Raise the federal minimum wage! Simple concept, direct immediate impact, long overdue. GOP resolutely on wong unpopular side of the issue. Why that wasn’t a central plank of the Harris campaign and every Democratic Congressional campaign is beyond me.
Separate from this discussion, why is Musk going after the government so aggressively? Because he knows that to resolve the long term debt problem, the wealthy must pay more tax and he's working to destroy the capacity to tax HIM.
I would argue that progressives need to start doing politics at the national level again. We’ve been too top down, relying on courts, executive orders and creaky institutions to accomplish our policy goals rather than building a movement from the bottom up. (We do a lot better at the local or state level.)
I know you are a policy guy, but, at this moment, the politics and policy have to be tightly aligned. We need to sell a skeptical public on the idea that collective action works for them.
Second, We have an enormous problem with our best and brightest working in finance and consulting and not solving big problems. We are not putting men on the moon nor curing cancer nor fixing education. Instead "our seed corn" like my own son, U Mich engineering, is trying to get rich Rather than help this country.
As you are not already a subscriber, may I invite you to subscribe (for free) to my substack, "Radical Centrist?" https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/
I write mainly about US monetary policy, US fiscal policy, trade/industrial policy, and climate change policy.
I have my opinions about which US political party is least bad and they are not hard to figure out, but I try to keep my analysis of the issues non-partisan.
Keynes said, “Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”
Let's talk Industrial Policy, as being applied, with spectacular local results, in little tiny Sierra County, California, the birthplace and epicenter of Brown-Newsom-Biden forestry policy.
Infrastructure Act funding has gone to accelerate California's investments in thinning the forests, so they don't all go up in smoke and CO2 all at once, and so that the World's Best Carbon Banks---forests in recovery, grabbing CO2 from the air and packing into homes for the birds and bees, and ultimately massive, hydrocarbon-rich, very long-lasting root systems.
We can do this in Sierra County, and proudly proclaim "We Did This." And we will continue, with or without the help of you all. Happily, Brother Jerry heard our call, and Brother Gavin's Administration, leveraging Biden, has delivered on the $$ front.
Now if we could persuade the brainiacs that we started this, we are doing it, and it is really annoying, as well as spectacularly poor political practice, when their institutions and students get in the way..
What we would really like is for My Fellow Wonks to wake up to what we are doing here, and help rather than hinder our work.
We are building a carbon economy, a prototype that can apply to the upper watersheds of the Yangtze, Irrawady, Amazon and Congo, as it does above the North Yuba and Middle Fork Feather. We welcome tourists, especially the academic type (I am indebted to Susan Strange of the LSE for the term "academic tourist." Professor Strange assured me that she was describing neither me nor John Zysman...
When I was a pup, at the Reagan-era NSF while Krugman was spinning his wheels over in the land of tax-cut mania, I got sat down with four senior scientists, from (if I remember) Polar Program, Atmospheric Sciences, an ocean guy, and my boss (a sociologist, but he counts, being another Berkeleyian, a sociologist of science).
The leader of the pack summed up by telling me that when I got to his age, if I wasn't staying up nights worrying about climate change, I would have taken a wrong turn in life.
Now I am mostly awake because I am excited by what we are showing in our little lab, now working at scale with the Biden-landmark North Yuba Project --- full watershed fuel treatments chosen under the logic of maximize EV Tonnes Avoided Carbon, with a preference for rubber wheels and hand work over the steel tracked machines of the industrial forests.
I am excited because Bubba, Loyalton High School Class of 2023, has been fully employed at wages negotiated by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, and because Bubba (that is his handle, he is a big guy) thinks that "Forests Union"ever sounds good (never ever let Loyalton boys loose with acronyms), because he knows that the unions work for him, as they did for his great grandpa in this old Wobbly country.
