A Distinctly American Industrial Policy

The events of the past two years—first the pandemic, and now the war in Ukraine—have revealed the inadequacies of US trade policy: supply chains ill-equipped for crisis, and corporate profiteering that drives prices higher.

“I think the question is whether the trade policy of the overly globalized, corporate-focused, volume-of-trade-only approach of the neoliberal trade regime was just not working either politically or substantively,” Roosevelt President and CEO Felicia Wong told Vanity Fair this week. 

We need more than short-term solutions to the problems we face today.

“The longer term strategy is a kind of domestic and international investment that is public-led, not just market-led . . . That’s what the new American industrial policy is really all about,” Wong says. 

A Plan for Reparations 

Since June of 2021, in the first state-level effort of its kind, a California task force has been meeting to discuss reparations for Black Americans. 

The work of the task force will be a model for other state and federal reparations proposals, answering questions about how a policy could be designed and who should be eligible. And those are questions Roosevelt Senior Fellow William Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen have explored extensively, as Nonprofit Quarterly’s Kitana Ananda covers.

“Ultimately, this essential transformative change demands systemic action from the core institution that established and maintained the system of racial injustice: the federal Government,” Darity Jr. and Mullen wrote in a 2020 Roosevelt report.

Join the Conversation

Join us on April 27 from 1–2 pm ET for the exclusive virtual launch of American Prospect co-founder Robert Kuttner’s new book, Going Big: FDR’s Legacy, Biden’s New Deal, and the Struggle to Save Democracy.

Kuttner and The Sum of Us author Heather McGhee will discuss the legacy of the New Deal, its lessons for today, and the potential of this moment.

Register now.