Walker promises more of the same

The evidence is clear that tax cuts do not create jobs or drive economic growth.

Yet last night Governor Walker boasted :"I want to cut taxes over and over and over again until we are leading the country in economic recovery."

That means Walker will be cutting taxes over and over and over and over and over again, as long as he is Governor.

Eight years of the Bush tax cuts, the largest in the nation's history,  or the Walker corporate tax cuts of two years ago, demonstrated conclusively that tax cuts do not lead to economic growth.

Businesses don't invest in capital or hire workers in response to lower tax rates. That is in the words of George Herbert Walker Bush "voodoo economics."

Business invest and hire in response to an increase in demand for their products and services. Yet Walker has pursued policies that have reduced demand and stymied economic growth. A quick review. Waker:

1) Raised taxes on the working poor;
2) Rejected billions in federal Medicaid dollars;
3) Rejected a federal investment of more than $800 million in federal high speed rail;
4) Slashed the discretionary income of the state's 300,000 public employees.

Walker loves to talk about job creation and economic growth. But the state's anemic job creation performance, 42nd worst in the country, is a refutation of his failed economic polices.

Subsidize Students, Not tax cuts

New York Times Editorial, April 25, 2012

In 2007, President George W. Bush signed a bill that cut in half interest rates on subsidized student loans until 2012. Those low rates will expire on July 1 — going back to 6.8 percent from 3.4 percent — and, to prevent college from becoming even more unaffordable for millions of students, the obvious move is to renew them.

But nothing is that easy or sensible anymore in Washington, where House Republicans are far more interested in cutting taxes, largely for the rich, than they are in helping low- and middle-income students get a college education.

House Republicans say the country cannot afford the $6 billion a year that it costs to pay for the lower rates. The Ryan budget, recently approved by the House, would allow the rates to double, and, at the same time, would cut taxes by $10 trillion over a decade. Representative John Kline Jr., the chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, said keeping the rates low would mean “piling billions of dollars on the backs of taxpayers.”

Instead, Republicans would rather pile that burden on the backs of taxpayers-to-be, specifically the 7.4 million students who now have federally subsidized Stafford loans and the millions more who will need them. At a time when many graduates are desperate for jobs, the interest rate increase would add an average of $1,000 a year to their debt. Already, many Republican lawmakers around the country have made it clear that they don’t even want students to vote, imposing identification requirements that would keep students away from polling places.

In the first of several speeches about the cost of higher education, President Obama urged students on Tuesday to demand that Congress renew the rates. “At this make-or-break moment for the middle class,” he said at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “we’ve got to make sure that you’re not saddled with debt before you even get started in life.”

Nothing is more important to this country’s future than ensuring a good education for coming generations. The issue also plays directly into Mr. Obama’s own need to re-energize younger voters, who turned out in overwhelming numbers for him in 2008 but seem far less enthusiastic these days.

Once the White House began its effort, Mitt Romney broke with House Republicans and said Monday that he supports renewing the loan subsidies. As usual, though, that also meant breaking with himself, since he had fully embraced the House budget and never expressed any reservations about the student loan provisions. Indeed, only a few months ago, he argued repeatedly in interviews that student subsidies were a bad idea that encouraged colleges to raise their tuition.

Mr. Romney, along with the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, said that the $6 billion cost of the subsidy should be offset with cuts to other programs, but predictably neither man said where those cuts should come from. The White House and Democrats have proposed raising the money by ending a loophole used by high-paid employees of S-corporations to avoid paying full payroll taxes.

The Republican response to that idea is also predictable. This is a party that shows time and again that it wants to protect only those who have made it, not help those struggling to get started.

Tax deal saves bailed out CEOs millions

Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., praised the President's agreement with Republicans to extend the Bush tax cuts.

"If we're going to strengthen our economy and grow jobs, this type of outreach - and cooperation between the administration, Congress, and the private sector - are critical," says Dimon.

It is no wonder Dimon liked the tax bill which extended the Bush era high income tax cuts for another two years. Dimon's compensation over the last three years has averaged $21,991,394 a year. The tax deal agreed to between President Obama and the Republicans will give Dimon and extra $1,179,000 next year, according to an analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice.

