Robert Kuttner: Why Liberals Have to Be Radicals

[marmar]

from the American Prospect:


Why Liberals Have to Be Radicals
ROBERT KUTTNER JULY 21, 2015

The reforms needed to restore the country's shared prosperity are to the left of all the candidates, including Sanders.


Just about nothing being proposed in mainstream politics is radical enough to fix what ails the economy. Consider everything that is destroying the life chances of ordinary people:

• Young adults are staggered by $1.3 trillion in student debt. Yet even those with college degrees are losing ground in terms of incomes.

• The economy of regular payroll jobs and career paths has given way to a gig economy of short-term employment that will soon hit four workers in 10.

• The income distribution has become so extreme, with the one percent capturing such a large share of the pie, that even a $15/hour national minimum wage would not be sufficient to restore anything like the more equal economy of three decades ago. Even the mainstream press acknowledges these gaps.

The New York Times's Noam Scheiber, using Bureau of Labor Statistics data, calculated that raising the minimum wage to $15 for the period 2009 to 2014 would have increased the total income for the 44 million Americans who earn less than $15 an hour by a total of $300 billion to $400 billion. But during the same period, Scheiber reported, the top 10 percent increased its income by almost twice that amount.

Scheiber concludes:

So even if we'd raised the minimum wage to $15 an hour, the top 10 percent would still have emerged from the 2009-2014 period with a substantially larger share of the increase in the nation's income than the bottom 90 percent. Inequality would still have increased, just not by as much.

.....(snip).....

Nothing in mainstream politics takes seriously the catastrophe of global climate change. Few mainstream politicians have the nerve to call for a carbon tax.

The budget deadlock and the sequester mechanism, in which both major parties have conspired, makes it impossible to invest the kind of money needed both to modernize outmoded public infrastructure (with a shortfall now estimated at $3.4 trillion) or to finance a green transition.

The economy is so captive to financial engineers that even interest rates close to zero do not help mainstream businesses recover. There is still a vicious circle of inadequate purchasing power and insufficient domestic investment. .............(more)

http://prospect.org/article/why-liberals-have-be-radicals

[Gregorian]

1. Radical is what drove us to this precipice.

You have posted some really solid threads. I really am grateful for what you've posted.




Being responsible isn't radical. What we need is not radical but common sense.

Great article. Someone gets it. Our biggest problem is division. And it's odd, considering almost every American is subject to the stress of their economic configuration. I did not say situation, because anyone can stop working and be stressed. But to work and still be in trouble: that's what took radical engineering.

We need to change the narrative indicating just who is radical. And we need to recognize we're all the 99%. If Americans are too stupid to see what is right in front of them, and not willing to see it when it's pointed out, then we simply burn like Rome did.

And I disagree with the placement of left versus Bernie. He is spot on with regards to the economy.

Having said all of that, the problems as I see it are that not only do we have to instigate change, but it has to happen within a short period of time. Not generations.

We're up against the age old problem of trying to regain equality that is being forced by those with power who want yet more, at our expense.

Nothing happens until Americans wake up and discover they're all in this together.