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Dear John,
Now that Joe Biden’s COVID relief bill has passed, the administration is beginning to put together a major infrastructure and jobs package. And like clockwork, Republican “deficit hawks” who gave trillions in tax cuts to the rich have come out against more federal spending.
Ignore them. The only deficit that matters is the deficit in public investment.
The public investment deficit is the gap between what we should be investing in our future — on infrastructure, education, and basic research — and the relatively little we are investing.
Public investment is similar to private investment in that we invest today because of the payoff in the future. The difference is public investment pays off for all of us, for America.
Federal investments in infrastructure, education, and research and development have all shrunk as a portion of the economy — even though the payoffs from these investments are gigantic, and the costs of not making them are astronomical.
Public investment in clean energy has a return of 27 percent, but federal tax breaks favor fossil fuels over renewables by a ratio of 7 to 1. And that’s just one example.
Our latest video breaks down America's public investment deficit and what needs to be done to fill it. [[link removed]]
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So ignore the deficit hawk hypocrites who say we can’t afford to invest in the American people.
We can afford it. We can’t afford not to.
Joe Biden needs to recognize this, and make public investment a central part of his economic strategy.
Thanks for watching,
Robert Reich
Inequality Media
P.S. Tomorrow at 8am PT/11am ET, I'll be testifying at a Senate hearing led by Bernie Sanders on how to tackle our crisis of widening income and wealth inequality. You can tune in on Sen. Sanders' Facebook page. [[link removed]]
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