The bank Dimon heads was also the beneficiary of the giant Wall-Street bailout of 2007 and 2008. JPMorgan Chase & Co, along with other Wall Street banks, also poured millions of dollars into a lobbying campaign to water down the financial reforms Congress considered earlier this year.

Skilled labor decisive in attracting green jobs to Milwaukee

It's great news that Ingeteam, the Spanish energy service firm that builds wind turbine parts, has decided to build its first U.S. factory in the Menominee Valley Industrial Center.

There are several reasons to be excited about this development:

1) Ingeteam will create sorely needed manufacturing jobs in Milwaukee. It is projected that when its factory opens in January 2011 it will employee 50 to 60 people. By 2015 it could an additional 250 workers. This investment won't solve Milwaukee's monumental unemployment problems, but these will be value added, full-time jobs with benefits, far better than adding another health club or Walmart with their low-paying, part-time employment.

2) Ingeteam is an energy technology firm whose components are found in 12% of all wind turbines. Its decision to locate in Milwaukee is a boast to the region's effort to become a center of green and advanced manufacturing.

3) In a city where the organized business community has been vocally opposed to a paid sick leave law that was overwhelmingly approved by the voters, Ingeteam appears to be family friendly. On their web site Ingeteam lists as one of its values: "Conciliate work and family life: provide opportunities and flexibility in working days and hours, etc., to conciliate work life and family life. Special priority should be given to maternity, by providing support measures."

The political spin over Ingeteam's decision has already begun.

Both leading candidates for Governor, Mayor Tom Barrett and County Executive Scott Walker inaccurately attributed Ingeteam's decision to tax cuts.

The Barrett campaign released a statement declaring Ingeteam's decision:" shows the success of Tom's philosophy of tying tax cuts to jobs."

Walker, not to be outdone, strayed even further from reality arguing that Ingetam's decision validated his staunch anti-tax position.

But it turns out that tax breaks weren't decisive. As Thomas Content and Tom Daykin report in today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

"The key differentiator for Milwaukee: its labor force. In particular, Milwaukee had far and away the most people employed in the making of electric motors, the province of local firms including Rockwell Automation Inc. and New Berlin's ABB.

"Southeastern Wisconsin has a history and legacy of manufacturing here that a lot of people are down on," said Darin Buelow, a principal at the Chicago office of Deloitte Consulting LLP, Ingeteam's site-selection firm. "(Building) motors is something that this area does really well, and this is something that Ingeteam wanted us to look for.'"

It was Milwaukee manufacturing and technical labor force, largely a product of our public schools, tech colleges and universities, all taxpayer financed institutions, and our industrial know-how that attracted Ingeteam and its jobs. Ingeteam acknowledged this in its press release: "... the Milwaukee area boasts prestigious universities with some of the highest-ranked engineering departments in the country, offering specific courses in renewable energies, which will be highly useful when it comes to finding specialized staff."

If the Milwaukee area is going to compete for green energy and advanced manufacturing firms and employment, it will not succeed by getting poor, by competing on the basis of low-cost labor and reduced public investments.

There will always be states and nations where people will work for much much less. Think Bangladesh or Shri Lanka.

Milwaukee, the region and our manufacturing firms need to compete based on our strategic advantages, skilled labor, industrial know-how, network of suppliers, supportive academic institutions like MATC, UWM and MSOE, efficient transportation and communication systems, access to fresh water, high quality service, quality and productivity. Those are the region's strengths and our competitive advantage. And that's why Ingeteam will be in the Menominee Valley and not the Mississippi Delta.

GOP sings same old supply side song

The New York Times Bob Herbert asks:

What’s up with the Republicans? Have they no sense that their policies have sent the country hurtling down the road to ruin? Are they so divorced from reality that in their delusionary state they honestly believe we need more of their tax cuts for the rich and their other forms of plutocratic irresponsibility, the very things that got us to this deplorable state?

Read his answer and entire column.

Bush uses fear to push bailout!

George W. Bush is up to his old tricks.

Last night he warned us that the economy is in danger and said there's no time to examine the $700 billion bailout's fine print. We have to act immediately.

Haven't we heard this before?

In 2001 President Bush used the same argument to get a $1.3 trillion tax cut, 50% of which went to the richest 1 % of income earners averaging $1.5 million a year.

He got his tax cuts, the economy tanked, inequality soared and our $5.2 trillion surplus evaporated.

