NY Times:
Mayor Bill de Blasio, dismayed by a Democratic Party that he believes has moved too slowly to embrace a populist platform, arrived in the Midwest on Wednesday with an audacious mission: leading the nation leftward.
On a two-day tour of Nebraska and Iowa — more than 1,200 miles from the New York City Hall where he has presided for 15 months — Mr. de Blasio is seeking to transcend his relative obscurity and jump-start a countrywide movement to promote liberal policies like raising taxes on the rich.
Already, the mayor’s effort is drawing scrutiny. His refusal this week to endorse the presidential candidacy of Hillary Rodham Clinton, his former boss, spurred criticism from more centrist Democrats, who questioned whether the mayor had earned the credibility to drive an insurgency within his party.
Think Progress:
On Wednesday, fast food workers walked off the job in 230 cities, staging the largest-ever strike in their movement aimed at a $15 minimum wage and the right to form a union.
The movement began with a single strike in New York City at the end of 2012 but has grown increasingly larger as the Fight for 15 movement has staged nine other days of coordinated strikes since then. Wednesday’s actions took place in cities on both coasts, the south, and the midwest, and it even went global, with strikes in Italy and New Zealand.
More politics and policy below the fold.
Dana Milbank:
Give credit to Republicans in Congress.
They’ve discovered, belatedly, that income inequality is a problem, and they’re no longer proposing to give tax breaks to the wealthiest 2 percent of Americans. Now they are proposing to give tax breaks to the wealthiest two-tenths of 1 percent of Americans.
Des Moines Register:
Democrat Hillary Clinton, at the first official event of her presidential campaign, spelled out the ideas that she said will be at the heart of her campaign.
"I want to be the champion who goes to bat for Americans in four big areas," she told four students and three educators at a roundtable staged in an automotive technology classroom at a community college.
It was the first time Clinton had laid out specific campaign themes since she announced on Sunday in a short video that she's in the 2016 race for the Oval Office.
Steve Benen:
Perhaps no portion of Sen. Marco Rubio’s (R-Fla.) presidential kickoff speech was more memorable than this:
“While our people and economy are pushing the boundaries of the 21st century, too many of our leaders and their ideas are stuck in the 20th century.
“They are busy looking backward, so they do not see how jobs and prosperity today depend on our ability to compete in a global economy. So our leaders put us at a disadvantage by taxing, borrowing and regulating like it’s 1999.”
It may have been some kind of attempt at a Prince joke, but Rubio couldn’t have picked a worse point of comparison. As Roll Call noted yesterday, “The problem with the senator’s statement is that the government is neither taxing, nor borrowing, nor regulating like it did in 1999.”
In 1999, the U.S. economy was still in the midst of a Clinton-era boom. We had higher taxes, faster growth, and lower unemployment. What’s more, we weren’t “borrowing” at all – by 1999, the deficit had disappeared entirely and the nation was running a large surplus.
Reason:
On Monday, I wrote about how Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) is the foreign policy antithesis to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) in the 2016 GOP presidential field, frequently sparring directly with his fellow member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. To collect some of Rubio's foreign-policy uber-hawkery in one place, I've compiled a list of seven highly questionable judgments by the Cuban-American freshman senator.
Stephen A. Nuño:
The media is in a frenzy over the entry of Marco Rubio into the presidential race. He’s young, handsome, well-spoken in English and Spanish, he’s got an immigrant history. He is a genuine American success story. The media has been waiting for a Republican candidate whose vision of America isn’t something found on a black-and-white sitcom from the 1950’s, and at first glance, Marco Rubio seems like that candidate.
But while he may be the best chance the GOP has to drag the party into the 21st century and connect with an essential part of the electorate, it may not be much of a chance after all. Because the problem between the GOP and Latinos isn’t marketing—it’s their policies. Marco Rubio may just be another GOP attempt to put lipstick on a pig.
Health Affairs Blog:
After seventeen years (eight months, 9 days…), over a dozen acts of Congress and innumerable reams of debate and conjecture about its fate, it’s time to say goodbye to the Medicare Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) formula. As a proper wake, let’s take a moment to reflect on this enigma of health care economic theory. And then let’s not ever do it again.