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.
Government Already Runs Health Care for Millions of Americans
Some people say they don’t want health care reform because they don’t want the government involved. Or—shiver me timbers and pass the Socialist smelling salts—they don’t want a “government-run health care system.”
Here’s news for them: The private health care system in the United States is so bad that more people already are getting their health care from the government because they can’t get it in the private sector.
This from that most Communist of daily newspapers, the Wall Street Journal:
More people are getting their health insurance from the government as the number of individuals with coverage from an employer declines…
The number of people in the U.S. without health insurance rose by about 700,000 between 2007 and 2008 to 46.3 million. The proportion of uninsured was essentially unchanged at 15.4 percent.
An additional 4.4 million people in the U.S. were insured by the government as of 2008, for a total of 87.4 million, or 29 percent of the population, up from 27.8 percent in 2007. At the same time, 1.1 million fewer people had coverage from an employer in 2008, leaving 176.3 million people with such coverage.