He used the same line about immediate danger from Iraq in 2002 and 2003.

He got his war, but no weapons of mass destruction or nuclear capacity were found. There were no flowers for liberators or oil revenues to pay for the war either. But Iran got a new ally next door. More than 4,000 U.S, soldiers lost their lives and more than 30,000 have been wounded. And we ended up with one heck of a bill... which is still growing.

He used the same line earlier this year to seek a new round of tax rebates. We've lost 660,000 jobs and the financial markets have collapsed.

There have been an awful lot of emergencies on GW's watch! And his solutions just haven't turned out as advertised, although the Haliburtons of the world have prospered from Bagdad to New Orleans.

We've had almost eight full years of the politics of fear.

Let's call the President's bluff and not act in haste.

Congress needs to take the time to make sure that its rescue plan protects taxpayers, homeowners, retirees and citizens. It needs to safeguard the long term economic interests of the nation and not simply those of the Wall Street buccaneers who gambled with the all of our money and lost!

Greenspan opposes McCain tax cut proposal as budget buster

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has questioned the affordability of Republican nominee John McCain's tax cut proposals which, like the Bush tax cuts, are based on cutting the taxes of the very wealthiest Americans. (see chart comparing Obama and McCain cuts)

Greenspan told Bloomberg News he was "not in favor of financing tax cuts with borrowed money" when asked if the United States could afford big tax cuts such as those proposed by John McCain. The non partisan Tax Policy Institute projects that McCains's tax cuts will add $5 trillion to the national debt or require major cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Noting that McCain has in the past expressed strong admiration for Greenspan, a fellow Republican whose support helped convince Congress to pass the high income Bush tax cuts, the Obama campaign said the former Fed chief's comments were evidence that McCain's economic plan was fiscally reckless.

Stimulus plan a "lemon"

Over the past three weeks, even Republicans have been forced to acknowledge the nation's growing economic problems and the need for decisive action by the federal government.

It's worth noting that President Bush and his GOP agreed to act only after the downturn hit Wall Street, exacting an unacceptable toll on the Republican Party's financial and political base. As a result, the Fed enacted the single largest interest rate cut in its history and Congress has moved quickly to design a fiscal stimulus package.

For a stimulus package to be effective, it must stimulate spending (demand) quickly. The essence of an effective stimulus package is for government demand (spending) to step in when private spending (consumption and private investment) is declining.

A recent study by the non- partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) concluded that extending unemployment benefits and increasing food stamps, policies that get money to folks who will spend it immediately, is the most effective form of economic stimulus.

Even President Bush was forced to acknowledge this. As a result, he temporarily dropped his initial proposal for making his high income tax cuts permanent since it would not have affected the economy until 2011.

So what has the Democratically controlled Congress agreed to? Another round of tax cuts for people who are less likely to spend it immediately!

Paul Krugman writes that the compromise plan is nothing less than a "lemon:"

Unfortunately, the plan — which essentially consists of nothing but tax cuts and gives most of those tax cuts to people in fairly good financial shape — looks like a lemon...

Specifically, the Democrats appear to have buckled in the face of the Bush administration’s ideological rigidity, dropping demands for provisions that would have helped those most in need. And those happen to be the same provisions that might actually have made the stimulus plan effective...

The entire column is worth reading

Fixing our infrastructure will jump start the economy!

The unemployment rate surged to 5 percent in December as the economy added a meager 18,000 jobs, the smallest monthly increase in four years.

The private sector actually lost 13,000 jobs.

The swift deterioration in the job market indicates that troubles once confined to real estate and construction are spilling into the broader economy, threatening the ability of American consumers to keep spending.

In response, President Bush has proposed making his high end tax cuts permanent.

This is not surprising. Cutting the taxes of the wealthy has been the singular policy proposal of this administration for any and all problems.

When President Bush was running for office in 2000, he proposed high end income tax cuts, the elimination of the inheritance tax, and cutting investment income taxes because the country was running a projected $5.2 trillion dollar surplus. He proposed a $1.3 trillion cut (25% of the total projected surplus) because he: "...trusted the people, not the government."

Shortly after he assumed the Presidency, in March 2001, the economy fell into a recession. But Bush's response was the same medicine-high end tax cuts- for an entirely different ailment.

