The Right Had a Plan. We Need One Too.

And that’s the whole problem with the current progressive framework. It’s circular. Tax billionaires, of course; bring the money. But we then inject it into a financialized health system which does not produce health. In a real estate market that does not produce affordable housing. In an education system that puts children in debt and doesn’t produce the workforce we need. Money flows directly into and out of the pockets of those who extract wealth from these systems. Tax, spend, extract, repeat. And every few years the other side steps in and cancels the tax part anyway. It’s not a plan. It’s a hamster wheel.

The right wants to demolish everything. The dominant left wants to throw more money into the rubble. And almost no one talks about building something that actually works.

We’ve done it before.

America should build things back, and we the people should own what we build.

Build the public competitor. On a large scale. A public energy company that produces and sells clean energy. A public AI laboratory, therefore the most transformative technology in human history, does not belong to three billionaires. Public pharmaceutical manufacturing so that we stop paying the highest prices in the world for the drugs we have financed. Public hospitals that actually provide care instead of extracting it from communities.

The Reconstruction Finance Corporation established businesses during and after World War II. Government ownership and management. Government owned and contractor operated. The RFC did not need to tax its way to solvency first. It has strengthened productive capacity, and productive capacity generates wealth. This is how you free yourself from debt. Not by reducing, not by taxing and circulating money in failing systems. By building things that produce value. The biggest problem with our debt, national, personal and professional, is not its size. It’s that we put the stupidest, most unproductive shit imaginable on this huge credit card. The solution is to start putting productive investments into it.

And look, we’re already spending money. We simply let individuals keep the wealth. Elon Musk is becoming the richest human in history in government contracts, government grants, and government intellectual property, shooting rockets into space with our money. We won’t let him have a nuclear weapon. Why do we let him keep all the benefits of publicly funded work? Why isn’t NASA doing this for the American people?

My friend and former colleague Saikat Chakrabarti, the architect of the Green New Deal, is building a framework for this type of construction on a public scale through something called Mission for America. Saikat understands. He understands that the progressive movement needs a fundamentally different approach. Don’t fight over how to share what the billionaires have. Strengthen our own capacity to produce the things this country really needs.

The right built its demolition plan during the Biden years. They were building while we were doing victory laps. The Trump years are our building years. The right had a construction plan for demolition. We need a construction plan for construction. Either you’ve already built the thing or you haven’t. It’s time to build our own.