I am excited because We Did This in California, because you know, Berkeley Political Economy, but we are also doing in Nevada (Sierra County cares for Tahoe). We can do it in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where Paul Bunyan cut down all the giant white pines before moving to Westwood (just north, in Lassen County), and in Maine, where Bunyan's ancestors turned the great forests into the Royal Navy. We can do it in the Ozarks, where so many of our people have family, who taught me to talk in ways that amaze and charm the women I have met from the mountains of North Carolina and West Virginia, where also the forests were once paradises of large trees of many species, an ecosystem that we humans have always always found a good place to live.
That is Industrial Policy. We saw the market failure ---- unpriced Atmospheric CO2, which we can Avoid. We put some resources in to get things going. And now the magic of capitalist growth, in a small-now economy that is built on TAC optimization (increase the Avoided, decrease the Atmospheric), with an exchange rate ($/TAC) available as a policy variable so that the TAC economy doesn't crush the $ economy too fast...
Thank you Wonks! Wonks of the World Unite! You have nothing to lose but your tenure!
With some support from outside our Third District I would be its first Geysir Candidate, looking for younger people to carry on our work, and protect Bubba's job.
i've been replying to my own comments since Usenet. Comp.Text.Tex! Alt.Fan.Grateful-Dead! Alt.Fan.Dan-Quayle and the Official Internet Quayle Quotes Archive!
The Internet was Industrial Policy. I was an early business user at the NSF when we were rolling it out to the bitnet folks.
Jared calls on us all to mobilize. You bet. That's why I am calling myself a Geysir Candidate, although of course Geysir Professor of Political Economy back home at Berkeley is the better fit.
I have been pleading with the University of California, specifically my second home, the DIvision of Agriculture and Natural Resources, to help us with our project. We captured the State of California (the Task Force was a response to our request for help, with which he had the help of our neighboring Plumas and Nevada Counties, and eventually 35 California Counties, of which some of you have heard of Los Angeles County),
The trouble is, perhaps, was that when I personally thanked and appreciated Vice President Humiston for coming to the Sierra County Economic Development Commission to report on the University's initiative to re-open the Loyalton Cogen, and buttered her up with my best impression of Al Gore (got some Mountain talk in there) preaching industry-government-academic partnership, the first words out of Vice President Humiston's mouth were:
I can't believe how stupid you people are.
The Sierra County Planning Department retains, I believe, the recording, since my wife and I disagree on her exact wording, if not the sharpness of the insult.
So yeah. Battle stations.
DeLong,, you are way overdue on this. You guys have built a high wall between yourselves and the rest of us. Get out of your tower and come up to the mountains. You can stay in Truckee, with all the other tourists. I'll give you a tour, including the World's Largest Slashpile, on the facility site in Loyalton, there because the University of California had no business thinking it should build Glenda a nice vacation spot, er, private campus, right in the logistics yard of the most important biomass handling site in California, complete with (for a while) functional 20 MW steam turbine to burn all that excess biomass that is killing our forests.
Hey UC Lawyers, I've told you over and over again to get this settled, I'm on your side (sometimes). If this helps, the Governor's Appointee who talked you into financing this failure, and getting his old bosses boss Al Gore to visit, is known locally as "Jason's BiLIBiL".
In my root comment I noted the fondness of Loyalton Boys for creativity in acronym's.
The fool that is hiding from his angry investors, and from the land trusts that he has been funding in the Northern Sierra, is indeed My Brother-in-Law's Idiot Brother-in-Law. Billy-Bill is how you pronounce the acronym. His wife used to call him David. I suspect her language has coarsened since he tried dabbling in California politics.
Tourists.
This is why we started the Political Economy (of Industrial Societies) major, so that California would have people to kick the Golden Bear in the ass when needed.
More for the UC Lawyers, who don't know how to settle.
Loyalton is part of Greater Metro Reno, at least in terms of power system economics. Reno is also home to the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony, a wonderful community which includes some of the famous Berkeley-Oakland Brothers and Sisters, known for breakfasts-for-children programs that brought Sister Barbara Lee into the movement. Hail the Oakland Paiute, and the San Francisco Washoe who are still serving breakfast in the Mission.
