Progressives built a national movement around enacting items like Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, drastic defense cuts, and massive tax increases on corporations and upper-income families. Yet they have not been able to develop serious legislative proposals to enact such policies. Instead, leading legislative proposals typically announce an unrealistic, utopian goal, and then simply declare that a future commission, office, or agency will come up with a plan to do the impossible.

The whole purpose of public policy is to turn aspirations into implementable outcomes. Relying heavily on slogans and vague (yet often aggressive) rhetoric, progressive leaders fail to do their homework and provide even basic information on how their proposals would work—likely because they cannot work. Congress cannot enact empty slogans, and it is self-defeating to build a national movement demanding the enactment of policies that do not even exist in any serious, implementable manner.