The key, we think, is to replace red tape with human responsibility. Nothing will get fixed until we re-empower Americans to roll up their sleeves and make things work again.
Read More
The $1.2 trillion package is about $10,000 for every American household. Without implementation oversight, the money will gush out of Washington without any discipline over, for example, New York work rules that can make infrastructure projects five times as expensive as in other developed countries.
Read More
By opening the door to a new party, Yang once again reveals solid leadership instincts. But a new movement requires a tougher, more focused platform. A list of centrist do-good reforms is unlikely to elicit the public passion needed to dislodge the current parties. Yang himself is a bold and disarming figure; his party must be as well. A new party needs a clarion call that can galvanize popular support.
Read More
Politics today seems dominated by loonies and fanatics: On the right, "Stop the steal" and anti-vaxxers; on the left, "woke" thought-police and spendthrift policies with no implementation plan. Extremists succeed mainly in driving us apart, not (so far) changing government. But do the leaders of either party offer a coherent governing vision?
Read More
There are about 5 trillion reasons to worry about the massive Biden spending proposal, but at least $1 trillion of it is aimed at overdue infrastructure needs — roads, transmission lines, broadband, water, and other "hard" infrastructure that will improve America's competitiveness and environmental sustainability.
Read More
President Biden’s breathtaking $5 trillion infrastructure agenda — about $50,000 in debt for each American family — is stalling on broad skepticism on both the goals and means of spending that money. … There’s a deal to be made here: Use this moment to overhaul how Washington spends money.
Read More
Authority in America has been broadly replaced by a procedural framework. People with responsibility — including university presidents, principals, public officials and business managers — believe they can't enforce any values unless explicitly set forth in a rule, or can be proved by objective evidence. Who are they to judge?
Read More
Do you feel buffeted by crazy viewpoints on both sides? Stop the Steal. Anti-vaxxers. Cancel King Lear. America is evil. Mass idiocies are amplified by social media, but all this nonsense is enabled by something else: the progressive disempowerment, since the 1960s, of people in positions of responsibility.
Read More
Overhauling government is needed to achieve public and private goals, most Americans agree. But overhaul is impossible without a new political movement. A “first mover” problem prevents any political leader from getting in the crosshairs of the powerful interest groups that defend the status quo.
Read More
In Sludge, Sunstein shines a light in the bureaucratic darkness, and, by calling for “sludge audits,” adds his moral authority to the growing demand to clear out the bureaucratic underbrush.
Read More
Philip Howard joins Geoff Kabaservice to discuss how thousands of nonsensical laws hamper any good the government can do.
Read More
Public frustration has boiled over in recent years in populist movements on all sides, including the Tea Party movement, Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. Channeling this anger into a coalition for change would provide common ground not only for environmentalists, but parents, caregivers, business leaders, police reformers and many others.
Read More
How does change happen in Washington? The list of needed changes is long — to address climate change, unmanageable schools, runaway healthcare costs, unaccountable police, obsolete laws, and more. Decades go by, and none of these problems get fixed. Even President Biden's ambitious infrastructure proposal (which incorporates Common Good's proposals for permitting reform) doesn't take on the core changes needed to address climate change.
Read More
Since the 1960s, the main political dividing line in the United States has been over the scope of government. Democrats have called for more public services and more regulation to address current challenges. Republicans have called for de-regulation and fewer services, backed by ample evidence of public failures, inefficiencies, and overreach. But government keeps getting bigger and generally more inefficient, without dealing with past and present needs.
Read More
Extremism is rattling the foundations of American society. Factual truth is under attack from the right. Core liberal values of free speech and tolerance are under attack from the left. Each side points to the other's extremism as justification for its own. Resolving these escalating culture wars is impossible as long as the battle is waged over abstractions such as reinterpreting history.
Read More
Washington is overdue for a spring cleaning. Only Congress has the authority to do this. But neither party has a vision about how, or even whether, to fix broken government. Congressional leaders are so dug in arguing about the goals of government that they have no line of sight to how laws actually work.
Read More
Americans are increasingly disaffected with Washington. Nor does either party enjoy the support of a plurality of voters. There are more independents than Democrats or Republicans. What do Americans want? For starters, they want things to work. Practical solutions to running schools, delivering healthcare, cleaning up the environment, and modernizing infrastructure shouldn't be that hard.
Read More
Most political leaders and reformers see government failures as a management problem. In reality, those failures result from something more like a philosophy problem. That problem does not concern the scope of government or the goals of public policy, but the belief that governing decisions should be guided by prescriptive rules, rather than by human judgment acting within proscriptive boundaries.
Read More
There’s a gaping hole in the pending infrastructure negotiations: How to build infrastructure without years of delay and ridiculous waste.
Read More
NowThis has picked up our videos on the need to streamline infrastructure permitting in order to advance green energy. Click here to watch!
Read More