We all buy our smoking materials from our friends and neighbors in the Colony, and the Colony leadership knows that Loyalton is a "good town."
The Colony has established an awesome working relationship with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), acting as a one-stop-shop for the wind-farm-and-transmission project between Wyoming and LA.
LADWP's banker, the Anschutz Corporation, is trusted by the Colony in part because the Attorney-in-Charge, with her brother and sister, were friendly with their high-school classmates from the Colony. Are friendly: some friendships are forever, as are mine with my cousins.
Anschutz knows all about the University of California's Loyalton face-plant, and recognizes that the Idiot had also failed his fiduciary duty to a bunch of other Green investors, specifically including from the community centered on Presidio Heights, presumably including the family of the Governor's wife (I went to school on Pacific Heights, which I so much like telling my Cow Holler Holler joke).
I believe that LADWP is working, this time with the Berkshire-Hathaway unit Nevada Energy, to reinforce transmission into/from the Plumas Sierra Rural Electric Coop. I don't know this, am extrapolating from too few data points, but from a technical perspective it makes sense, and will support a large-scale integrated gasification combined-cycle facility at Loyalton, as well as smaller community chip-burners across Plumas and Sierra Counties.
Anschutz always has room for more qualified investors on its projects.
When I tells UC "Settle," I mean get all your co-victims of My BiLIBil together, even let BilIBiL stay in thanks to the grace of the Christians of Sierra County and Reno, and ask Anschutz if they can, for example, get going on financing forests-health biomass generation at Loyalton.
EZ Squeezy! There are forests full of opportunities to turn dollars into carbon-capturing assets.
If we do not fight aggressively with real economic populism, the outcome is already decided—an oligarchy where billionaires hoard assets while the middle class is pushed into financial servitude. . We must demand that the wealth of the nation is not siphoned upward into billionaire hands while the working class is forced into a modern serfdom.
All the points are spot on but, until Democrats forcefully address immigration. Nothing matters. There has to be some limit. Much as I would like to we can't take everyone. There is a limit to our capacity and resources.
We could link immigration to sector level wages, incomes and employment.
“In this piece, Jared Bernstein dismantles the empty promises of faux populism and argues that the real solutions—rebuilding worker bargaining power, progressive taxation, a public sector that works for working Americans, and smart harvesting of our share of the enormous benefits from global economic integration—are hiding in plain sight.”
I disagree with quite a bit of it, particularly where it actually amounts to “faux populism,” in particular the continuing absurd cult of “strong” unions. “Strong” unions certainly did not cause prosperity in the Thirties, because the country was not prosperous in the first place. In the forties, fifties, and sixties, they were the result of prosperity rather than a cause. Robert Gordon’s well known book, “The Rise and Fall of American Growth”, argues (convincingly, to my mind) that the “Golden” Fifties and Sixties were not the result of top down economic policies but bottom up economic conditions—such things as a massive rebound in the civilian economy after twenty years of depression and war, the maturation of “vital” technologies like the internal combustion engine (oil replacing coal) and electricity, the increase in the educational level of the general population, and the “baby boom” increase in population—all of them “one time only” events that cannot be replicated simply because it would be convenient if they could.
American consumer products in the fifties and sixties were often of much lower quality than they would have been if there had been “true competition”, but that didn’t matter, because they were still much better than were available anywhere else in the world. The U.S. had mastered mass production back in the 1920s, but fifty years later the rest of the world, principally Germany and Japan, were just beginning to catch up. In 1973, Richard Nixon took the U.S. off the gold standard to increase our international competitiveness. We were beginning to lose our edge. He also inadvertently triggered a massive increase in oil prices, which, though no one knew it, was the beginning of the end.
Ronald Reagan is the great bogyman of the decline of American unionism, but it was Jimmy Carter who got the ball rolling, deregulating trucking, airlines, and railroads, and quite deliberately reducing the bargaining power of unions. Why did he do it? Because the soaring cost of fuel meant a soaring cost of shipping. Previously, the ICC had divided up the country, assigning monopoly routes to specific companies. Customers had no choice but to pay the price demanded, which allowed the companies to “buy” labor peace with high wages and generous benefits. This was tolerable with low fuel prices and a constantly expanding economy. It was not tolerable with high fuel prices and a stalled economy.
