Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Stephen Rosenfeld — 37 Ways to Reform the Economy So It’s Not Rigged for the Rich, According to Progressive Economists


Unpacking "Rewriting the Rules."

AlterNet
37 Ways to Reform the Economy So It’s Not Rigged for the Rich, According to Progressive Economists
Stephen Rosenfeld

6 comments:

Dan Lynch said...

About time somebody condensed the 115 page report to a bullet list. :-) Who in the hell is going to read a 115 page report? Typical out of touch elitists?

That said, Rosenfeld's list includes a lot of weasel words like "better regulate," "improved regulation," "enforce existing rules," "reform Federal Reserve governance," "restructure CEO pay," and "restore balance."

Re: the FTT and "Tax undesirable behavior." Why not regulate undesirable behavior, instead?

Re: "Reform monetary policy to give higher priority to full employment." Obviously MMT does not see monetary policy as the right tool.

Re: "Have government set the standards by attaching strong pro-worker stipulations to its contracts." Why not not instead pass pro-worker laws that apply to all employees ?

Re: "Legislate universal paid sick and family leave." Translation: mandate that employers provide sick leave and family leave. Why not instead have universal paid sick leave & family leave administered directly by the Federal government ?

Re: "Subsidize child care." Why not provide free public child care, instead?

Re: "universal pre-K." This seems to be the lame "liberal" way to advocate universal child care. Note that kids in Finland don't start school until age 7 so there's no strong educational argument for kindergarten let alone pre-K. There is a strong argument for free public child care but "liberals" can't seem to go there.

Re: "reforming tuition financing, restoring protections to student loans." Why not free K-Phd for qualified students, instead?

Re: "Make health care affordable and universal by opening Medicare to all." Medicare is not necessarily affordable -- there are substantial out of pocket expenses and significant limits on what Medicare covers. Why not offer free public health care, instead?

Re: "Expand Social Security with a supplemental public investment program modeled on private Individual Retirement Accounts." Why not pay for public investment and pensions with keystrokes, instead? The purpose of federal taxes is to control inflation, not to "pay for" programs.

All in all these things are steps in the right direction, but lame, and market-based. It's sort of a kinder, gentler neoliberalism. Few people will even bother to read it because it is so long.

Huey Long's 1934 "Share Our Wealth" proposal is still the gold standard for progressive platforms. Bold, simple, and easy to understand.

Roger Erickson said...

Needed, 5 ways to force the lucky few to WANT to reform governance to enhance aggregate, not just parasitic, benefit.

Capitalism per se says nothing about "General Welfare Of The People," nor anything about how to "Form A More Perfect Union."

Tom Hickey said...

All in all these things are steps in the right direction, but lame, and market-based. It's sort of a kinder, gentler neoliberalism.

Theses the problem with so-called progressive reform. It's proposed from within the conventional frame instead of changing the frame. Progressives need to start thinking out of the box.

Tom Hickey said...

Capitalism trumps the Constitution. The Supreme Court makes it so.

Many of us were sounding the alarm at the time of the appointment and confirmation of Roberts and Alito that the real issue was not Roe v. Wade as progressives believed but rather a coup d'etat by corporate interests.

And that is exactly what happened. The Supreme Court has generally been business friendly, for example, the appointment of Justice Powell as a reward for the Powell memo, but this is court is a business lobby, delivering on Citizens United to cement oligarchic democracy in place.

Random said...

TH, presidents can introduce court packing legislation. See e.g. FDR.
But I agree supreme court (and gerrymandering) make left-wing reform difficult.

Dan Lynch said...

Re the Democratic talking point of universal pre-K:
.
Diane Ravitch -- where is the progressive plan for education?

"Not a word about the privatization steam-roller, nor about the attacks on the teaching profession and unions. Nothing about the NCLB-RTTT debacle. Nothing about reversing the federal demands to close schools, to fire teachers, to facilitate data-mining, to promote charters, to accept schools and colleges that operate for profit."