In May 2001, as gas prices began to soar for the first time under his administration, President Bush proposed, you guessed it, high end tax cuts as the solution which Congress ultimately passed

President Bush, and all of the Republican candidates competing to replace him, are wrong when they argue that making tax cuts that have disproportionately benefited the wealthy permanent will stimulate the economy.

The 2001-2003 jobless recovery and the relatively anemic job growth that followed suggest that high end tax cuts are not an effective stimulus precisely because the wealthy are the least likely to immediately spend their tax cut windfalls, although that is precisely what is needed to jump-start the economy.

Making high end tax cuts permanent, moreover, would not increase spending this year when a stimulus is needed. It wouldn’t affect the economy until 2011 since that is when the tax cuts are set to expire.

Making the tax cuts permanent, however, would increase the country’s deficit for years, increasing interest payments on the debt that will have to be paid by future generations and reducing the funds available for needed social investments in education, job training, research and development, science, medicine, medical care, energy and infrastructure.

On Sunday the New York Times called for an economic stimulus package to revitalize the failing economy.

The Times argued that middle and low (income or payroll) tax cuts would be effective since that money would be spent immediately.

Equally if not more, effective than targeted tax cuts, would be a plan to significantly increase investment in the nation’s failing public infrastructure — highways, bridges, rail systems, water works, public schools, port facilities, sewers, airports, energy grids, tunnels, dams and levees.

California’s experience in early 90’s demonstrates what a well-timed shock of public spending can do for a depressed economy.

California was mired in a severe recession when an earthquake rocked Southern California in January, 1993. It was the costliest in U.S. history. Sixty-one people died. More than 9,000 were injured. The quake destroyed more than $15 billion of property, including 21,000 housing units. It devastated highways in the nation's most auto-dependent region.

The federal government responded with disaster relief. The immediate infusion of $9.5 billion in emergency assistance and public works funds revived the depressed economy. Less than six months after the earthquake, Southern California's economy was growing and generating jobs for the first time since 1990.

The tragic collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis, while not a natural disaster like the Los Angeles earthquake, is the canary in nation's failing infrastructure mine. Our nation's infrastructure is crumbling.

A study released in May by the Urban Land Institute and Ernst & Young found that 83 percent of the nation’s transportation infrastructure was not capable of meeting the country’s needs over the next 10 years. The American Society of Civil Engineers, in its latest national report card, gave transportation infrastructure a D. It estimates that government should be spending $320 billion a year over the next five years — double the current outlay — just to bring up to par what already exists.

A public infrastructure investment program would address one of the nation's biggest problems, create high wage jobs, save lives, decrease business's cost of transportation and stimulate the economy! If tied to local hiring and job training, it could help address the unacceptably high rates of black unemployment which are rising as the economy slows.

Other ideas should be on the table as well. The nation has a shortage of low and moderate income housing particularly in fast growing suburban areas experiencing labor shortages. We are falling further behind our international competitors in developing a high speed communications infrastructure. And we lack modern high speed train and energy efficient (light rail) transportation systems.

Before we waste valuable national resources by making President Bush's inefficient high end tax cuts permanent, we should examine the more effective economic stimulus tools in our policy tool box. It is after all, our money (and country for that matter) and as someone once said, in a different context, we know better than a lame duck politician what to do with it.

All I got for X-mas was a stocking full of debt!

One present none of us want to open this X-mas morning is the one left by President George Bush, Grover Norquist and their neocon friends-the growing national debt.

Federal borrowing from the public has mushroomed since 2001, by 53 percent, to $5.1 trillion. The single biggest cause of this spiraling debt has been the President's gifts to the very wealthiest Americans who double as his campaign financiers-high end tax cuts totaling $1.8 trillion.

From 2002 to 2011, forgone revenue from the cuts will account for 37 percent of the federal budget’s descent into the red, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The neocons war of choice in Iraq and defense spending come next, producing 30 percent of the deterioration, followed by domestic spending at 11 percent.

President Bush has been one of this nation's most fiscally irresponsible Presidents.

This holiday season the richest Americans, including hedge fund and private equity managers who pay a lower tax rate on their million and sometimes billion dollar incomes than most working American pay on theirs, have much to celebrate.

But most American taxpayers, their children and grandchildren will be left with little more than a stocking full of debt, $144,434 per family.