Both companies and labor unions in the U.S. had naturally adapted to the “fat” years and had grown fat themselves. When it came time to go on a diet, they failed. In 1981, as a reporter of sorts, I sat in a committee room in the Capitol and watched Lynn Williams, head of the Steelworkers Union, beg for tariffs: “The Korean steel mills are state of the art,” he said. “We can’t compete.”
Those were his exact words. The U.S., in 1981, is an industrial backwater. History has passed us by. We can only sit and mourn our lost empire while the South Koreans go on to write the new chapters in the economic history of the world.
More recently, of course, the U.S. longshoremen’s union has demanded no increases in productivity FOREVER! That is their bargaining position.
The “faux populism” of the Biden administration made exactly the same fetish of “strong unions” that Mr. Bernstein does. What this amounts to in practice is the coddling of public employees unions, most spectacularly the teachers’ unions, of course, whose record of “success”, particularly in your own state of California, is a matter of some dispute. Have one of your grad students compare the recent NAEP scores for California’s black students with those of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida. I think you’ll be embarrassed.
As for tariffs, well, Biden simply expanded on what Trump started. Considering the current political climate, maybe it was impossible to do anything else.
Okay, this is long enough. But please stop fantasizing about “strong unions”.
Need more like this. Next time, please add a preamble. These things all fall out of something like serving the middle and lower income levels, and increasing public security, and preventing oligarchic and corporate corruption. Outline whatever it is up front, so the rest can be deduced. Agree? If so, what else? How about ending Congress' ability to do insider trading?
Great piece! Would it be possible to work in the thought somewhere that we are also for a just society and a political system that values adherence to just laws?
Are too many of our best and brightest in finance? Adoption of a Tobin tax could have broad appeal, and long run benefits, though requires some international diplomacy and domestic backbone?
Great ideas Jared. I'm a big fan of Ohio's "silicon heartland" effort with Intel building a leading edge fab supported by employee training such as Engineering programs at Ohio State University and other colleges and technical training. A one time tax break or a tariff will do nothing. In this day and age building a true sustainable manufacturing base takes a coordinated effort among many groups and the will power to stay with it an see it through. That is the way the American economy was built and later the Chinese manufacturing base. TSMC did not just arise in Taiwan due to free market forces, it took many decades of planning and government support. I hope we can find a way to continue the great work that Biden/Harris and you began.
I hope you addressed this to every member of the House and the Senate in both parties.
COMMON SENSE! How refreshing. If only there were enough politicians who had some. And if they do then they just need to stiffen their backs and say NO to many of these new orders, because they seem to have forgotten about the three co-equal branches of our government. Most of these new”orders” are blatantly unconstitutional.
I think that they have forgotten that elected office was never meant to be a Career. Otherwise they would not be afraid to speak out against the corruption. They are now being threatened by an unelected billionaire with primary fights paid for by that man. This should be illegal anyway but since most of the Supreme Court justices back the administration they are afraid to fight in the courts. The answers are still STRENGTH IN NUMBERS. Vote in every election local, State and federal and maybe there will be changes. Until then I suggest flooding the same elected officials in each level of government with letters, emails and phone calls and if possible personal visits to keep the pressure on them and remind them that WE THE PEOPLE, ELECTED THEM! The power is with the people.
This is the right policy mix but we have to work on the labels. For example, “Regulations” should be “Fair Competition.” In other words focus on the objective, not the means. Or “Fair and Secure Immigration.” The word “fair” might be a repeating adjective here.
Raise the federal minimum wage! Simple concept, direct immediate impact, long overdue. GOP resolutely on wong unpopular side of the issue. Why that wasn’t a central plank of the Harris campaign and every Democratic Congressional campaign is beyond me.
Politically, I don't know. Economically, a more generous, wage like EITC is a better way to transfer income to low income workers.
