Franklin Roosevelt reined in the big banks and giant corporations in ways that had never been done before. Government became a more active participant in keeping markets honest. Together, over time, we built economic stability and growth. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan turned that around. He declared that government was the enemy and began unraveling the regulatory net, and he led the country down a path that ultimately resulted in the greatest economic crash since the Great Depression.
For starters, we should put in place a modern version of Glass-Steagall and separate plain-vanilla banking like checking accounts and savings accounts from crazy risk-taking on Wall Street. This doesn't have to be partisan. My first cosponsor for a twenty-first-century Glass-Steagall bill was the Republicans' 2008 presidential nominee, Senator John McCain. In 2016, Donald Trump campaigned on this idea, and, at his insistence, adopting Galss-Steagall was added to the Republican platform. But the Republican leadership has refused to move any such legislation and now President Trump has put in place an economic team that is headed in the opposite direction.
Here's another idea: The SEC should hire a leader who doesn't work for Wall Street.
Oh, and here's a good one: when CEOs break the law, they ought to go to jail, just like anyone else.
When Roosevelt said we could do better, he reined in the big banks and giant corporations in ways that had never been done before. Government became a more active participant in keeping markets honest. Over time, we built economic stability and growth. In the 1980s, Reagan turned that around. He declared that government was the enemy and began unraveling the regulatory net, and he led the country down a path that ultimately resulted in the greatest economic crash since the Great Depression.
Trickle-down is a lie. But 37 years after Reagan's election, it's the lie that won't die. Donald Trump has clearly embraced Reagan's voodoo economics. Trump clearly believes that he can ignore all the analysis that showed that trickle-down economics was pure fiction. Why? Because Trump knows in his golden gut that once the tax cuts kick in, the economy will grow so fast that the new tax revenues will more than make up for the money lost from tax cuts. There it is, the same old trickle-down lie.
I'd laugh, except this is deadly serious. If we don't put a stop to this nonsense, trickle-down economics will eventually wipe out our middle class. It will complete the job of turning America into a country that works for a narrow slice of economic royalty at the top while the peasants live on the crumbs carelessly tossed off the banquet table
Think about it: just a few years after a major crash, bank lobbyists wrote a provision that blasted a hole in a crucial financial regulation. Then the banks muscled it through Congress.
Not long after I was sworn in, some complex language seemed to say that student loans were turning a profit for the U. S. government. We dug deeper still and learned that overall, the federal government was on track to make about $174 billion in profits on its student loan portfolio. That's $174 billion. Off the backs of a bunch of young people who had to borrow money to make it through school. Oh, Lord.
The way I looked at it, that $174 billion was basically an extra tax on kids who go to college but whose parents can't afford to write a check for it.
Giant banks pay less than 1 percent interest.
While students were paying 6 percent, 8 percent, or higher on their student loans.
People are angry because trade deals seem to be building jobs and opportunities for workers in other parts of the world, while leaving abandoned factories here at home. Angry because young people are getting destroyed by student loans, working people are deep in debt, and seniors can't make their Social Security checks cover their basic living expenses. Angry because we can't even count on the fundamentals--roads, bridges, safe water, reliable power--from our government.
People are angry, and they are RIGHT to be angry. Because this hard won, ruggedly built, infinitely precious democracy of ours has been hijacked.
Today this country works great for those at the top. It works great for every corporation rich enough to hire an army of lobbyists and lawyers.
If labor representatives had a substantial number of seats at the table , I guarantee that the trade deals would be written differently and that the promises that were made would have some serious muscle to back them up.
There's so much more we could do if we actually had a trade policy that was about making the economy work better for
Nut what if that country violates other terms of the agreements, such as those that prohibit companies using prison labor or dumping toxic waste into rivers? Can workers or environmental groups go to that same high -speed arbitration panel? No. They have to do to their own government and try to persuade it to bring a lawsuit to an international court.
The reason is pretty simple: even if an industry loses a battle to get a law written exactly the way it wanted--the industry can try to have the new law or regulation overturned in court. For those with plenty of money to spend, the courts can provide a second bite of the apple. Don't like a new rule issued by a regulator who oversees your industry? Bring a lawsuit, and maybe a judge will knock it out. Don't like the outcome of a court case? Fight to overturn it and maybe a higher court will overrule the first court.
The trickle-down policies of the Reagan years shifted American' priorities. 1 At the same time that military spending expanded significantly, school funding was slashed by 15 percent. More bombs and fewer text books. And when the politicians figured out there was no price to pay politically, the cuts just kept on coming. Even during the Obama years, federal funding for education took a hard hit. In 2011, Republicans bargained for another 15% cut in return for increasing the debt ceiling and thus preventing the complete disruption of financial markets around the world.
How does the guy in the stockroom sign up for auto-repair classes at a nearby vo-tech school if McDonald's won't give him his schedule more than a week in advance? Working two or three jobs is an economic necessity for them as they try to support their families, but with shifting hours in most places, it's hard for them to piece together schedules that will let them show up when called. Some say they look for all-night cleaning jobs so they can have their days free to take second and third jobs.