We will have to repay this borrowed money with interest, which means fewer federal dollars to spend on everything else for decades to come, including health care, infrastructure repair, emergency response, chemical plant security and alternative energy.

The New York Times recently ran an excellent editorial on President Bush' fiscally reckless tenure and his recent political posturing. It's worth the read.

Greenspan rewrites history!

Alan Greenspan is revising history and the role he played in supporting the Bush administration's irresponsible fiscal policies.

In his new memoir, Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World, he is harshly critical of President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and the Republican-controlled Congress, as abandoning his party’s principles on spending and deficits. "My biggest frustration remained the president's unwillingness to wield his veto against out-of-control spending." Greenspan wrote.

Either Mr. Greenspan is suffering from amnesia or he is purposefully rewriting history to conform to his libertarian views! Either way, Greenspan ignores that it was the Bush tax cuts which he aggressively supported, that are primarily responsible for the era's deficits, not "out-of-control spending."

Congressional Budget Office data illustrates that the $1.3 trillion 2001 tax cuts, 45% of which went to the richest 1%, have been the single largest contributor to the reemergence of substantial budget deficits in recent years.

According to the CBO, legislation enacted since 2001 added almost $2.3 trillion to deficits between 2001 and 2006, with half (51%) of this deterioration in the budget due to the tax cuts (about a third was due to increases in security spending, and about a sixth to increases in domestic spending).

Mr. Greenspan played a crucial role in getting this legislation passed.

President Bush initially proposed tax cuts during his presidential campaign in response to a projected $5.2 trillion surplus.

Opponents argued that it was folly to base tax cuts on projections and that any surpluses that might materialize should be used for necessary social investments (repairing New Orleans levies and the nation's ailing infrastructure, investing in education, etc.) and to pay down the national debt.

By the time Bush was inaugurated, the dot.com bubble which Greenspan had helped create through his support for capital gains tax cuts in the 1990's, had burst and the economy was slowing. The recession officially began in March 2001.

President Bush appeared to lack the Congressional support necessary to enact his high end tax cuts. He had lost the popular vote, his installation as President was controversial, and the Senate was divided.

But Greenspan, seemingly more concerned with providing political cover to the new president than the nation's economic health, aggressively supported the tax cuts.

In late January 2001, Greenspan said: "It is far better, in my judgment, that the surpluses be lowered by tax reductions than by spending increases," assuring Congress that the tax cuts would not endanger future Social Security benefits.

In response to White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, praised the Federal Reserve Chair, "We are very heartened to see that Chairman Greenspan has weighed in on the importance of cutting taxes, and hope that the Congress will join President Bush and Chairman Greenspan in cutting taxes, in passing the Bush tax cut, so we can protect the strength of our economy."

Greenspan's support was crucial mustering the votes to get the tax cut legislation passed.

In 2003 with deficits soaring, the Federal Reserve Chair supported yet another round of deficit-creating high end tax cuts proposed by President Bush.

These tax cuts created large deficits rivaling those Greenspan had insisted must be closed in the early Clinton years. But now Greenspan supported making Bush's tax cuts permanent at a cost that was more than five times the amount necessary to close the projected shortfall in Social Security over the next 75 years.

Then in a truly remarkable bait and switch, Mr. Greenspan called for cuts in social security to restore fiscal discipline. Not surprisingly his conversion to cutting social security benefits coincided with President Bush's ultimately unsuccessful effort to dismantle the system through privatization.

Despite current protestations, Mr. Greenspan was not a critic of the Bush administration's fiscal irresponsibility. When it mattered, at every key junction, Mr Greenspan aided and abetted the Bush administration's reckless economic policies. Buy the book, if you must. But don't believe the hype.

Bush boom leaves middle class out!

Last week, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel acknowledged for the first time that the current economic expansion was leaving the middle class behind.

Real incomes for working families declined for the second straight year and remain $2000 below what they were in 2000.

The number of Americans without healthcare jumped to 47 million. Many of those who retained their coverage were paying much higher premiums, reducing their disposable incomes.

Mortgage foreclosures are at a record high. It is projected that 2 million households will ultimately default.

Rising gas prices and the soaring cost of college education are also making it harder for middle class families to make ends meet.

