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The idea of billionaires launching themselves into space on their own rockets has provoked apoplexy from some progressives, who view the spectacle as an ostentatious display of economic inequality that must be fixed with a wealth tax.

Witness the response to Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson's successful journey to the edge of space yesterday on his company's Unity spaceship.

The flightwhich carried Branson and five other crew members more than 50 miles above the Earth's surfacerepresents an important milestone for the nascent private space tourism industry. But several commentators were only concerned with what the British billionaire's money could have funded instead.

On Twitter, Mother Jones' Clara Jeffery declared it an "advertisement for a wealth tax":

Journalist Teddy Schleifer said on CNN that the press should cool its jets when covering billionaires' space travels, saying that "it's impossible to talk about the billionaire's success without talking about the system that creates this in the first place."

Sen. Bernie Sanders (DVt.) struck a familiar dyspeptic note:

Rep. Ro Khanna (DCalif.) asked, a few days before Branson's launch, whether that money could be spent on health care and education rather than "space travel fantasies."

Khanna doesn't see such a stark trade-off with the government's own resources, given his co-sponsorship of the "Endless Frontiers Act," the initial version of which would have given $100 billion to the National Science Foundation to research such sci-fi ideas as artificial intelligence and quantum computing. Surely that money could be spent on health care too? And Khanna is a member of Congress' "NASA Caucus," so he isn't objecting to spending money on space exploration per se.

In any case,billionaire-backed space companieswhich includes not just Branson's Virgin Galactic but also Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and Elon Musk's SpaceXcan help to eliminate wasteful space spending. That's certainly the case with SpaceX. Back in May 2020, the company's Crew Dragon vehicle ferried NASA astronauts to the International Space Station from American soil for the first time since 2011, when the accident-prone Space Shuttle was retired.

To develop and launch Crew Dragon, SpaceX received a $2.6 billion contract from NASA through the agency's Commercial Crew Program. In comparison, the Constellation program run directly by NASAwhich had a similar goal of developing a launch system for putting astronauts in low-earth orbitwas estimated to cost closer to $34.5 billion.

SpaceX was "effectively doing what the Constellation Program was doing with about the same amount of money, total, that they were burning in a single month," NASA engineer Mike Horkachuck told ArsTechnica's Eric Berger.

In time, the competition between these various private ventures will put yet more downward pressure on prices while spurring the development of new, better space technologyhelping the government's space efforts as well as the private sector's.

Even if you aren't convinced of the value of space travel, given that we've yet to reach a utopia free of poverty, disease, and war here on Earth, there's something to be said for a private space industry soaking up the legions of engineers and other aerospace professionals who might otherwise be spending their careers designing faster-flying missiles for traditional military contractors.

The private space industry has problems from a libertarian perspective too. SpaceX and Blue Origin are primarily in the business of competing for government contracts. New Mexico taxpayers shelled out$220 million to fund Virgin Galactic's desert launch facility.

Yet even a rigid ideologue like Ayn Rand was able to see some good in government-funded space travel. "Nothing on earth or beyond it is closed to the power of man's reason," she wrote of the Moon landing. "This is the fundamental lesson to be learned from the triumph of Apollo 11."

Her criticism of space flight's detractors also rings only truer today. Their attitude, she wrote, "penalizes the good for being good, and success for being success."

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Billionaires Spending Their Own Money To Go to Space Has Progressives Howling For a Wealth Tax - Reason

Progressive Insurance is embarking on a hiring spree.

The insurer said it intends to hire up to 6,400 new employees across the country during the remainder of 2021.

The Mayfield Village, Ohio-headquartered company with $42 billion in revenues said it will be adding more employees in claims, customer care, technology, analysis and legal throughout the country.

The company currently has nearly 42,000 employees nationwide.

The largest areas of opportunity for career development lie in call center positions with 3,000 remote openings across the country. Additionally, 2,900 jobs in field and centralized claims will be available. These careers include some hybrid work-from-home and fully remote positions.

Here is a breakdown of job openings:

There are also approximately 60 jobs in data and analytics, as well as openings in corporate business areas such as human relations, marketing, and product management.

In May, one of Progressives biggest competitors, Geico, said it is looking to hire another 500 people for its Macon, Georgia office.

Source: Progressive Careers

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Progressive Insurance Plans to Hire 6,400 New Employees By Years End - Insurance Journal

Back in 2015,President Barack Obamacompared Minnesota favorably with Wisconsin, holding up our state's high, progressive taxes as the model for others to follow.

