The Roosevelt Rundown is an email series featuring the Roosevelt
Institute’s top 5 stories of the week.
1.
#GoodPolicyGoodPolitics
Progressive
policies aren’t
just good governance; they’re good politics, as Roosevelt President
and CEO Felicia Wong argues in a blog
post about this
week’s Democratic debates. The proof is in the polls: Most Americans—and
many
Republicans—support progressive economic
priorities, such as taxing the wealthy and raising the minimum
wage. They also favor
reclaiming public power with the kinds of bold proposals that the
moment demands, including across-the-board government investment in
green jobs and infrastructure. “An aggressively progressive candidate
can make the argument about real structural change to the economy with
very little risk of backlash,” Wong writes.
2. Making Industrial Policy
& Planning Comprehensive and Inclusive
3.
Ear to the
Ground
On last week’s episode of
Left,
Right & Center, Roosevelt’s Felicia Wong discusses Robert Mueller’s
congressional hearing, the latest budget deal, and the increasingly
progressive policy preferences of swing voters. Later in the podcast,
Roosevelt Fellow JW
Mason joins the
conversation to discuss his recent decarbonization
report
(co-authored with Roosevelt Fellow Mark Paul and Anders Fremstad of
Colorado State University). As Wong summarizes, “To
really make the transition to a green economy—not just to ... phase
out fossil fuels, but also to expand mass transit or to retrofit
buildings or pay farmers to capture carbon—you simply must have a
public investment-led strategy.”
4. When We
Talk About Student Debt, We’re Talking About Power
Quoted in a MarketWatch article about Sen. Kamala Harris’s (D-CA)
new student-debt forgiveness proposal, Roosevelt Fellow Julie Margetta
Morgan contrasts the varying scope of 2020 candidates’ approaches to
the student debt crisis. In a Roosevelt blog
post, Margetta
Morgan examines the structural dynamics of the debt spiral:
stagnating
wages for college
graduates, brazen profiteering in the loan industry, and a
worsening
racial wealth gap.
“Student debt is not only a tool in the erosion of
public power, the accumulation of private power, and the entrenchment
of racial inequality, but it is also a symbol of the overall power
imbalances in our economy,” Margetta Morgan writes.
5.
Empowering Workers, Not
Corporations
“We desperately need a more racially inclusive and
environmentally sustainable alternative to the post-neoliberal
right,” Roosevelt Fellow Todd
Tucker writes in a Nation piece analyzing Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s
(D-MA) just-released trade
manifesto.
Building on Warrens’s proposals to curb Trumpian economic nationalism
and center labor and environmental interests in trade, Tucker
highlights the potential of rebuilding worker power and integrating a
Green New Deal in our trade regime. In marshalling public power and
putting people before corporate profits, he argues, Americans can
rewrite the rules of trade to benefit all.
What We’re
Reading
As a new Wall
Street Journal piece emphasizes, middle-class life is increasingly out of
budget for millions of debt-saddled Americans. Turbocharged by
financialization; stalled
income growth; and
the ballooning costs of cars, college, homes, and health care,
consumer debt has now reached new heights: $4 trillion, not counting
mortgages. This level of debt not only poses risks to
future
economic growth, but it exacerbates
existing structural inequalities. As noted in the article, “Borrowing for everyday consumption or
for assets such as cars that lose value makes it harder to save and
invest in stocks and real estate that tend to create wealth. So the
rise in consumer borrowing exacerbates the wealth gap.”
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