If progressives want a winning theme that the right can’t match, this is it.
Jacob S. Hacker
Jacob S. Hacker is a professor of political science at Yale University and the co-author (with Paul Pierson) of the forthcoming Let Them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality (Liveright, July 2020).
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The Stalemate State
Those who argue that gridlock is a good check on partisanship haven’t examined its policy consequences.
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Health Reform 2.0
If reform is to succeed, progressives will have to fight for a stronger government role, including a public option.
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A Strong Safety Net Encourages Healthy Risk-Taking
The basic underlying principle of the New Deal was that security is not opposed to opportunity but essential to it.
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It Wasn’t Just Iraq
Just about everyone understands the importance of Iraq to the Democrats’ success in the 2006 midterm elections. Far fewer, we suspect, understand that the Democrats owe a good chunk of their 2006 success to an issue that has historically been one of their strongest: the economy. Throughout the campaign, polls regularly indicated that the economy […]
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Risk Assessment, Round 2
This week, the Prospect‘s Matthew Yglesias, Ezra Klein, and Mark Schmitt have been discussing The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care, and Retirement — And How You Can Fight Back with the book’s author, Jacob Hacker of Yale University. See the first round of this exchange here. Round 2: […]
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Bigger and Better
Remember those bumper stickers during the early-1990s fight over the Clinton health plan? “National Health Care? The Compassion of the IRS! The Efficiency of the Post Office! All at Pentagon Prices!” In American policy debates, it’s a fixed article of faith that the federal government is woefully bumbling and expensive in comparison with the well-oiled […]
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Good Medicine
Across the political spectrum, alarm bells are ringing about Medicare, America’s giant health program for the aged and disabled. To conservatives, Medicare is a huge, Kremlin-esque bureaucracy destined to soak up more and more of the American economy. To critics on the left, it’s an inadequate program that nonetheless siphons off increasingly limited funds that […]