When I joined the Center of the American Experiment think tank in 2017, we were skeptical of this. The previous year, we had produced a report showing that Minnesota was losing residents to, and failing to attract them from, other states. Our annual report on Minnesota's economy in 2017 called its performance "lackluster," noting below average GDP growth.

These weren't popular arguments at that time.

Our concerns are now much more widely shared. In March, Steve Grove, commissioner of Minnesota's Department of Employment and Economic Development, tweeted in celebration of our state being ranked the second-best to live in byU.S. News: He was roasted by progressives highlighting Minnesota's racial disparities and forced to issue a groveling clarification.

In May, the Star Tribune Editorial Board embraced a report from the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce that highlighted, among other things, our state's below average GDP growth and "lack of in-migration from other states." Sound familiar?

And a recent poll for our magazine, Thinking Minnesota, found that while 45% of Minnesotans think our state is on the right track, 48% of us now believe it is on the wrong track: this is up from 38% in March 2019 and 26% in March 2018.

A new consensus is emerging as progressives join conservatives in perceiving that all is not well in the state of Minnesota.

Consider those racial disparities. Prof. Samuel L. Myers Jr., of the University of Minnesota, recently listed disparities in graduation rates,homeownership rates, loan denial rates, mortality rates, suspension rates, wage and salary incomes, unemployment rates, child abuse and neglect report rates,traffic stops,even drowning rates. Prof. Myers noted, "The coexistence in Minnesota of wealth and plenty for the majority group with wide racial gaps faced by minority groups has come to be known as theMinnesota Paradox."

Even worse, for Black Minnesotans some of these outcomes, like homeownership rates, are not just low relative to those for white Minnesotans but relative to those for Black residents of other states. My colleague Catrin Wigfall noted recently that Black and Hispanic students in Mississippi outperformed Minnesota's Black and Hispanic students in both math and reading and that test scores for Mississippi's Black students have been rising in recent years, compared with declining scores for our state's Black students.

And these disparities coexist with Minnesota's high, progressive taxes. Minnesota has had some of the highest tax rates and one of the most progressive income tax systems in the U.S. for decades. Our state's tax system ranked among the top five in 2018.

The data show that whatever problems you think afflict our state at present from racial disparities to surging violent crime they have either arisen while Minnesota has had high, progressive taxes or they have proved resilient to remedy by high, progressive taxes. It is time to try something different. But what?

Look again at those education disparities. Last year, Brightbeam, a nonprofit education advocacy organization, released a report which found that some cities are doing a much better job at closing the gaps in education outcomes than others. But, as Nekima Levy Armstrongwrote on these pages, "The Brightbeam report shows that progressive cities like Minneapolis do worse and, surprisingly, conservative cities do better when it comes to educating students of color. According to the report, conservative cities have gaps in math and reading that are on average 15 and 13 percentage points smaller than those in progressive cities."

This is not because conservative cities have higher and more progressive taxes than progressive ones. Something besides taxing and spending is closing those gaps. Rather than repeating or amplifying what has failed over decades in Minnesota, we should look to the places which are succeeding and learn from them.

This message was a hard sell four years ago. But with the emergence of a new, more skeptical consensus across Minnesota's political spectrum, its time might have come.

John Phelan is an economist at the Center of the American Experiment (www.AmericanExperiment.org).

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Minnesota, we have a problem - Minneapolis Star Tribune

An obscure progressive nonprofit called the North Fund has scaled up operations during the last two years, allowing the group to quietly work in high-profile legislative fights in Washington and state capitals.

Why it matters: The North Fund's structure and its refusal to reveal financial contributors make it the latest progressive nonprofit to operate in ways that obscure key financial information from the public, even as it pushes for legislation to limit the role of so-called dark money in politics.

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What's new: Founded in late 2018, the North Fund's budget shot up from $9.3 million in 2019 to nearly $50 million last year, according to previously unreported records filed with state regulators in Montana.

It doled out nearly $18 million to other progressive groups, according to those records primarily other nonprofit advocacy groups, but with some going to outright political organizations.

The North Fund also financed ballot measure campaigns across the country last year, including efforts to legalize marijuana in Montana, expand paid leave in Colorado and reform congressional redistricting in Missouri.

In addition, the North Fund acts as the legal umbrella for a handful of other organizations, including voting rights group Just Democracy, anti-Big Tech advocacy outfit Accountable Tech and 51 for 51, which pushes for D.C. statehood.

