This week on the Prospect Weekly Roundup, David Dayen talks to Robert Kuttner about his report from the antitrust conference in Brussels that Politico called the “anti-Davos,” and why the European Union has fallen behind in taking meaningful antitrust action. During the Trump years, Eurocrats were leading the world in enforcing data privacy laws and fighting mergers across sectors. In recent years, the tables have turned, and our side of the Atlantic now leads in taking anti-monopoly action. Figures in the Biden administration like Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter represent the vanguard of a revolution in thinking about political economy, and making the connection between corporate abuses of market power and the global erosion of democracy and civil liberties.
Why have European policymakers been slow to act? The European Union has enough problems: raging war, energy shortfalls, a migrant crisis, rising nationalist sentiment. In contrast, it’s no wonder so many seem to believe that political economy should take a back seat—but maybe that’s exactly what Europe is getting wrong.
Dayen and Kuttner also discuss generational struggles in being able to achieve the American dream, and how homeownership, financial stability, and retirement are more and more out of reach for younger Americans. Our crises of unaffordable housing, the broken health care system, the student debt bubble, and the cost of living all have a common solution: raising taxes on the ultra-wealthy and corporations to fund social programs that benefit all Americans.
This year’s election will determine whether we can actually pass the tax policies we need to solve the crises of our time. President Biden, to his credit, has broken away from the Democratic neoliberal consensus of the past few decades, but it’s not enough. To win in 2024 and deliver on their agenda, liberals need to go bigger and embrace progressive taxation.
Donald Trump is not on working people’s side, and a second term would be in service of the wealthy and corporations, at the expense of everyone else. Only an active labor movement can make inroads in right-to-work states, and that’s exactly what the UAW is doing, filing historic elections in non-union auto factories across the South, most recently today at an Alabama Mercedes-Benz facility.
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