PPI’s executive director and former DNC finance director, Lindsay Lewis proposes that the best way to reform campaign financing might be to repeal the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law. As Lindsay argues, McCain-Feingold inadvertently led to the creation and now dominance of super PACs.

PRESIDENT OBAMA’s recent endorsement of a Democratic “super PAC” — Priorities USA — that will support his re-election campaign makes one thing clear: money will dominate this year’s election like no other in history. Already, Restore Our Future, the super PAC supporting Mitt Romney, has hauled in over $17 million from just 60 donors.

Big money has always played a role in politics, but the advent of super PACs means that America’s presidential candidates have effectively outsourced their campaigns to the megarich. The wealthy turn over big bucks to super PACs, which in turn make whatever arguments they want, often much dirtier than anything a candidate would want to attach his or her name to.

Read the op-ed at the New York Times.

PPI President Will Marshall, explains the dire need to free American hostages being held in Cairo over at CNN’s Global Public Square:

“With deadly soccer riots, popular unrest and a tricky political transition to manage, you’d think that Egypt’s military rulers would have enough on their hands without provoking a confrontation with the United States. Evidently not.

“Everyone knows the generals call the shots in Egypt, but they profess to be powerless to stop Egypt’s courts for trying 19 Americans on trumped up charges of funneling “foreign funding” to anti-government protesters. This outrage demands a calm but resolute response from President Obama. While avoiding public statements that further inflame Egyptian nationalism, Obama should quietly make it clear to the Supreme Military Council that persisting in this folly will lead to a cut-off of U.S. aid.

“The crisis began in late December, when Egyptian authorities raided the offices of nine nongovernmental groups, including the U.S.-based National Democratic Institute, the International Republican Institute and Freedom House. These organizations operate around the world to assist local activists and civil society groups working for greater political and economic freedom.”

Read the entire article here

PPI Senior Fellow, Roger Ballentine, explains in The Hill why the cost of gasoline matters far more than the price:

“Recently, it seems the debates on Capitol Hill make even less sense than usual.”

“Look closely and you will find that the same politicians who demand more domestic oil production to “relieve pain at the pump”, simultaneously and inconsistently, attack the Obama administration’s efforts to increase fuel economy standards.”

“Take Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), for example, the chairman of the powerful House Oversight Committee. He’s launched a needless investigation into the administration’s new mileage standards, even though they were negotiated with—not imposed upon—Detroit. Most importantly, Rep. Issa blindly ignores that boosting fuel efficiency is a sure-fire way to lower gas costs for American families. Republicans can chant “drill, baby, drill” all they want, but they can’t repeal the basic laws of economics.”

Read the full article at The Hill

PPI Chief Economist, Michael Mandel, discuses the challenges facing America’s economic recovery on Marketplace:

“After a number of incremental but positive indicators that have come out in the past couple of months — the so-called “green shoots” — today’s fourth quarter GDP was a reminder that our economy is still very fragile. Like a green shoot of a plant or a tree, our economy needs a lot of nurturing to really grow.

“Mike Mandel is the chief economic strategist for the Progressive Policy Institute. He says lower-than-expected GDP in the final three months of last year reflect an economy that’s “on the road to recovery,” but it’s a “slow, uneven recovery.”

“Mandel says we still haven’t solved a key underlying problem: We’re investing too little in increasing our productivity and too much on consumption. According to Mandel, we went into this recession too focused on consuming and neither public or private investment has been enough of a priority.”

Read and listen to Mandel on Marketplace.

Will Marshall analyzes the SOTU and Obama’s populism at Politico’s Arena:

“President Obama emphasized fairness and pledge to raise taxes on wealthy Americans. If this be populism, we are all populists now, and the voters are solidly behind the president on this. But the prevailing tone in Obama’s speech wasn’t class warfare, as some political reporters have claimed. It was economic patriotism.

“Obama’s State of the Union Speech last night was Clintonian, in two senses. First it was stupendously long, as Clinton’s SOTU speeches tended to be. Second and more important, Obama repeatedly evoked consensual American values and common national interests, muting rather than inflaming ideological or partisan differences.”

Read the entire post.

PPI’s Executive Director Lindsay M. Lewis argues for a time-out from the nonstop campaign in today’s Politico:

Partisan gridlock is the standard explanation for why Congress gets so little done these days. But there’s another reason for lawmakers’ dwindling productivity: They spend too much of their time asking for money instead of legislating.

