achievable progressive policies

We need to build our way out of the carbon crisis, and it is ridiculous that environmental regulations are standing in the way of projects that we know will be of massive benefit to the environment.

Projects that can be shown to reduce overall carbon emissions should be eligible for a fast-track to approval, whether that’s energy transmission projects that unlock renewable energy sources, mass-transit to make our cities more efficient, or building housing closer to where people work and play.

The total energy value of all the fossil fuel reserves in the US is equivalent to about five and a half hours of sunlight on the surface of our country. Building out the infrastructure to access that energy means that we get back the consistent energy-sector growth that made the working class prosper until the fossil fuel sector failed to keep up with demand in the 1970s.

Let’s free ourselves from being held hostage by an energy system that can never provide enough for everyone to have a good quality of life. We have all the technology we need to fix our energy system, now we need to make the social changes that will let us use our technology to actually help people for a change.

Standardized testing only works for standardized students. I don’t know if you’ve met kids, but “standardized” isn’t the word I’d use to describe them.

As a substitute teacher, I have seen the result of 20 years of teaching to the test, and it horrifies me. We have 6th graders who can’t read and 12th graders who don’t know why they’re in school.

It is not a coincidence that science and history lessons are conspicuously absent from our nation’s standardized testing programs. It’s a system that actively punishes schools for teaching students about the world they live in and rewards creating obedient cogs who exist to meet metrics instead of achieving their full potential.

As it stands right now, we waste $1.7 billion per year on a program that actively makes schools worse in this country. Repealing it and replacing it with nothing at all would be an improvement.

In 2024, only four people were hired for every ten job postings.

“Ghost Jobs” are job postings made by a company that has no intention of filling that role. They are a despicable anti-worker practice that cause incalculable economic and emotional harm to our country.

Imagine if you never had to wonder if a job posting was real or not before you spent time on an application. Imagine if all of the effort put into that pointless 60% of job applications went towards something productive in the economy instead. We would all be better off.

Given the correlation between unemployment and self-harm, it is not an exaggeration to say that there are probably people who are dead who would be alive today if ghost jobs hadn’t kept them from finding work. There are certainly companies that never found the right person for a role because that person never saw their job posting, or assumed it was a ghost job and didn’t apply.

Workers in this country must demand a level playing field in the job market. We should treat ghost job ads like what they are: false advertising. They are materially misleading statements that effect commerce and should be punished as such.