Since the calendar flipped to 2015, Democrats have been rolling a hot new economic agenda off the presses. Last week, House Democrats unveiled a new plan to cut taxes for middle-class families, paying for it with higher taxes on the rich and a tax on financial transactions. Today, meanwhile, President Barack Obama will officially call for the passage of legislation giving workers the opportunity to earn up to seven paid sick days per year.

As far as economic policy goes, these are great ideas. A financial transactions tax, in addition to slowing down some of the hyper-trading that has occurred in recent years, raises much-needed revenue in a way that will impact the bottom line of some Wall Street firms a bit, but without having much of an effect on anyone else. Mandatory paid sick days, meanwhile, would move U.S. labor law closer to that of the rest of the developed world, cutting down on the spread of debilitating disease while, as such laws at the state and local level have shown, having little to no impact on job creation or economic growth.



So it's all very exciting, right? Wait.

The problem, of course, is that Democrats recently got shellacked in an election, leaving them without control of either chamber in Congress. The odds that a Republican-controlled House or Senate takes a keen interest in paid sick leave or a tax that primarily effects Wall Street are, presumably, nil.

Now, a charitable reading of the situation is that the Democrats have acknowledged their shortcomings when it comes to economic policy and messaging. The travesty of the 2014 election was that, while electing Republicans almost across the board, voters endorsed economic policies, such as increasing the minimum wage, that are much more closely associated with the Democrats. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren is ably showing that there's a hunger for economic populism, and that it can translate into a message that's broadly appealing.

Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen, the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee, said today at a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor that the new push is a logical follow-on from what the Democrats campaigned on in 2014:

In the 2014 election, the Democrats put forward an important agenda. If you look at what the president and Democrats proposed, it would have made a significant dent in some of the big areas of concern around the country. Raising the minimum wage is important and will help tens of millions of Americans. What I'm proposing builds on the policies that Democrats have been recommending at the national level, including things like equal pay for equal work, the minimum wage and earned paid sick leave. ... But I do believe that if you just look at the math on the economy and this problem of wage stagnation, which as I said dates way back, if you’re going to really address it on a large scale you do need to implement policies like the ones I'm suggesting. This is obviously going to be a debate going forward over the next couple of years.



There's also the fact that, as Talking Points Memo's Sahil Kapur noted, the big Republican victories last year have left fewer "centrist" Democrats in Congress, "reducing the new minority party to a more ideologically cohesive unit" that feels willing to propose more liberal ideas.



A less charitable reading, though, is that the Democrats are seizing on the opportunity to be progressive at a moment when it's cheap and easy; being out of power (or in Obama's case, term-limited) they won't have to pay the price in campaign dollars or blowback that would come from pursuing these policies in an environment in which they could actually become law. After all, when Democrats controlled all of Congress and the presidency, it's not like they made a move on paid sick leave or a financial transactions tax or any of a host of other ideas that would have helped out the middle class. (Which isn't to diminish the very real accomplishments of that Congress.) Now they can stoke the fire and garner the goodwill of the left, without having to deal with the downside.