Creating a Progressive Economic Agenda for Arizona

This essay is an exercise in suggestion, not a prescription. I don’t believe that we Democrats are in a solid position intellectually, in the public perception and conversation (such as it is), and in terms of factual study and policy formation to make a strong case for the kind of progressive economic agenda that we will have to make both in the states and nationally to be effective in passing the kind of structural and legal changes we need to make our economy work for average people.

I can’t do much to affect the national conversation and the Democratic Party, but I do have some small influence on the state and local parties, I hope. So my suggestions and discussion will limit itself to state and local economic matters that might be significantly impacted by state and local government action; of course, that is all properly contextualized in the broader national context of the challenges to broadly shared economic prosperity and equity.

Major themes that must be addressed are market concentration and monopoly, private equity and financialization, unfair trade practices and consumer rights, government privatization, systemic inflationary pressures, and wage and labor conditions. All these problems play a part in what ails the U.S. economy, and Arizona’s in particular, but It would be its own essay (or book – or books) to adequately discuss all those topics – and that is part of the issue. The expertise and fact-gathering needed to study these issues in the Arizona context are currently lacking or scattered, not widely known, nor promoted in public discussions.

There exists a rich intellectual reservoir on these problems in our economy to draw from in academic and government sources, but we Democrats need to build institutional capacity to adequately study, synthesize, form policy, and promote those policies with the public to bring many of those solutions to the citizens in terms of workable and legally sound legislation and regulation.

As I see it, there are several areas in which we need to invest and build that capacity: in our state legislature and executive offices, in our state and local Democratic Parties, and in private and public service foundations and communities.

The state legislature has long stripped our state of the sort of expertise and institutional capacity to actually study problems, gather evidence, deliberate and propose solutions, and pass meaningful legislation – and that has been a matter of intentional choice on the part of the Republican Party. The present GOP majority do not want our state to have the capacity to adequately address problems in our economy: they want the state to merely wait for think tanks like the Goldwater Institute or Center for Arizona Policy, model legislation shops like ALEC, and private interests to propose legislation that makes our problems worse by creating opportunities to strip mine profits from government functions like corrections and education and to further concentrate income and wealth for those who can afford to lobby them.

Democrats need to change that. We can, and should -once we control the rules – use the time that the legislature is out of session to hold serious and rigorous hearings on the matters that concern and confound Arizonans around the state. That requires that we re-staff the Arizona legislature with the kind of professional staff and expertise that has long been stripped from the institution, making legislators more and more dependent on lobbyists for their facts and information. The legislature needs to professionalize and invest in itself and its operations in order to deliver economic solutions to Arizona’s problems. The idea that we have a part-time legislature is long outdated and harmful to the operation of the legislature as a functional institution that can deliver policies that help everyday Arizonans meet the challenges of the 21st-century economy.

Our Governor’s and Attorney General’s executive offices also need beefing up from a data collection and analysis standpoint. The agencies need more support and staff to investigate economic abuses, seriously investigate citizen complaints, bring legal action against abuses, study the causes of unfairness in our economy and synthesize policy solutions to implement or present to the legislature for study and enactment. We have a serious dearth of policy depth in our executive offices – the GOP has long since largely outsourced those executive functions to trade and special interest lobbies. We need our legislature to reinvest in the investigative, litigation, and fact-finding aspects of our executive branch once again.

Our state and local Democratic Parties also need to beef up their policy chops. We have long issued purely aspirational platforms that contain little in the way of actual policy solutions to the economic issues the Party needs to address to win over and keep the working and middle classes reliably voting for the only party actually interested in fixing the problems that cause them economic pain and distress. We need to use the convening power of the Party to once again become the connective tissue linking our academic and professional expertise and resources to the political platform and policies that we present to the public, and on which our candidates run. Too often we leave such policy formation to chance, and the “free market” of ideas, and the whims of candidates; and we fail to set priorities that link measurable public preferences and attitudes to serious policies that can address and shape public policy preferences – in a phrase, we’ve lacked a unified strategy toward economic policy. This is a central role of the party that has faded and shriveled since the “third-way” neo-liberal turn of the Democratic party under Clinton and his fellow travelers, who were far too ready to turn over control of our Party’s economic agenda to those running the heights of the economy for the benefit of the 1%.

You can see the disconnect in the problems that national Democrats are having connecting the policy solutions we have provided at the national level to people’s daily concerns about the economy. While we have made serious changes to industrial policy, infrastructure spending, taxation, and labor conditions – which are laudable in themselves – these policies are not sufficiently resonating with a public that is not seeing those policies quickly translate into the relief of their more immediate concerns of inflation and the cost of living, wage stagnation, and a valid perception that more and more working- and middle-class families are being pushed into an ever more precarious economic position. We are, as a Party, far more focused on solutions that address the macro-economic concerns of the business community and Wall Street at the Board Room table than on the micro-economic conditions facing America’s small businesses and families at the kitchen table. That’s how we can have record low unemployment, almost 5% annual economic growth, and flattening inflation following the dual global supply and labor shortages of the COVID crisis, and still have the public evaluating Democrats’ performance on the economy poorly.

Working at the state level to create and prove out solutions to the many legal and structural components of how and why our economy has become ever more unfair to, and precarious for, regular folks could help us reconnect with the segments of the population that we are losing to the pernicious and fear-based solutions to such problems broadcast by the fascist GOP – anti-immigration, “wokeness” in the economy and education, resentment and distrust of expertise of any sort, and facile and stupid economic nostrums like tariffs, flat taxes, and ever more “supply-side” economic policies can only flourish in the public imagination where real policy solutions to our real problems are lacking. We need to do better and we can do so by implementing policies where we do have control. And our state parties are doing that work – many states where Democrats control policy are making strides that we need to study and adopt in Arizona, and nationally. A great example of this is in health care coverage, in which several Democratically controlled states have reduced their uninsured rate radically by using the ACA in conjunction with state policy.

If Democrats are going to be given control of the Arizona government – as we all are working toward and hoping for in 2025 – we need to clearly tell voters how we are going to improve their lives and those of their families and communities economically. We have glimmers of such a message, but we need to become more organized, better resourced, and more vocal as a party about creating, justifying, and selling our policy solutions to our citizens’ economic problems and complaints as we pivot from being an oppositional party – trying to limit the damage done by an increasingly radicalized GOP majority – to a ruling party that is confidently and productively using state government to solve the state’s economic problems. That reorientation takes time, takes dedication by our leaders to the project, and takes resources. We need to see public commitments and initiatives from our legislative and Party leaders that indicate they understand that challenge. The Party must publicly advocate for the structural, institutional, and policy and budget choices our state needs to progress. Our present Gubernatorial Administration and our legislative Caucuses need to press the Party to devote much more of our tremendous grassroots resources toward creating a policy vision that demonstrates to our working class and rural voters that we are offering real solutions for what ails us.

The private sector also has a role to play in pushing for and publicizing progressive solutions to our economic woes. We need to see those with economic power, who understand that broadly shared prosperity is better for business in the long term, to step up and resource the kind of institutional support those ideas deserve. We need institutions on the progressive side that can compete with the powerful and well-resourced institutions on the right here in Arizona. Again, there are some positive signs that we are building that capacity, but we have miles to go. We have some nascent efforts that need rapid growth and public pledges of support.

Thanks for reading my thoughts about this matter, and I hope those of you in a position to make a difference in this regard take my words as encouragement to be bold, be proactive, and take serious steps toward creating an economic agenda and message that can give us control of Arizona’s government in order to deliver on our principles for the public.