The Congressional Progressive Caucus recently released its agenda for 2025 and beyond. While the proposed trillions in new spending and crippling tax increases come as no surprise, the agenda is notable for its total rejection of the constitutional and free enterprise principles that enable prosperity and have made this country great. If enacted, this agenda would undo decades of economic progress and leave millions of Americans worse off.
The name Progressive Caucus is a misnomer for a group of elected officials who embrace with open arms numerous policies of failed socialist states that are antithetical to actual human progress. While the word socialism has at times been overused, there is no descriptor more accurate to characterize an agenda that would put the federal government in the businesses of manufacturing drugs and providing consumers bank accounts while also paying people not to work. These explicit command and control industries are in addition to numerous other further government expansions into energy, broadband, health care, housing, and agriculture, among others.
This post is the second in a series highlighting the most harmful proposals in the agenda. Our post covering the trillions in new taxes and spending is here.
Green New Deal or Green Raw Deal
Perhaps as a show of their commitment to the Three Rs of the environment, the socialist caucus reuses and recycles the same harmful environmental policies that have been on green wish lists for years, including the Green New Deal—a policy so bad that it failed to garner even a single vote in the US Senate. As expected, this wish list would require trillions more in government spending and implement failed policies tried by states that have caused utility bills to “skyrocket.”
Democrats often use environmental protection as an excuse to socially engineer, undermine free enterprise, impose more government control, and oftentimes, not actually protect the environment. As with the original New Deal, the Green New Deal proposes abusing government authority to remake society to fit their other priorities. For example, the Socialist Caucus embraces a new radical proposal designed to hinder economic progress through abusive environmental review processes requiring all projects be viewed through a woke social justice lens.
If You Like Your Gas Stove, You Can Keep It (Maybe…)
Among the more unserious environmental proposals is a limitation on single-use plastics. These types of proposals regularly fail to help because they are based on junk science, harm disabled people and actually make the environment worse. The federal focus on plastics comes after a handful of blue states and cities have spent the past few years experimenting with these destructive policies. A similar dynamic is now playing out with gas stoves. Early last year, a Biden Administration official suggested the federal government may ban gas stoves, which faced immediate significant pushback from American consumers. Democrats and the media initially denied it was happening and channeled Obama’s Lie of the Year and declared if you like your gas stove, you can keep it, with the Biden Administration even going as far as pressuring fact checkers to support their messaging. Less than four months later, the first blue state banned gas stoves and Democrat-controlled cities around the country continue to follow suit. Only a year later, Biden is back at it banning gas stoves (and other fossil fuels) in federal buildings, so you can expect this to come up again in the future.
Climatarian is the New Paleo
The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) oversees tens of billions of dollars in food spending every year, including to provide school lunches and emergency food assistance. While these programs should focus on nutrition and costs, the Socialist Caucus instead proposes aligning the process with “sustainable, equitable, and climate-friendly foods.” The proposal doesn’t go into detail about whether they are planning for school kids to eat bugs every day in the cafeteria instead of just trying it once on the playground or if they expect kids—notorious for always eating their vegetables—to go full vegetarian or even “climatarian.”
Free Enterprise Solutions
If the Socialist Caucus were serious about protecting the environment, rather than social engineering, they would embrace the free enterprise system that is actually going to save the environment. Property rights incentivize conservation, and the free market rewards innovation, which is why factories in the Soviet Union had to use 50 percent more materials and twice as much energy to produce the same goods as American factories.
Despite all of this evidence—and their policies being wildly unpopular—it should come as no surprise that they continue limit consumer choice and significantly raise costs to make household essentials unaffordable for many consumers in the name of green causes, since the tax dollars just funnel back to Democrat candidates. Speaking of unaffordable, the socialist caucus, laughably, calls to build on the “achievements” of the Inflation Reduction Act, which is still not reducing inflation nearly two years later.