While there’s no shortage of ideas for campaign finance reform, many run afoul of Supreme Court rulings that treat political donations as a protected form of free speech. But there’s a simple way to ease the fundraising burden that doesn’t require amending the Constitution or passing new laws: Call a “time-out” on collecting cash in non-campaign years.

Specifically, Congress should amend its ethics rules to require an off-year “fundraising quiet period.” House members would be forbidden to accept campaign donations except during an election year. For senators, the time out would apply through the first four years of each six-year term — leaving the last two years to fundraise.

Read the entire op-ed.

PPI Chief Economic Strategist Michael Mandel, writing for the Washington Monthly, challenges the widespread complacency on the right and on the left about American productivity growth:

“In 1939, when John Steinbeck completed The Grapes of Wrath—a heart-wrenching tale of a family of sharecroppers forced out of their home during the Depression— roughly one-quarter of the U.S. population still lived on farms. Today, family farms are increasingly rare, and less than 2 percent of employed Americans work in agriculture.

“But rather than viewing the decline of farming jobs as a tragedy, economists almost invariably count agriculture as a shining American success—the triumph of productivity. And why not? A handful of farmers using GPS-equipped combines and sophisticated moisture sensors can grow far more food than the population of an entire rural county in 1939. Food has become so plentiful and cheap in the United States that it has been blamed for the increase in obesity. And agricultural products have become one of the country’s chief exports, totaling more than $115 billion in 2010.

“As the story of the American economy is usually told, the shrinkage of agricultural employment was a tough but essential part of the march toward higher incomes and a better standard of living. What’s more, this example has been cited time and again to explain subsequent upheavals in employment. In 2003, N. Greg Mankiw, a Harvard economist who then headed President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), told a Washington audience that the more recent fall in manufacturing jobs was an “inescapable” consequence of rapid productivity growth: ‘The long-term trends that we have recently seen in manufacturing mirror what we saw in agriculture a couple of generations ago.’”

Read the complete article at the Washington Monthly.

PPI President Will Marshall discussed the recent Republican Iowa caucus results on Maryland NPR affiliate 90.7 with Don Rush, host of Delmarva Today. He was joined by Dr. Michael O’Loughlin, chair of Salisbury University’s Political Science Department.

Listen to the full broadcast here.

Will Marshall explains Mitt Romney’s big win in Iowa for Politico’s Arena:

“Let’s not overthink the Iowa result. Mitt Romney won big, pure and simple.

Despite dampening expectations, he finished first. Not a back trick for a candidate who has never had the support of more than a quarter of Iowa Republicans. Romney deftly played a divided field, laying low as one “real conservative” after another stepped into the spotlight, only to be dismissed by a fickle and unsettled electorate. Had Iowa been a two-man race again as it was in 2008, Romney would have finished a distant second, and someone else would be headed to New Hampshire with the Big Mo.”

Read the entire post.

PPI President Will Marshall discussed how House Republicans continue to obstruct extension of payroll tax cuts and unemployment benefits in Politico’s Arena:

“‘Tis the season, apparently, for House Republicans to deck the halls of Congress with meanspirited obstructionism. In blocking extension of the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits, they’ve delivered a loud “Bah, Humbug” to working Americans.”

Read the full post here.

PPI Chief Economic Strategist Michael Mandel’s new report on scale and innovation is featured in this week’s Economist‘s Schumpeter column:

SOME people say it is neither big nor clever to drink. Viz, a British comic, settled that debate with a letter from a reader who said: “I drink 15 pints a day, I’m 6 foot 3 inches tall and a professor of theoretical physics.” However, another question about size and cleverness has yet to be resolved. Are big companies the best catalysts of innovation, or are small ones better?

Joseph Schumpeter, after whom this column is named, argued both sides of the case. In 1909 he said that small companies were more inventive. In 1942 he reversed himself. Big firms have more incentive to invest in new products, he decided, because they can sell them to more people and reap greater rewards more quickly. In a competitive market, inventions are quickly imitated, so a small inventor’s investment often fails to pay off.

These days the second Schumpeter is out of fashion: people assume that little start-ups are creative and big firms are slow and bureaucratic. But that is a gross oversimplification, says Michael Mandel of the Progressive Policy Institute, a think-tank. In a new report on “scale and innovation”, he concludes that today’s economy favours big companies over small ones. Big is back, as this newspaper has argued. And big is clever, for three reasons.

Read it at The Economist.

Download Mandel’s report – Scale and Innovation in Today’s Economy.