Separate from this discussion, why is Musk going after the government so aggressively? Because he knows that to resolve the long term debt problem, the wealthy must pay more tax and he's working to destroy the capacity to tax HIM.
Great agenda!
I would argue that progressives need to start doing politics at the national level again. We’ve been too top down, relying on courts, executive orders and creaky institutions to accomplish our policy goals rather than building a movement from the bottom up. (We do a lot better at the local or state level.)
I know you are a policy guy, but, at this moment, the politics and policy have to be tightly aligned. We need to sell a skeptical public on the idea that collective action works for them.
Second, We have an enormous problem with our best and brightest working in finance and consulting and not solving big problems. We are not putting men on the moon nor curing cancer nor fixing education. Instead "our seed corn" like my own son, U Mich engineering, is trying to get rich Rather than help this country.
Hi
As you are not already a subscriber, may I invite you to subscribe (for free) to my substack, "Radical Centrist?" https://thomaslhutcheson.substack.com/
I write mainly about US monetary policy, US fiscal policy, trade/industrial policy, and climate change policy.
I have my opinions about which US political party is least bad and they are not hard to figure out, but I try to keep my analysis of the issues non-partisan.
Keynes said, “Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”
I want to be that scribbler.
Thanks,
Let's talk Industrial Policy, as being applied, with spectacular local results, in little tiny Sierra County, California, the birthplace and epicenter of Brown-Newsom-Biden forestry policy.
Infrastructure Act funding has gone to accelerate California's investments in thinning the forests, so they don't all go up in smoke and CO2 all at once, and so that the World's Best Carbon Banks---forests in recovery, grabbing CO2 from the air and packing into homes for the birds and bees, and ultimately massive, hydrocarbon-rich, very long-lasting root systems.
We can do this in Sierra County, and proudly proclaim "We Did This." And we will continue, with or without the help of you all. Happily, Brother Jerry heard our call, and Brother Gavin's Administration, leveraging Biden, has delivered on the $$ front.
Now if we could persuade the brainiacs that we started this, we are doing it, and it is really annoying, as well as spectacularly poor political practice, when their institutions and students get in the way..
What we would really like is for My Fellow Wonks to wake up to what we are doing here, and help rather than hinder our work.
We are building a carbon economy, a prototype that can apply to the upper watersheds of the Yangtze, Irrawady, Amazon and Congo, as it does above the North Yuba and Middle Fork Feather. We welcome tourists, especially the academic type (I am indebted to Susan Strange of the LSE for the term "academic tourist." Professor Strange assured me that she was describing neither me nor John Zysman...
When I was a pup, at the Reagan-era NSF while Krugman was spinning his wheels over in the land of tax-cut mania, I got sat down with four senior scientists, from (if I remember) Polar Program, Atmospheric Sciences, an ocean guy, and my boss (a sociologist, but he counts, being another Berkeleyian, a sociologist of science).
The leader of the pack summed up by telling me that when I got to his age, if I wasn't staying up nights worrying about climate change, I would have taken a wrong turn in life.
Now I am mostly awake because I am excited by what we are showing in our little lab, now working at scale with the Biden-landmark North Yuba Project --- full watershed fuel treatments chosen under the logic of maximize EV Tonnes Avoided Carbon, with a preference for rubber wheels and hand work over the steel tracked machines of the industrial forests.
I am excited because Bubba, Loyalton High School Class of 2023, has been fully employed at wages negotiated by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, and because Bubba (that is his handle, he is a big guy) thinks that "Forests Union"ever sounds good (never ever let Loyalton boys loose with acronyms), because he knows that the unions work for him, as they did for his great grandpa in this old Wobbly country.
I am excited because We Did This in California, because you know, Berkeley Political Economy, but we are also doing in Nevada (Sierra County cares for Tahoe). We can do it in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where Paul Bunyan cut down all the giant white pines before moving to Westwood (just north, in Lassen County), and in Maine, where Bunyan's ancestors turned the great forests into the Royal Navy. We can do it in the Ozarks, where so many of our people have family, who taught me to talk in ways that amaze and charm the women I have met from the mountains of North Carolina and West Virginia, where also the forests were once paradises of large trees of many species, an ecosystem that we humans have always always found a good place to live.
