Borosage/Latke: A New New Deal?

A New New Deal?

by Robert Borosage and Eric Latke, The Nation 12/23/08

"If the United States wants to retain a broad middle class in a global economy, it has little choice but to finance a public social contract - from healthcare to lifelong learning to pensions above Social Security - that will be vital to providing the security that families need to prosper. Expanded public investment - in research and development, twenty-first-century infrastructure and new energy - will be essential to sustaining a competitive high-wage economy. The new economy will also need several other building blocks: a new global economic strategy; a sensible industrial policy, beginning with a transition to new energy; an aggressive wage policy (providing living wages, empowering workers to organize, curbing executive plunder and fat bonuses) that helps distribute the benefits of profits and productivity gains fairly; and a reregulation of finance to make banking boring once more."

"This broad transformation - a true new New Deal - entails a sea change in values and policy from the conservative era of the past thirty years. It will have to rally a public that yearns for
greater security but is sensibly suspicious, after decades of conservative
misrule, of the government's capacity to do anything."

Posted by Chuck Bell at 8:55 PM