Why We Need More Public
Spending
The climate crisis
will
cost our economy
more than we think. As professors Dr. Naomi Oreskes and Nicholas Stern
write in a New York
Times op-ed, “A set of
assumptions and practices in economics has led economists both to
underestimate the economic impact of many climate risks and to miss
some of them entirely.” In an appearance with author Naomi Klein on
Pitchfork
Economics,
Roosevelt Fellow JW Mason argues that we can and must spend more to
combat this unprecedented challenge—and that we can afford
it.
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How we pay for it: Public spending on this generational challenge isn’t just
doable; it’s desirable. “In short, our current economy stands only to
benefit from increased public spending. Therefore, it should be seen
as a feature—not a bug—of future economic policymaking.” Learn more in
Roosevelt’s latest spending
factsheet.
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Another angle: “What
does it mean that the CBO keeps revising its forecasts of future
interest rates downward, even as the federal debt continues to rise?
Quite obviously: The tight relationship between a high debt-GDP ratio
and rising interest rates—that austerity-promoting economists like to
predict—doesn’t exist,” Roosevelt Fellow JW Mason writes for the blog.
Read
on.
- Coming soon: Next week, a report by Mason and
Roosevelt Senior Associate/Research Assistant Kristina Karlsson will
outline why we can afford 2020 candidates' Green New Deal proposals.
Watch this space.
Student Debt Cancellation’s Newest
Advocate
Upon resigning from the US
Department of Education this week, senior student-loan official A.
Wayne Johnson criticized a “fundamentally broken” system and
endorsed
the cancellation of student debt. As Roosevelt Fellow Julie Margetta Morgan
responded in a statement, he’s not alone: “Nearly two-thirds of
registered voters said that they would support a plan to make public
colleges tuition-free and to cancel most existing student loans. The
evidence is out there, and people on both sides of the aisle are
beginning to listen. It’s time to stop industry insiders from reaping
billions in profits at the expense of not just students but also our
nation’s collective economic future.” Read
more.
How the Post Office Can Solve Our Banking
Crisis
About 8 percent of Americans
are
unbanked, and
about 20 percent live in underbanked areas. Roosevelt Fellow Mehrsa
Baradaran has a bold solution: postal
banking. “Banks
want to be efficient, they want to make lots of money, and when the
law doesn’t prevent them, they’re going to merge and close up certain
areas, and then you’ll have a large swath of the population that has
to rely on nongovernment-subsidized lenders,” Baradaran tells
Fast
Company. “The post office
is not motivated by profit, so it can help everyone.” Read
on.
#SOCAP19
At this week’s #SOCAP19 gathering, Roosevelt President & CEO
Felicia Wong joined Black Lives Matter co-creator Alicia Garza, Color
of Change President Rashad Robinson, and Common Future CEO Rodney D.
Foxworth for a conversation on impact investing and the racial wealth
gap. “Wealth
is crystallized history,” Wong said. “It’s about power, not empowerment, for people of
color.”
Rebuilding Worker
Voice
Testifying before the House Committee on Education and
Labor in the midst of strikes
across the country, Roosevelt Fellow Brishen Rogers deployed years of labor
research to make
the case for worker power. “For decades, our labor and employment laws
have been a key part of our social contract. But that social contract
has been eroded in recent years, due to changes in our economy, to
various legal doctrines that have undermined workers’ bargaining
power, and to employer strategies designed to limit labor costs,”
Rogers testified. “To ensure that workers in today’s economy
can thrive, we need to restore the right to organize, while also
considering more fundamental, structural changes to our labor
law.”
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Why this matters: “Autoworkers, teachers, and other workers accepted austerity
when the economy was in a free fall, expecting to share in the gains
once the recovery took hold. In recent years, however, many of those
workers have come to believe that they fell for a sucker’s bet, as
they watched their employers grow flush while their own incomes barely
budged.” Read
more from the New York Times.
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