That is Industrial Policy. We saw the market failure ---- unpriced Atmospheric CO2, which we can Avoid. We put some resources in to get things going. And now the magic of capitalist growth, in a small-now economy that is built on TAC optimization (increase the Avoided, decrease the Atmospheric), with an exchange rate ($/TAC) available as a policy variable so that the TAC economy doesn't crush the $ economy too fast...
Thank you Wonks! Wonks of the World Unite! You have nothing to lose but your tenure!
With some support from outside our Third District I would be its first Geysir Candidate, looking for younger people to carry on our work, and protect Bubba's job.
i've been replying to my own comments since Usenet. Comp.Text.Tex! Alt.Fan.Grateful-Dead! Alt.Fan.Dan-Quayle and the Official Internet Quayle Quotes Archive!
The Internet was Industrial Policy. I was an early business user at the NSF when we were rolling it out to the bitnet folks.
Jared calls on us all to mobilize. You bet. That's why I am calling myself a Geysir Candidate, although of course Geysir Professor of Political Economy back home at Berkeley is the better fit.
I have been pleading with the University of California, specifically my second home, the DIvision of Agriculture and Natural Resources, to help us with our project. We captured the State of California (the Task Force was a response to our request for help, with which he had the help of our neighboring Plumas and Nevada Counties, and eventually 35 California Counties, of which some of you have heard of Los Angeles County),
The trouble is, perhaps, was that when I personally thanked and appreciated Vice President Humiston for coming to the Sierra County Economic Development Commission to report on the University's initiative to re-open the Loyalton Cogen, and buttered her up with my best impression of Al Gore (got some Mountain talk in there) preaching industry-government-academic partnership, the first words out of Vice President Humiston's mouth were:
I can't believe how stupid you people are.
The Sierra County Planning Department retains, I believe, the recording, since my wife and I disagree on her exact wording, if not the sharpness of the insult.
So yeah. Battle stations.
DeLong,, you are way overdue on this. You guys have built a high wall between yourselves and the rest of us. Get out of your tower and come up to the mountains. You can stay in Truckee, with all the other tourists. I'll give you a tour, including the World's Largest Slashpile, on the facility site in Loyalton, there because the University of California had no business thinking it should build Glenda a nice vacation spot, er, private campus, right in the logistics yard of the most important biomass handling site in California, complete with (for a while) functional 20 MW steam turbine to burn all that excess biomass that is killing our forests.
Hey UC Lawyers, I've told you over and over again to get this settled, I'm on your side (sometimes). If this helps, the Governor's Appointee who talked you into financing this failure, and getting his old bosses boss Al Gore to visit, is known locally as "Jason's BiLIBiL".
In my root comment I noted the fondness of Loyalton Boys for creativity in acronym's.
The fool that is hiding from his angry investors, and from the land trusts that he has been funding in the Northern Sierra, is indeed My Brother-in-Law's Idiot Brother-in-Law. Billy-Bill is how you pronounce the acronym. His wife used to call him David. I suspect her language has coarsened since he tried dabbling in California politics.
Tourists.
This is why we started the Political Economy (of Industrial Societies) major, so that California would have people to kick the Golden Bear in the ass when needed.
Go Bears.
PEIS 1980. Fancy degrees elsewhere. Loyalton always.
More for the UC Lawyers, who don't know how to settle.
Loyalton is part of Greater Metro Reno, at least in terms of power system economics. Reno is also home to the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony, a wonderful community which includes some of the famous Berkeley-Oakland Brothers and Sisters, known for breakfasts-for-children programs that brought Sister Barbara Lee into the movement. Hail the Oakland Paiute, and the San Francisco Washoe who are still serving breakfast in the Mission.
We all buy our smoking materials from our friends and neighbors in the Colony, and the Colony leadership knows that Loyalton is a "good town."
