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How Neoliberalism Drives
the Climate Crisis
“Our best chance at tackling the
climate crisis may well be to transcend neoliberalism,” Roosevelt
Fellow Mark Paul and Colorado State University’s Anders Fremstad write
in a new Roosevelt report. As they argue, three core neoliberal tenets
have prevented meaningful action: the decentralization of democracy,
the defunding of public investment, and the deregulation of our
economy. “As the excitement builds around a Green New Deal, it is
clear that confronting climate change will require us to confront the
ideological system that helped create it,” they write.
Read
on.
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Another angle: “If
the 2008 financial crisis failed to make us realize that unfettered
markets don’t work, the climate crisis certainly should: Neoliberalism
will literally bring an end to our civilization.” Read
more from Roosevelt Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz
in Project
Syndicate.
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Why this matters: “Ultimately, our ability to halt the climate crisis is limited
by the reality that its effects are largely irreversible—natural
resources cannot be recreated; warming cannot be undone, only slowed;
and melting ice caps, causing rising sea levels, cannot be refrozen,”
Roosevelt Senior Associate/Research Assistant Kristina Karlsson writes
for the blog. “Outsized market and corporate power will continue to
hinder a solution unless we shed the ideology that empowers and
enables these forces to act in their own interest.”
Read
on.
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Good policy, good politics: The 2020
candidates are betting big on climate action—and the
politics are as sound as the policies. “Climate change is increasingly on Iowans’ minds, according to
an August
poll conducted by the Yale Program on Climate
Communication.
About 70 percent of Iowa voters polled said they were worried about
climate change, and 74 percent said they were concerned about the
impact to the state’s agriculture. And it’s a trend nationwide; a
Public
Policy Institute of California poll from July 2018 found that 54 percent of
Californians in the state said the issue was very important to them,
and half said they’d be willing to pay more to reduce the effects of
global warming.” Read
more from Vox.
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Moving forward: In response to the Trump
administration’s formal notice of withdrawal
from the Paris Agreement this week, the
United States Climate Alliance—a coalition
of 25 governors—has reaffirmed its
commitment to the agreement’s goals. As
the group wrote in its press release, “. . .
we have demonstrated that economic growth and climate action go
hand-in-hand. Alliance states have reduced emissions faster than the
rest of the country while growing per capita GDP three times as fast.
Climate action is a driver of—not a
deterrent to—innovation and economic
strength.”
 The Costs of
Being Poor
As a new report from the Groundwork
Collaborative and the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia
University explains, we may be underestimating poverty in
America—by 3 million
people. The reason:
inflation
inequality. “Just
as aggregate measures of GDP may mask variation in economic growth at
different points in the economic distribution, aggregate measures of
inflation may mask the fact that the prices and price changes faced by
the poor may be fundamentally different from the prices and price
changes faced by the middle class, which in turn may be fundamentally
different from the prices and price changes faced by the rich.”
Read
on.
 United States of
Inequality
Record-high inequality is not an
accident. With a historical timeline, Capital & Main examines the labor, trade, and tax policies
that got us here—with help from
Roosevelt Fellow Todd Tucker. “Every time Democrats would gain a
little bit of power, they would try to introduce legislation to help
workers,” said Tucker. “But then the Supreme Court would knock it down
or would make an interpretation that would weaken it after the fact.”
Read
more from Fast Company.
 How the Tax System Makes It
Worse
One of those
inequality-exacerbating policies: preferential tax treatment for
capital
gains. In a
Squawk Box debate with the American Enterprise
Institute’s Alex Brill, Roosevelt Fellow and Groundwork Collaborative
Executive Director Michael Linden makes the case that capital gains
and corporate tax cuts have neither grown the economy nor improved
life for most Americans. Watch
here.
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Coming soon: Next
week, a report from Roosevelt and the National Women’s Law Center
(NWLC) will outline the hidden rules of gender in the tax code and the
ways that they’ve harmed women’s economic security. Our report is one
of a three-part series from the NWLC on why tax justice is gender
justice.
 A Progressive Plan for
Growth
“There’s a renewed interest in how
you have a more active role of government in promoting key
industries,” Roosevelt Vice President of Strategy and Policy Nell
Abernathy tells Vox. For more from Abernathy, Stiglitz, and Roosevelt
Fellows Darrick Hamilton and Mike Konczal, explore
“The
Progressive Vision for Economic Growth,
Explained.”
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Reclaiming public power: Rebuilding our economy and democracy requires renewed civic
power, as authors K. Sabeel Rahman and Hollie Russon Gilman write in
their
new book. As
Roosevelt Communications Director Kendra Bozarth tweeted during a Demos
Twitter chat about
the book, “We handed our government over to markets and handed our
markets over to corporations. Power-building policymaking can reset
the rules of the game and restore economic security and dignity to the
people.”
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We can afford it: This week, a
briefing hosted by
the Roosevelt Institute and the Congressional Progressive Caucus
Center reiterated a key pillar of that vision: We can afford more
federal spending. “Our current economy stands only to benefit from
increased public spending. It should be seen as a #FeatureNotABug of future economic policymaking,” the
Roosevelt Institute tweeted.
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