Should-Read: James Kwak: The Importance of Fairness: A New Economic Vision for the Democratic Party

Should-Read: This, from the extremely sharp James Kwak is—if I may say so—itself unfair.

The claim that Barack Obama had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate is especially so.

Yes, Obama made a lot of mistakes. Yes, his bonding with a let’s-calm-down-and-not-do-anything-rash Tim Geithner who had no clue about the situation was very damaging. Yes, the Democrats had 60 votes in the Senate for six months. But that wasn’t Obama’s filibuster-proof majority: that was Max Baucus, Ben Nelson, Blanche Lincoln, Tom Carper, and Joe Lieberman’s filibuster-proof majority. This is not uncommon: the present Senate majority is not Donald Trump’s or Mitch McConnell’s; it is John McCain, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski’s majority:

James Kwak: The Importance of Fairness: A New Economic Vision for the Democratic Party: “A central shortcoming of the party is that, on economic issues, it has nothing to say to people trapped on the wrong side of our country’s growing inequality divide… https://baselinescenario.com/2017/06/15/telling-a-better-story-a-new-economic-vision-for-the-democratic-party/

…Hillary Clinton won the “working class” (household income less than $50,000) vote, but by a much smaller margin than Barack Obama in 2012 or 2008—despite Donald Trump’s ardent efforts to alienate African-Americans and Latinos. Some people voted for Trump because of racism or misogyny. But Clinton was also flattened by Trump among voters who feel their financial situation was worse than a year before or who think that life will be worse for the next generation. She lost the Electoral College in the “rust belt” states of the Upper Midwest, whose economies have never fully recovered from the decline of American manufacturing. The Democratic Party was once the party of working people. So why is it increasingly becoming the party of well-educated, socially tolerant, cosmopolitan city-dwellers? Because, in an age of stagnant median incomes and a disintegrating social safety net, Democrats have no economic message for the many people who are struggling to make ends meet, to pay for college, to stay in a home, or to save for retirement….

While Republicans say, “Free markets solve all problems,” Democrats respond, “Free markets solve most problems, but markets sometimes fail, so sometimes they need to be judiciously regulated to produce efficient outcomes.” This may be more accurate, but it undermines Democrats’ appeal to people who have not benefited from overall economic growth—because they have the wrong skills, live in the wrong place, got sick at the wrong time, or otherwise got unlucky. The second problem is that economism lite doesn’t work, at least not anymore….

The failure of overall economic growth to benefit the middle and working classes is not solely or even primarily the Democrats’ fault. The villain in that story is the Republican conservatives who weakened unions, undermined the social safety net, and slashed taxes on the rich. Globalization and competition from low-wage countries were another factor. But since the onslaught of the conservative revolution, Democrats have played defense by claiming the space once occupied by moderate Republicans. Recall the pivot to deficit reduction in 1993, welfare reform in 1996, the capital gains tax cut of 1997, the commitment to free trade agreements from NAFTA to TPP, and the bipartisan commitment to financial deregulation that helped produce the devastating financial crisis of 2008. Barack Obama temporarily had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and yet his principal accomplishments were an economic stimulus bill that was more than one-third tax cuts; a health care plan modeled on Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts reforms; a technocratic financial reform bill that neither reduced the dominance of the megabanks that caused the 2008 crisis nor, judging from subsequent experience, deterred them from serial lawbreaking; and a financial system rescue that kept the big banks (and their executives and shareholders) afloat while they fraudulently foreclosed on millions of homeowners….

One of the central themes of my book is that economism is an ideological worldview: a lens through which we see the world, which affects the way we interpret reality and serves the interests of certain groups. Logically, it can only be overthrown by another worldview. And so the book ends this way:

Millions if not billions of people today hunger to live in a world that is more fair, more forgiving, and more humane than the one that we were born into. Creating a new vision of society worthy of that collective yearning—one that goes beyond the false promises of economism—is the first step toward building a better future for our children. That is the story that remains to be written.

What the Democratic Party needs is an economic message that: addresses the real problems that many Americans face on a daily basis (instead of callously insisting that “America is already great”); and resonates with their very real frustrations and anxieties….

Investment bankers and hedge fund managers work hard for long hours… make millions, tens of millions, or hundreds of millions of dollars…. Hotel housekeepers, retail store cashiers, fast food restaurant employees, and migrant agricultural workers also work hard for long hours. They often make less than twenty thousand dollars per year. Many work multiple jobs to make sure their families have enough to eat. Homebuyers who were overly optimistic or who didn’t read their mortgage terms carefully are kicked out of their homes, their savings obliterated and their credit shredded. The banks and law firms that foreclosed on them, using false affidavits robosigned by fictional executives, escape with nominal monetary penalties…. For-profit universities entice students to take out thousands of dollars of loans, then fail to give them the education they need to get a job…. University executives and shareholders enjoy large bonuses and rising stock prices.

Children born to well-off families have the full attention of two highly educated parents from birth. They go to private pre-schools from age two and then to economically segregated elementary schools where they are surrounded by equally fortunate peers. Their afternoons are filled with organized sports, music lessons, and other enrichment activities. Children born to poor families are often raised by only one parent who did not finish school and works long hours to make ends meet. They make do with haphazard child care arrangements until entering kindergarten at an underfunded public school, already years behind grade level.

This is the world we live in. There is a word for this world: unfair…