The big picture: The North Fund is shadowy even by the standards of D.C. advocacy groups. It has no website. Its address is a shared workspace. And in March, it won a fight against Montana officials trying to force the group to disclose its donors.

The North Fund's subsidiary organizations are more prominent and are spending significant sums on some top progressive agenda items.

Just Democracy, for instance, recently kicked off a seven-figure ad campaign attacking Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) over her opposition to nuking the filibuster. It's also pushed heavily for federal legislation that would dramatically increase disclosure requirements for politically active nonprofits.

The North Fund operates as a "fiscal sponsor" for Just Democracy and other groups under its umbrella, a legal designation effectively allowing those groups to operate as any stand-alone nonprofit would but without submitting their own financial information to the IRS.

That's an increasingly common structure on the left, with large groups such as the Sixteen Thirty Fund seeding scores of progressive advocacy outfits and steering millions to them in ways that obscure key financial details.

What they're saying: In an emailed statement, North Fund president Jim Gerstein declined to identify any of the group's financial supporters.

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"North Fund strictly follows all disclosure requirements at local, state and federal levels, and donors decide for themselves whether to disclose their contributions," he wrote.

Between the lines: Many progressive groups benefitting from that sort of opacity are simultaneously advocating for more political money disclosure. Their excuse is they don't want to handicap their own side in a fight against a well-funded conservative opposition.

"The rules are rigged against Black and Brown people," Just Democracy told Axios in a statement. "Until we win our fight to change them, were committed to using every tool in our toolbox to stop voter suppression and build a more just democracy."

That echoed comments by the Sixteen Thirty Fund's president this year.

Amy Kurtz said her group would "continue to level the playing field for progressives until (reform) happens."

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A progressive dark money group is being built to fight dark money - Yahoo News

Progressive Democrats continue to demand bold climate action be included in any infrastructure legislation as the White House moves forward with bipartisan brokering that does not include measures to combat climate change. Climate activists and progressive members are working in a coordinated effort to mount pressure on the White House and drum up public support with the mantra and hashtag #noclimatenodeal.

Congresswoman Cori Bush sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the rest of House leadership on Thursday urging the Democratic caucus embrace a more progressive climate agenda.

"As the urgency to invest in public climate infrastructure and jobs intensifies each day, we urge you to work with us to deliver robust and lasting investments at a scale that directly addresses the climate crisis," read the letter, first obtained by CBS News.

The letter criticized President Biden's proposed infrastructure goals and his willingness to negotiate with some Senate Republicans. Read the letter here:

"We are very concerned that the American Jobs Plan (AJP), and more so the bipartisan compromise as it presently stands, will not reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are driving the climate crisis to the extent that science and justice require."

The message is cosigned by 10 members including Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Pramila Jayapal, who is the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. With an evenly-divided Senate and slim Democrat majority in the House, progressives potentially hold enough leverage to foil legislation they find unsavory.

As the White House has had ongoing infrastructure talks with a group of 10 bipartisan senators, climate goals have been diluted in the name of negotiation.

Republican Senator Susan Collins, who has been at the negotiating table, said last month on "Face the Nation" that Republicans are working to include a tax on electric vehicle owners.

Progressives believe Mr. Biden ought to be listening to their demands more so than Republicans.

"The conversation has become a discouraging, tepid dance between the already compromised [American Jobs Plan] and plans from Republicans and bipartisan coalitions that leave climate out entirely," Bush writes.

Bush and her cosigners advocate for goals laid out in the Green New Deal, spending $1 trillion every year for the next decade "to match the scale of the climate crisis."

"This is the very least we can do to avert the worst of the climate crisis. Anything less would be unacceptable and an abdication of our global responsibility."

At a press conference on Tuesday, Senator Ed Markey, one of the coauthors of the Green New Deal, said he would only support a bipartisan infrastructure deal if he first had assurance of a complementary progressive climate bill with the promise of passing with 50 votes via reconciliation. Bush's letter urges Pelosi to include progressive directives in the budget resolution process, "which will dictate the scale and scope of the upcoming reconciliation bill on infrastructure."

The letter was written in collaboration with climate groups, including the youth-led Sunrise Movement and Justice Democrats, demanding the Democratic caucus fully support a progressive plan.

"We are up against the ticking time bomb of the climate crisis and if we neglect investment now to avert the climate crisis if Speaker Pelosi ignores House Progressives and the thousands of young people behind them costs and consequences will only be greater," said Lauren Maunus, advocacy director of Sunrise Movement.

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House progressives demand climate action be included in infrastructure deal - CBS News