Next Social Contract

On June 3, 2003, the Treasury Department’s James Gilleran brought a chainsaw to a photo-op. While speaking to reporters, he promised to cut up piles of paper representing regulations of the financial sector. Joining him were representatives of four other U.S. regulatory agencies in charge of overseeing finance, armed with less formidable (but still sharp) gardening shears. The message was clear: The Bush Administration was tearing down the final pieces of the New Deal regulatory wall.

In recent weeks, new signs of an economic recovery have emerged in the form of stock market rallies, surprisingly high bank profits, and better-than-feared official unemployment and economic growth reports. But accompanying these so-called green shoots is worrying evidence of a recovery that could be compromised if not cut short altogether by high levels of unemployment and by a long period of unusually weak and uneven job creation.   Not only is actual unemployment more severe than is reflected in official measures, it is also concentrated in those industries and sectors that must grow in

Now that the president and the Democrats in Congress have set a fall deadline for legislative action on universal police protection for all Americans, battle lines are being drawn on Capitol Hill. On the right are conservative defenders of America's system of for-profit, private mercenaries. The Democrats are divided among progressives who favor universal, publicly funded police who would protect all citizens against crime, and moderate and conservative Democrats who argue that any citizen security reform should leave America's existing system of soldiers for hire in place.

Recently, discussions around health care reform have begun in earnest among politicians and policymakers in Washington, D.C. and beyond. President Obama has spent the month of June hitting the trail and the airwaves making the case for reform,  and legislators are now aiming to pass a health care reform bill sometime this summer. With the possibility of comprehensive changes to health care on the horizon, it is important for leaders and policymakers—as well as citizens—to understand the full argument for reforming the health care system in the United States.

Lost in the ideological battles over fiscal stimulus is one newly authorized program that is already delivering results: Build America Bonds (BABs). Unexpected demand has transformed this once-obscure component of the federal stimulus legislation into the hottest bond since Daniel Craig.

California, the University of Minnesota, the New Jersey Turnpike Authority, and the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority have been among the first to issue this new class of municipal bond, which could transform how America finances its 21st-century infrastructure needs.

Despite ubiquitous talk of "green shoots," America's unemployment crisis is worse than most pundits and politicians care to acknowledge, and the nation is headed for a jobless recovery in which high unemployment will persist. That was the message delivered in a recent New America Foundation report and corresponding conference yesterday on Capitol Hill.

In the summer of 1968, as Soviet tanks rolled into communist Czechoslovakia to end the brief period of liberalization known as the "Prague Spring," W.H. Auden composed a poem titled "August 1968":

Yeomanry--small-scale production centered on a self-sufficient family unit--has been the dream of all manner of social philosophers from Thomas Jefferson to Pope Leo XIII. But until recently, real-life yeomen could be and were dismissed-often violently. Joseph Stalin, for example, made short work of Eastern Europe's land-holding peasant class. Soon after, on the expanding frontiers of America's 1950s suburbia, zoning boards gave the nod to strip malls and big-box stores while outlawing almost all traditional forms of home production.

Green investment is a major pillar of the president's economic recovery plan.  Yet, America's dependence on foreign countries to produce green technologies may undermine this recovery strategy.  Using a list of green goods derived from the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), we have determined that the United States ran an overall green trade deficit of -$8.9 billion in 2008, including a deficit of -$6.4 billion in the critical category of renewable energy, one of the main targets of the Obama administration's green agenda.  The U.S. economy also suffered a significant deficit in the pollution management category.  On the positive side, the United States ran modest surpluses in two categories--energy efficiency and a grouping of other environmental goods related to water purification and sustainable agriculture.  

"There is a good economic argument to be made that the government has not done enough stimulus," said Niko Karvounis, a policy analyst at the New America Foundation who recently wrote a report warning that the economic recovery is likely to be tepid ...