Make billionaires the enemy. Make clear that wealth is public, not private. Musk can hissy fit his way to a trillion, but only in a mad bourgeois fantasy did he earn it. Target that greed. Target that shit and link it to the hunger and lack that millions of Americans feel every day.

But what, exactly, is the plan? How will you target it?

The problem for Democrats isn't that they lack for rhetoric. They can, and do, talk of the need to address inequality and affordability and the struggles of ordinary Americans.

What they lack is an agenda.

They used to have a bunch of things they wanted to get done. Universal health care. Reducing carbon emissions to fight climate change. "Medicare for All" or "the Green New Deal." Big, signature programs that if elected, they would implement.

What's the program for "targeting that shit"?

If I had to sum up the Democrats' current problems with the American electorate, it's in the below chart:

cbo.gov - Cume growth after tax

...which comes from the report in the below link. It's basically a chart of earnings growth over the last several decades, broken up by quintile, after taxes and transfers.

The real problem for Democrats isn't the fact that the top line (for the "highest quintile") is higher. That's consistent with their message. The problem is that the line for "lowest quintile" is so much higher than the line for "middle three quintiles." Unlike European economies, we have a very very progressive taxation and social program structure - our taxes are much more progressive, and we have a lot of need-based transfers and social programs. But the result of that is that the net outcomes for middle class families have been growing far, far more slowly than the outcomes for low-income folks.

Or to put it a different way, the standard Democratic toolkit of using government programs to redistribute wealth isn't reaching the middle folks as much as the lowest quintile.

Which is why, I think, "targeting the rich" and "fighting oligarchs" hasn't gotten Democrats much traction. For the last several decades, benefits from Democrats' programs have flowed more to the bottom quintile than the middle quintiles. Which makes it much harder for Democrats to successfully argue that "targeting the rich" translates into "benefits for the working class." For that strategy to work, the Democrats need to be able to articulate not just who their program will target, but how it will actually help working class folks.

So what's the Next Big Idea? What do you think the Democrats should focus on?

Congressional Budget Office: Publication 60706