Centrists, man...
The history makes it easy to cast Tanden as the Democratic Establishment’s enforcer, more interested in disciplining the party’s left flank than in considering the failures of the center. What’s missing from that picture is how progressive CAP has become. Matthew Yglesias, the centrist Substacker (and former ThinkProgress blogger), points to the disjunction between Tanden’s reputation and CAP’s work. “Most people evaluate Neera on the basis of her Twitter persona,” he told me. But if you ignored the feed and simply read the organization’s policy output, “you would almost think, Well, this is the moderate wing of the Bernie Sanders movement.”CAP’s policy positions bear that out. Among its proposals for addressing the affordability crisis is a voluntary program in which grocers who restrain price increases on staple foods would get temporary relief from credit-card swipe fees — hardly the sort of policy usually associated with the party’s corporate-friendly center. The Washington Post editorial board derided it as price controls. “That one didn’t get a ton of love, to be honest,” said Jared Bernstein, Biden’s former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and now a CAP senior fellow, who helped write the proposal. He rejects the idea that it was an attempt to reposition CAP in a way that would neutralize the left: “That’s a direct result of recognizing that the affordability crisis requires a bold policy response.”
program in which grocers who restrain price increases on staple foods would get temporary relief from credit-card swipe fees
That's almost full communism! Imagine trying to implement this! The application process! The bureaucracy!
Imagine running a little corner store and trying to prove you restrained price increases on staple foods to get your temporary swipe fee relief?
Is this a joke? I can't even tell. Does the writer want us to understand he is laughing at this, too, or is is he marveling at this model of left wing policy, genuinely?