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Note: The Roosevelt Rundown will be
on hiatus until January 10. Happiest of holidays to you and yours, and
see you back here in 2020!
The Southern Economic
Advancement Project
This week marked the launch of the
Southern
Economic Advancement Project (SEAP), a policy initiative founded by Stacey
Abrams and fiscally sponsored by the Roosevelt Institute. Bringing
particular attention to the intersection of race, class, and gender in
economic and social policy, SEAP seeks to spark innovation and
collaboration and build a more equitable future for Southern states.
“Across the South, we have local leaders dedicated to improving the
lives of those around us, and our goal is to call upon that common
bond and support this transformative work,” SEAP
Executive Director Stacey Abrams said in a press
release. “We are
thrilled to be SEAP’s fiscal partner as it works to elevate and bridge
progressive work happening in the South, ultimately moving us toward a
better future for all,” said Roosevelt President & CEO Felicia
Wong.
-
Listening tour: A new report
from SEAP Research Director Sarah Beth Gehl reveals findings from a
listening tour with Southern nonprofit leaders—and explains how
they’ve shaped SEAP’s roadmap for the future: “SEAP has based our
research agenda on feedback from these conversations and expanded our
capacity-building and network-building services. For example, we offer
microgrants to organizations wishing to engage in policy for the first
time or in a new way,” Gehl writes. Read
more.
- In related news: Echoing SEAP’s mission to “change
the narrative of the South,” Roosevelt Communications Director Kendra Bozarth recently
joined Hidden
Truths, an Insight Center
podcast, to discuss getting regional stories right. “We’ve really
reduced entire communities, entire regions, to these really flawed
and, I feel, offensive political headlines,” she says. “We have all
these big ideas happening right now . . . but policy change cannot be
real until we change the way we talk about policy and people.”
Listen
here.
 Why
Capitalism’s Salvation Depends on Taxation
Conscious policy choices that allowed
for the dismantling of public power and plummeting tax revenues pose
an existential risk to both our economy and our democracy, as
Roosevelt Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz, Roosevelt Fellow Todd
Tucker, and the University of California, Berkeley’s Gabriel Zucman
argue in
an essay for Foreign Affairs. “The direct consequences of this shift are
clear: crumbling infrastructure, a slowing pace of innovation, a
diminishing rate of growth, booming inequality, shorter life
expectancy, and a sense of despair among large parts of the
population. These consequences add up to something much larger: a
threat to the sustainability of democracy and the global market
economy.”
 2020’s Billion-Dollar
Challenge
In an op-ed for USA Today, Roosevelt Vice President of Strategy and
Policy Nell Abernathy argues that the wealth of billionaire 2020
candidates Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer has allowed them to drown
out competition—in this
election and in
our economy more broadly— in ways that are both undemocratic and
reflective of deeper root issues. “We’ve let the wealthiest among us,
including presidential hopefuls Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg, take
home more wealth and then hoard it. The next president must prioritize
unrigging the very economic system from which billionaires have so
richly benefited,” Abernathy writes. Read
more.
 The Perks of Free
College
As 2020 candidates spar over their
free and debt-free college plans, and who exactly should benefit from
them, Roosevelt Program Manager Suzanne Kahn is making the case for
universal free college. “The
promise of universal free access can cut through yearly budgetary
fights, reduce bureaucratic hurdles to access, and increase citizens’
trust in and willingness to use the program,” she told
the Associated Press this week. Coming soon, two new reports from Kahn will define a
progressive values framework for free college proposals and examine
the lessons of existing American programs that make public goods
broadly accessible—including
Medicare, Medicaid, and unemployment insurance. Watch this space.
 Making
Private Equity
Equitable
“What enables a market economy to
serve American society is informed competition with a fair set of
rules where decision makers bear the full consequences of their
actions,” Joseph Stiglitz writes in an op-ed for Business Insider. “A
system in which private equity can hoodwink investors, rely on debt to
fund acquisitions—raised by banks that pass the risk on to others—and
then extract wealth from viable going concerns, is a far cry from a
just market economy. It is a creation of already rich Wall Street
financiers who win even if everyone else loses. If private equity is
to work to the benefit of all stakeholders, then Congress needs to
demonstrate the same talent for making markets work that bad actors on
Wall Street have shown for sabotaging them.” Read
on.
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