A Post-Neoliberal Foreign
Policy
“Today’s national security experts need to
move beyond the prevailing neoliberal economic philosophy of the past
40 years,” Roosevelt Fellow Jennifer Harris and the Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace’s Jake Sullivan argue in a piece for
Foreign
Policy. “Toward this end,
the foreign-policy community needs to shed a number of old
assumptions. First, policymakers should recognize that underinvestment
is a bigger threat to national security than the US national debt . .
. America’s national security depends on it.” Read
on.
- Another angle: As
David Leonhardt writes for the New York Times, Harris and
Sullivan’s op-ed offers four specific suggestions on investment,
industrial policy, trade, and multinational corporate oversight and
taxation. “The piece is well argued, and I found the historical
analogies especially telling,” he writes. “Today’s challenges aren’t
the same, and the solutions should not be the same. But military
leaders and foreign policy experts can again use their prestige and
credibility to play a crucial role.” Read
more.
The Role of the Fed
During Federal Reserve Chair
Jerome
Powell’s testimony
before the House Financial Services Committee this week, Rep. Ayanna
Pressley (D-MA) pressed Powell on full
employment
and—equipped with a history of civil rights movement advocacy—asked
whether a federal
jobs guarantee
might be the key. “. . .
After Dr. King’s assassination,
Coretta Scott King picked up the mantle, pushing the Fed to adopt a
full employment mandate, and was actually standing behind President
Carter as he signed the Humphrey-Hawkins Act into law. And that’s the
reason you are here today,” Pressley told Powell. Read
more about the testimony in Forbes.
Why the
Racial Wealth Gap
Persists
Why the Black
Rural South Deserves
Priority
As Roosevelt Journalist-in-Residence
Greg Kaufmann writes for The Nation,
“one region that hasn’t
received the attention it needs in this or previous elections is the
rural Black Belt, specifically the persistently
poor counties in
11 Southern states that are home to more than half of the nation’s non-metro poor.” The
Southern Economic Advancement Project (SEAP)—fresh off of a
listening
tour across
Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and North Carolina—has
solutions. “Economic progress
for the Black Belt requires innovation and deep commitment, which
means providing consistent investment to address the interconnected
issues that hinder growth and block equity,” SEAP Executive Director
Stacey Abrams tells Kaufmann. Read
on.
How the Trump Budget Threatens
the Economy
This week’s Trump budget proposal
includes trillions
of dollars in cuts
for Medicaid, food stamps, and other vital public programs. As
Roosevelt Fellow Michael Linden tweeted, that poses existential challenges for the
economy and for individuals. “There has simply not been enough written
about what an economic
disaster Trump's
budget would be. In the short run . . . it would probably induce a
recession. In the long run, it would undermine our economic
foundations and lead to less overall prosperity. What a mess.”
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