And on Friday the US Labor department announced that the nation had lost 4,000 jobs last month and created very few over the last quarter, an average of only 44,000. To put that in perspective, we need 150,000 new jobs a month simply to absorb all the new workers entering the labor market.

Princeton economist, Paul Krugman, writes that supply side apologists argue that their upper end tax cuts created the "Bush boom" including eight million jobs since 2003. But Clinton raised high marginal tax rates and contrary to conservative projections of disaster created twenty-one million jobs.

I have reprinted Krugman's "Where's My Trickle?" below:

September 10, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
Where’s My Trickle?
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Four years ago the Bush administration, exploiting the political bounce it got from the illusion of success in Iraq, pushed a cut in capital-gains and dividend taxes through Congress. It was an extremely elitist tax cut even by Bush-era standards: the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center says that more than half of the tax breaks went to Americans with incomes of more than $1 million a year.

Needless to say, administration economists produced various misleading statistics designed to convey the opposite impression, that the tax cut mainly went to ordinary, middle-class Americans. But they also insisted that the benefits of the tax cut would trickle down — that lower tax rates on the rich would do great things for the economy, helping everyone.

Well, Friday’s dismal jobs report showed that the Bush boom, such as it was, has run its course. And working Americans have a right to ask, “Where’s my trickle?”

It’s true, as the Bushies never tire of reminding us, that the U.S. economy has added eight million jobs since that 2003 tax cut. That sounds impressive, unless you happen to know that a good part of that gain was simply a recovery from large job losses earlier in the administration’s tenure — and that the United States added no fewer than 21 million jobs after Bill Clinton raised taxes on the rich, a move that had conservative pundits predicting economic disaster.
What’s really remarkable, however, is that four years of economic growth have produced essentially no gains for ordinary American workers.

Wages, adjusted for inflation, have stagnated: the real hourly earnings of nonsupervisory workers, the most widely used measure of how typical workers are faring, were no higher in July 2007 than they were in July 2003.

Meanwhile, benefits have deteriorated: the percentage of Americans receiving health insurance through employers, which plunged along with employment during the early years of the Bush administration, continued to decline even as the economy finally began creating some jobs.
And one of the few seeming bright spots of the Bush-era economy, rising homeownership, is now revealed as the result of a bubble inflated in part by financial flim-flam, which deceived both borrowers and investors.

Now you know why 66 percent of Americans rate economic conditions in this country as only fair or poor, and why Americans disapprove of President Bush’s handling of the economy almost as strongly as they disapprove of the job he is doing in general.

Yet the overall economy has grown at a reasonable pace over the past four years. Where did the economic growth go? The answer is that it went to the same economic elite that received the lion’s share of those tax cuts. Corporate profits rose 72 percent from the second quarter of 2003 to the second quarter of 2007. The real income of the richest 0.1 percent of Americans surged by 51 percent between 2003 and 2005, and although we don’t yet have the data for 2006, everything we know suggests that the income of the rich took another upward leap.

The absence of any gains for workers in the years since the 2003 tax cut is a pretty convincing refutation of trickle-down theory. So is the fact that the economy had a much more convincing boom after Bill Clinton raised taxes on top brackets. It turns out that when you cut taxes on the rich, the rich pay less taxes; when you raise taxes on the rich, they pay more taxes — end of story.

But it’s not just trickle-down that has been refuted: the whole idea that a rising tide raises all boats, that growth in the economy necessarily translates into gains for the great majority of Americans, is belied by the Bush-era experience.

As far as I can tell, America has never before experienced a disconnect between overall economic performance and the fortunes of workers as complete as that of the last four years.
America was a highly unequal society during the Gilded Age, but workers’ living standards nonetheless improved as the economy grew. Inequality rose rapidly during the Reagan years, but “Morning in America” was nonetheless bright enough to make most people cheerful, at least temporarily. Inequality continued to increase during the Clinton years, but wages rose, as did the availability of health insurance — and the great majority of Americans felt prosperous.

What we’ve had since 2003, however, is an economic expansion that looks good if not great by the usual measures, but which has passed most Americans by.

Guaranteed health insurance, which all of the leading Democratic contenders (but none of the Republicans) are promising, would eliminate one of the reasons for this disconnect. But it should be only the start of a broader range of policies — a new New Deal — designed to turn economic growth into something more than a spectator sport.