Morning Must-Read: Matthew Yglesias: A 2017 Agenda
A 2017 Agenda: “A 160-page white paper… titled…
…Report of the Commission on Inclusive Prosperity is… the best guide… endorsing fiscal stimulus and a strong pro-labor union agenda… downplaying the strong education-reform streak… no cap-and-trade or carbon tax… no public option for health care… no effort to break up or shrink the largest banks. Nor is there an ambitious agenda to tackle poverty. Instead, you get a multi-pronged push to boost middle-class incomes…. The list of proposed solutions… ranging from more infrastructure spending (with new measures to improve project management on federal infrastructure deals), more preschool, closing corporate tax and inheritance tax loopholes, curbing the deductibility of executive pay, a tax cut for middle class workers, more FHA subsidies for riskier loans… a reiteration of the merits of comprehensive immigration reform… endorsement of labor market regulations not normally associated with the Summers wing of Democratic thinking…. On the non-wage front… paid (gender-neutral) parental leave… universal paid sick days and paid vacation days… a lot to offer Americans who are employed and not impoverished, but nonetheless struggling with stagnant incomes and a sense of pervasive economic insecurity….
The left will find a great deal missing… [no] Elizabeth Warren-style effort to dethrone giant banks… no support for the Financial Transaction Tax…. Nor is there much of an anti-poverty agenda… value of education… in the frame of liberal-friendly proposals for subsidizing preschool and college…
I was not surprised at the absence of a healthcare public-option from the agenda. This, once again, is an issue that looks very different on the different sides of the North Atlantic. And on this side of the North Atlantic, my view is that we have made a number of very large bets with the Affordable Care Act and we need to see how those bets pay off before we start monkeying with the healthcare finance and regulation system yet again. Revisiting the ACA is for the 2024 agenda, not the 2017 one.
The explicit absence of an antipoverty program seems to me to reflect acceptance of Wendell Primus’s dictum that “a program for poor people is a poor program”, and that universalist social democracy aimed at opportunity is a more effective road to poverty reduction than programs aimed at those specifically and currently poor that create notches and are under constant budgetary threat from the political process.
And as for finance… Well, what can you expect? As the very sharp Tom Ferguson says at every opportunity, even though the Democratic Party in America today does, unlike the Republican Party, have somewhat of a mass financing base, its functioning still depends on raising money from elites. For today’s Democratic Party, those elites are:
- Hollywood,
- Silicon Valley,
- Trial lawyers, and
- The one-third of Wall Street derived from the traditionally-Jewish investment banks.
True public funding of elections might make a difference. But advocacy of Wall Street regulatory reforms require that the regulated believe that the reforms are intended not to punish them but rather to stabilize their businesses against risk. And even though things like Dodd-Frank are primarily stabilization-directed, the regulated are skeptical.