Must-Read: James Kwak: The Last Chapter Problem

Must-Read: The bad thing about President-elect Donald Trump is that he has no clue about policy debates. The good thing is that he has, in the past, taken every single possible policy position on both sides in an off-the-cuff fashion. Thus there may be opportunities, depending on who can convince Jared Kushner that his father-in-law needs policies that will actually work:

James Kwak: The Last Chapter Problem: “Bernstein, to his credit, gets the description of the problem out of the way in the first two chapters…

…He devotes the rest of the book to solutions: policy tools that can not only increase growth but, just as importantly, ensure that the benefits of growth are widely shared… expanding automatic stabilizers, spending more on infrastructure, universal pre-school, and maintaining a symmetric monetary policy—that is, not pretending you have an inflation target when what you really have is an inflation ceiling…. Bernstein focuses on the importance of using economic policy to change the pre-tax distribution of income—bolstering the bargaining power of workers so they can demand a larger share of the gains from increases in their own productivity… unions, subsidized jobs and apprenticeship programs to help people gain skills, and ban-the-box rules…. But, as Bernstein writes, turnout by Democratic constituencies “may well hinge on whether they believe a candidate will try to implement a set of policies that convincingly relinks growth and their living standards.”… Democrats… [need to] convince the public that we care about something more than fiscal responsibility and overall economic growth.