From our April issue: Robert Kuttner notes that regardless of who the next president is, they will need to soundly reject 30 years of entrenched free-market ideology if they wish to ameliorate the looming economic crisis:
After the Great Crash, it took three agonizing years before the nation had the good fortune to elect Roosevelt, and a decade until the New Deal and the economic stimulus of war finally ended the Great Depression. This time, we are in both better and worse shape. On the plus side, the right did not succeed in repealing the entire New Deal. Thanks to deposit insurance, Social Security, a more activist Federal Reserve, and federal spending of nearly 20 percent of gross domestic product, government can still play much more of a stabilizer role today than in 1929.
On the minus side, the bipartisan right did succeed in repealing far too much financial regulation, hence the current credit crisis; the U.S. is in hock to foreign creditors; the dollar is plunging; unemployment is rising; commodity prices are soaring; stagflation looms; trade policy serves financial elites rather than the nation; and the private financial system may need to be recapitalized, either by foreign governments that share few of our values, or by U.S. taxpayers.
Read the rest and comment here.
--The Editors
