Thank you all very much,…  Gene Sperling, it’s great to have the opportunity to join you here. 

As a fellow “pro-growth” progressive, I remain very excited about New Deal,… I look forward to hearing about some of the things you’re doing in your own cities and states. 

Maryland: Smart, Green & Growing

In Maryland, over the past 5 years, with performance measurement, we have been making our government work more effectively.  We openly set public goals, and we transparently measure our progress toward achieving those goals. 

How do we measure our progress?  Traditional economic measures like GDP tell us important things, but in Maryland  e believe that genuine progress requires a broader and more inclusive perspective on quality of life than production; a more balanced and holistic value of community than mere consumption.

As Robert Kennedy once said, if you look solely at economic measures like GNP (or in a state’s case GDP), you overlook things like “the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play,…”  Those things which “make life worthwhile.” 

The time we have to spend with our kids instead of traffic.  The air we breathe.  The health of our streams.  What it means to a community when fewer of our neighbors are underemployed.  The social capital sparked when more citizens volunteer.  The value of higher education to the strength of a State, fighting to create jobs and expand opportunity in a changing new economy,… We are openly measuring 26 indicators of genuine progress, because our pro-growth vision of progress, is the vision of a Maryland that is smart, green, and growing.

And we have set 15 overarching strategic policy goals to point us in the right direction; among them,…   

We have goals for strengthening the skills of a world-class workforce, like improving education achievement 25% by 2015.  Measuring our progress to goal, in state testing we’ve increased reading proficiency among 8^th grade students 21% , and math proficiency by 17%. Concurrently, our NAEP scores are rising, and for three years in a row Education Week magazine says that we’ve built America’s #1 best public school system.

We have goals for sustainability, like restoring the health of the Chesapeake Bay by 2020,… measuring our progress to date, preliminary estimates show us hitting a series of benchmarks we established two years ago for making her waters healthier. 

We have goals for public safety and security, like reducing violent crime 20% by next year. Measuring our progress we’re at 17% as, together with law enforcement, we’ve driven violent crime down to the lowest rates our state has seen since the 1970s. 

We have goals for improving the health of our people; goals like reducing infant mortality 10%.  Right now we’re exceeding this goal,… at 16%.

We have some goals where the graphs aren’t moving in the right direction.  We set, for example the goal of reducing energy consumption 15% by 2015.  Last year, consumption actually ticked up by 2.6%.

But on the biggest, most important goal of them all, job creation, or graphs are moving in the right direction. Since January we’ve created 20,000 jobs in our State.

Two Economic Models

Currently, we are searching for our way through a period of tremendous polarization; a time of competing ideas of citizenship, competing stories of where our country is headed – and therefore sharply different ideas about the responsible set of choices that any individual or family should be making in these difficult times.

If there is anything that we should have learned from the Administration of George W. Bush, it is that trickle-down economics does not work.

And yet the struggle between two competing economic models continues: one that has been proven to work in every generation, versus one that brought us record debt and record unemployment. 

One that built the largest and strongest middle class in the history of the planet, versus the one that brought us declining middle class incomes for the first time since World War II, and very nearly drove our national economy into a second Great Depression.

These two fundamentally different sets of choices are playing out, not in Congress, but in statehouses across our country.  Take Ohio as one extreme example among many where Governor Kasich is making deep cuts in economic priorities like public education even as he cuts taxes for the estates of dead millionaires and billionaires -- hoping, I can only suppose, that they will reach back from the grave to create millions of new jobs and opportunities for the living. 

By their own trickle-down theory, this massive concentration of wealth – accomplished primarily by massive tax windfalls for the 1% – was supposed to bring about better times, not economic disaster.  If their theory worked, millions of jobs should have been created by now,... jobs falling from the sky. 

We created only 1 million jobs during the Bush decade. Compare that to the 23 million jobs created during President Clinton’s years.  I report, you decide: which is the more effective economic model for creating jobs and expanding middle class opportunity?