The Colony has established an awesome working relationship with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), acting as a one-stop-shop for the wind-farm-and-transmission project between Wyoming and LA.
LADWP's banker, the Anschutz Corporation, is trusted by the Colony in part because the Attorney-in-Charge, with her brother and sister, were friendly with their high-school classmates from the Colony. Are friendly: some friendships are forever, as are mine with my cousins.
Anschutz knows all about the University of California's Loyalton face-plant, and recognizes that the Idiot had also failed his fiduciary duty to a bunch of other Green investors, specifically including from the community centered on Presidio Heights, presumably including the family of the Governor's wife (I went to school on Pacific Heights, which I so much like telling my Cow Holler Holler joke).
I believe that LADWP is working, this time with the Berkshire-Hathaway unit Nevada Energy, to reinforce transmission into/from the Plumas Sierra Rural Electric Coop. I don't know this, am extrapolating from too few data points, but from a technical perspective it makes sense, and will support a large-scale integrated gasification combined-cycle facility at Loyalton, as well as smaller community chip-burners across Plumas and Sierra Counties.
Anschutz always has room for more qualified investors on its projects.
When I tells UC "Settle," I mean get all your co-victims of My BiLIBil together, even let BilIBiL stay in thanks to the grace of the Christians of Sierra County and Reno, and ask Anschutz if they can, for example, get going on financing forests-health biomass generation at Loyalton.
EZ Squeezy! There are forests full of opportunities to turn dollars into carbon-capturing assets.
Action Stations!
If we do not fight aggressively with real economic populism, the outcome is already decided—an oligarchy where billionaires hoard assets while the middle class is pushed into financial servitude. . We must demand that the wealth of the nation is not siphoned upward into billionaire hands while the working class is forced into a modern serfdom.
All the points are spot on but, until Democrats forcefully address immigration. Nothing matters. There has to be some limit. Much as I would like to we can't take everyone. There is a limit to our capacity and resources.
We could link immigration to sector level wages, incomes and employment.
The political-economic platform listed does not imply fiscal policy.
Government was funding those externalities because that was how DEMs bought votes.
Coase shows how private markets can do the same.
Social efficiency does not have to obtain in the absence of social equity.
“In this piece, Jared Bernstein dismantles the empty promises of faux populism and argues that the real solutions—rebuilding worker bargaining power, progressive taxation, a public sector that works for working Americans, and smart harvesting of our share of the enormous benefits from global economic integration—are hiding in plain sight.”
I disagree with quite a bit of it, particularly where it actually amounts to “faux populism,” in particular the continuing absurd cult of “strong” unions. “Strong” unions certainly did not cause prosperity in the Thirties, because the country was not prosperous in the first place. In the forties, fifties, and sixties, they were the result of prosperity rather than a cause. Robert Gordon’s well known book, “The Rise and Fall of American Growth”, argues (convincingly, to my mind) that the “Golden” Fifties and Sixties were not the result of top down economic policies but bottom up economic conditions—such things as a massive rebound in the civilian economy after twenty years of depression and war, the maturation of “vital” technologies like the internal combustion engine (oil replacing coal) and electricity, the increase in the educational level of the general population, and the “baby boom” increase in population—all of them “one time only” events that cannot be replicated simply because it would be convenient if they could.
American consumer products in the fifties and sixties were often of much lower quality than they would have been if there had been “true competition”, but that didn’t matter, because they were still much better than were available anywhere else in the world. The U.S. had mastered mass production back in the 1920s, but fifty years later the rest of the world, principally Germany and Japan, were just beginning to catch up. In 1973, Richard Nixon took the U.S. off the gold standard to increase our international competitiveness. We were beginning to lose our edge. He also inadvertently triggered a massive increase in oil prices, which, though no one knew it, was the beginning of the end.
