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**JANUARY 28, 2022**
Kuttner on TAP
Biden's Executive Actions to Protect Workers
The president could be doing a lot more with his executive power.
Thanks to President Biden's executive order requiring all companies
with federal contracts to pay their workers at least $15 an hour, nearly
400,000 workers will get raises starting next week, when the order takes
effect. According to tabulations
by our friends at the Economic Policy Institute, the average wage
increase will be $3,100, and more than half of the workers who benefit
will be Black or Hispanic.
As EPI's Ben Zipperer writes, the contractor order will have spillover
effects. "Higher contractor wages will incentivize other firms in the
local labor market to raise wages in order to recruit and retain workers
who can now earn higher pay."
The
**Prospect** has long urged President Biden, who faces a deadlocked
Congress, to maximize his progressive impact through the use of
executive orders and other executive action. We've laid this out in
our Day One Agenda series.
Some of this is already being carried out by Biden's appointees. His
antitrust appointees are doing a superb job at the FTC and the Justice
Department of slowing down merger-mania. At the Labor Department, we can
expect more executive action to protect workers against wage theft and
misclassification and to defend the right to unionize.
This pitch-perfect editorial
from today's
**Wall Street Journal**, demonizing my wonderful Brandeis colleague
David Weil, shows how aggressive pro-worker regulators panic the right
wing. As Weil returns to his old job as wage and hour administrator at
the Labor Department, the
**Journal** editorialists provide a nice preview of the great things he
can do.
Biden himself could be doing a great deal more. He has the power, with
the stroke of a proverbial pen, to cancel all student debt held by the
federal government, thus liberating two generations of students and
middle-aged graduates from a lifetime of debtors' prison. He could cap
the debt relief at, say, $50,000 to make it better targeted.
He also has the power, under existing federal law, the Bayh-Dole Act
,
to drastically cut drug prices by giving overpriced and urgently needed
drugs developed with federal assistance (virtually all drugs) to generic
producers. Merely threatening this would have a salutary effect. It's
a travesty that drug companies manipulated patents on insulin, a drug in
the public domain for a century, to make it a high-priced specialty
drug. There are dozens of such cases.
These moves would not only be good policy. They would be very smart
politics as Biden reconnects with his inner populist. And they would
shame Republicans who opposed them.
****
~ ROBERT KUTTNER
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Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter
**Robert Kuttner's latest book is**
The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy
.
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Most Americans Don't Want War With Russia. Where Are Progressives?
Anti-war politicians have become willing to criticize failed
adventurism in the Middle East. They're more reluctant to pump the
brakes on Ukraine. BY LEE HARRIS
Understanding Ukraine
The Quincy Institute's Anatol Lieven explains Russian and Ukrainian
intentions, and how the U.S. has 'trapped ourselves by our own
rhetoric.' BY DAVID DAYEN
On Being American
Mitch McConnell reminded us that Americans often have trouble with the
reality of fully American Black people. Expect more such flare-ups in
the new Supreme Court fight. BY GABRIELLE GURLEY
Altercation: 'Stupid Sons of Bitches'
Biden's response to a notably dumb question from Fox raises the
question of which Foxites are idiots and which just play them on TV. BY
ERIC ALTERMAN
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