They succeeded in accomplishing their means – the extreme concentration wealth – but it brought about near disastrous economic ends for 99 percent of us. It has been a failure for America. It has been a failure for America’s economic growth.  And we are still recovering from the losses of Bush decade and their failed trickle-down economic model.

As pro-growth progressives, we reject their model, don’t we?  It is not fiscally responsible. It is not good for our country. That’s why President Obama rejects it too. 

We believe in a different model, a more effective model, the more traditionally American model.  This model puts job creation first and recognizes that to create jobs, a modern economy requires modern investments.  That isn’t a Democratic or Republican idea, it’s an American idea;  an historic and economic truth that we have proved out time and again as a people.

We have a long way to go before we recover all that we have lost, but we can make our economy stronger; we can make our country better.

Last month our country achieved the 13th month in a row of positive job growth under President Obama’s leadership. Thirteen months in row – that is the longest stretch of consecutive job creation that our nation has achieved since 2005-2006.

Meanwhile, the private sector has achieved 20 consecutive months of job growth.

And as we work to stem the national foreclosure crisis, in July we battled home foreclosures down to a 44 year low.

Because we are starting to make better choices as a people, our economy is starting to get better. Bank failures are down; corporate profits are up. But better isn’t good enough.  We haven’t regained all that we’ve lost in the Bush recession; too many of citizens are hurting, still searching for work.  There’s a lot to do. 

And the truth of our situation is, we won’t move beyond our current job creation and employment difficulties simply by cutting.

If it feels every month that our economy is taking two or three steps forward and then one step back,... that’s because for every two or three jobs the private sector creates, the public sector eliminates one.  The absence of a more balanced approach, the absence of moderation and measure in the public decisions of our national endeavor, is forcing counties, cities and states to actually slow down our jobs recovery with never ending layoffs and job eliminations.

If our public payrolls were bloated, perhaps you could chalk this up to right sizing, but in most places our public payrolls are not bloated. How much less public safety would be good for Baltimore or Newark? How much less education would be good for America?

Conclusion

For the last decade we’ve been severely under-capitalizing the idea of America. We have been under-investing in that common platform of job creation and opportunity expansion called the United States.

Others may rightly want to talk about the morality of an economic system that is rigged to concentrate so much of our nation’s wealth in the hands of so few, but I am just as concerned about how these poor choices keep us from investing in our country and the better future and the better job opportunities we want for our children.

Under President Eisenhower in the 1950s, as a nation we invested nearly 12% of federal non-defense spending in our infrastructure – which allows America’s business and commerce to thrive.  Today, we’re at just 3%.

When it comes to basic research and development, we are today investing 60 percent less than we did when Richard Nixon was president, as a percentage of our GDP.

In just the last ten years we’ve slipped from having one of the highest percentage of college graduates in the world down to 12th.

And it is not what other countries are doing to us – it’s what we are not doing for ourselves.

No one else is going make these national economic investments in education, innovation, and infrastructure for us.

The American Society of Civil Engineers recommends we invest $846 billion over the next decade to upgrade our roads, bridges, and tunnels. Ending the Bush tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires, and returning to Clinton-era tax rates for the highest brackets would allow us to make $400 billion of that needed investment.   To govern is to choose.

Today we face a host of deficits that threaten this ongoing idea of a stronger America.  We face the Bush deficit in our federal budgets, but we also face an investment deficit,... a compassion deficit,... an understanding deficit.  These are the enemies within. 

To defeat them, we must grow in our understanding of one another.  We must grow in our mindfulness about the consequences of the good and bad decisions we make together and as individuals,… we must grow in our compassion.

As pro-growth progressives, we believe that there are, in fact, some challenges so large that we can only hope to tackle them together.  Creating jobs, spurring innovation in how we feed, fuel, and heal our people, expanding opportunity in this fast-changing new economy, improving public education and public safety, making college more affordable, rebuilding a 21st century transportation and cyber infrastructure, eradicating child poverty,... these things won’t happen by themselves.

We must do them as we always have before. We must do them together, and do them ourselves.  I look forward hearing your ideas, on how,…