Ronald Reagan is the great bogyman of the decline of American unionism, but it was Jimmy Carter who got the ball rolling, deregulating trucking, airlines, and railroads, and quite deliberately reducing the bargaining power of unions. Why did he do it? Because the soaring cost of fuel meant a soaring cost of shipping. Previously, the ICC had divided up the country, assigning monopoly routes to specific companies. Customers had no choice but to pay the price demanded, which allowed the companies to “buy” labor peace with high wages and generous benefits. This was tolerable with low fuel prices and a constantly expanding economy. It was not tolerable with high fuel prices and a stalled economy.
Both companies and labor unions in the U.S. had naturally adapted to the “fat” years and had grown fat themselves. When it came time to go on a diet, they failed. In 1981, as a reporter of sorts, I sat in a committee room in the Capitol and watched Lynn Williams, head of the Steelworkers Union, beg for tariffs: “The Korean steel mills are state of the art,” he said. “We can’t compete.”
Those were his exact words. The U.S., in 1981, is an industrial backwater. History has passed us by. We can only sit and mourn our lost empire while the South Koreans go on to write the new chapters in the economic history of the world.
More recently, of course, the U.S. longshoremen’s union has demanded no increases in productivity FOREVER! That is their bargaining position.
The “faux populism” of the Biden administration made exactly the same fetish of “strong unions” that Mr. Bernstein does. What this amounts to in practice is the coddling of public employees unions, most spectacularly the teachers’ unions, of course, whose record of “success”, particularly in your own state of California, is a matter of some dispute. Have one of your grad students compare the recent NAEP scores for California’s black students with those of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Florida. I think you’ll be embarrassed.
As for tariffs, well, Biden simply expanded on what Trump started. Considering the current political climate, maybe it was impossible to do anything else.
Okay, this is long enough. But please stop fantasizing about “strong unions”.
Need more like this. Next time, please add a preamble. These things all fall out of something like serving the middle and lower income levels, and increasing public security, and preventing oligarchic and corporate corruption. Outline whatever it is up front, so the rest can be deduced. Agree? If so, what else? How about ending Congress' ability to do insider trading?
Great piece! Would it be possible to work in the thought somewhere that we are also for a just society and a political system that values adherence to just laws?
You might want to add rule of law? Because one can't take that for granted anymore and none of the other stuff works without it.
Are too many of our best and brightest in finance? Adoption of a Tobin tax could have broad appeal, and long run benefits, though requires some international diplomacy and domestic backbone?
Great ideas Jared. I'm a big fan of Ohio's "silicon heartland" effort with Intel building a leading edge fab supported by employee training such as Engineering programs at Ohio State University and other colleges and technical training. A one time tax break or a tariff will do nothing. In this day and age building a true sustainable manufacturing base takes a coordinated effort among many groups and the will power to stay with it an see it through. That is the way the American economy was built and later the Chinese manufacturing base. TSMC did not just arise in Taiwan due to free market forces, it took many decades of planning and government support. I hope we can find a way to continue the great work that Biden/Harris and you began.
I hope you addressed this to every member of the House and the Senate in both parties.
COMMON SENSE! How refreshing. If only there were enough politicians who had some. And if they do then they just need to stiffen their backs and say NO to many of these new orders, because they seem to have forgotten about the three co-equal branches of our government. Most of these new”orders” are blatantly unconstitutional.
I think that they have forgotten that elected office was never meant to be a Career. Otherwise they would not be afraid to speak out against the corruption. They are now being threatened by an unelected billionaire with primary fights paid for by that man. This should be illegal anyway but since most of the Supreme Court justices back the administration they are afraid to fight in the courts. The answers are still STRENGTH IN NUMBERS. Vote in every election local, State and federal and maybe there will be changes. Until then I suggest flooding the same elected officials in each level of government with letters, emails and phone calls and if possible personal visits to keep the pressure on them and remind them that WE THE PEOPLE, ELECTED THEM! The power is with the people.
This is the right policy mix but we have to work on the labels. For example, “Regulations” should be “Fair Competition.” In other words focus on the objective, not the means. Or “Fair and Secure Immigration.” The word “fair” might be a repeating adjective here.