Government Grows the Economy
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Economist Jeff Madrick, director of policy research at The New School’s Bernard Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis, is among several key speakers at next week’s Building the New Economy conference here in Washington, D.C. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka and United Steelworkers President Leo Gerard also are among keynote speakers. Here, Madrick shares with us why government involvement in the economy is essential to ensure a robust, successful nation.
America had been living a free-market myth for a generation until the credit crisis of 2008 and 2009 descended on the nation—and the world. One expression of that myth, found frequently on the editorial pages of the popular media, was that government does not grow economies, business does. In other words, government, don’t meddle where you’re not needed. Politicians are even easier to belittle than government itself.
Inauguration Day: Party with a Program
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| ‘Lynn for Obama’ volunteers get ready to knock on New Hampshire doors in October as part of the effort to elect Barack Obama president of the United States. |
At our November local union meeting, our vice president, Alex Brown, posed the question: What do you hope for from the Obama presidency? There were a dozen answers, but they boiled down to “bring the jobs back,” “health care” and “bring our soldiers home.”
If hope was results, this would already be the greatest presidency of all time. I admit it—I’ve wasted too much of my time parsing lists of possible Barack Obama appointees and pestering people in Washington I think might know something about who might get which job.
The appointments Obama is making look like the ultimate Bill Clinton comeback. I was happy to work for Clinton over Dole. But President Clinton also brought us the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the “end of welfare as we know it” and the repeal of Roosevelt’s Glass-Stegall Act, which prevented the banks from participating in some of the worst financial speculation. Clinton announced that “the era of Big Government is over.” Each of these acts was a rejection of the New Deal and an accommodation to the neo-liberal policies of free trade, privatization and deregulation. We went from Nixon’s “We’re all Keynesians” to an unspoken, “We’re all neo-liberals.” This is not what I had in mind when I spent my weekends tracking down undecided voters in New Hampshire.