I'm pretty hard-core about this issue. The way I see it, no one in this country should work full-time and still love in poverty--period. But at $7.25 an hour, a mom working a forty-hour-a-week minimum-wage job cannot keep herself and her baby above the poverty line. This is wrong--and this was something the U. S. Congress could make better if we'd just raise the minimum wage. We could fix this now.
For decades, Republicans had been fighting unions on virtually every issue that touched working people--the minimum wage, paid family leave, fair scheduling laws, access to affordable health care, Medicaid, Medicare, and on and on. Republicans had also assaulted unions head-on by trying to shut down the National Labor Relations Board, which deals with companies that violate labor laws, and by attacking the Department of Labor's efforts to protect unions.
We stand up and we fight back--and we do so on a very personal level. We start with clarity about the principle we are fighting for: everybody counts and everybody gets a chance to build something. Or to say it another way: America must be a country that respects every human being and that builds opportunity not just for some of us, but for all of us. We fight for a country we can believe in.
Collective action begins with individual action, and each of us must find our own way to speak up.
Our country's future is not determined by some law of physics. It's not determined by some preordained path. It's not even determined by Donald Trump. Our country's future is up to us. We can let the great American promise die or we can fight back. Me? I'm fighting back.
This fight is our fight.
I know it sounds nuts. How could I have said yes? I was halfway to graduation and my teaching certificate. But I didn't hesitate to drop out of college and marry Jim.
For 19 years I had absorbed the lesson that the best and the most important thing any girl could do was "marry well." And for 19 years I had also absorbed the message that I was a pretty iffy case--not very pretty, not very flirty, and definitely not very good at making boys feel like they were smarter than I was. So when Jim popped the question, I was so shocked that it took me about a nanosecond to say yes.
I was going to get to be a wife & mother, after all. I was walking on air. And that whole plan to go to college and teach? My mother had predicted that it would go away, and now I supposed she was right. I finished up my degree with correspondence courses.
We believe in that America. That is the America we fight for.
We believe, but we are worried--worried that those opportunities are slipping away. In fact, a lot of America is worried--worried and angry. Angry that far too often Washington works for those at the top and leaves everyone else behind.
I laid it out as best I could. This is about our values, I said, about the things we believe in, the reasons we get up every day and work as hard as we can. About debt-free college and expanded Social Security. About science and climate change. About our capacity to invest together to create something better.
We believe that millionaires and billionaires and giant corporations should not be able to buy our elections and our politicians. Corporations are not people.
Who benefits? I'll tell you exactly who benefits: When we turn on each other, bankers can run our economy for Wall Street. When we spend our energy attacking immigrants, oil companies can fight off clean energy. When we argue over who got more crumbs of food stamps, giant corporations can ship the last good jobs overseas. When we turn on each other, rich guys can push through more tax breaks for themselves.
We've also got to be prepared to lose some battles. Without control of Congress or the White House, we will often come up short. We simply don't have the tools and the weapons to win every time. But that doesn't mean we are powerless. It doesn't mean we should not fight back.
To rebuild an economy that works for everyone--we need to be clear about our values. We need, in other words, to be clear about our core principles.
True, there were a few Debbie Downers raining on the magical parade. Reagan's own vice president, George H. W. Bush, once labeled it "voodoo economics." Others worried that those tax cuts wouldn't make anyone richer except the rich people who pocketed more money.
Eventually, study after careful study showed that Reagan's tax cuts did exactly what a lot of people had expected they would: they reduced government revenues and increased the national debt. But Reagan and all his economic advisers kept selling their wacky idea, and eventually tax cuts became the new religion.
The question is simple: How do we build and America that works for all of us? The answer is right in front of us: We built it once, and we can build it again. This is what big majorities of Americans--Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, and vegetarians--believe.
And how do we pay for all those things? Again, a pretty solid majority of America agrees: start by raising taxes for those at the top. Currently, 61% of us believe that the wealthiest Americans don't pay their fair share in taxes, and 63% favor eliminating tax deductions and loopholes for the very rich.
We had long invested in infrastructure, but now we were even bolder: America was investing in ideas. The results were transformative; basic research that eventually led to the Internet, GPS, and a map of the human genome.
For me, this is the basic American contract. We all pay taxes, and in return we all benefit--sometimes immediately, sometimes down the road--and we also help build opportunity for the generations to come. I first tried to put this into words in 2011 when I was thinking about running for the Senate: "There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own--nobody." My point was that everyone who succeeds gets some help from the investments we've all made. And we keep on making those investments so the next kid will get a chance, too.
America ramped up its infrastructure long before many other parts of the world, but our refusal to maintain & upgrade it is catching up with us. The overall quality of infrastructure in the US is now rated just slightly ahead of Taiwan's and far behind the quality of that in Germany & Japan.
This failure to invest in our future is incredibly shortsighted. This plan isn't pro-business. This plan is pro-stupid. More investment in basic infrastructure would transform our daily living, along with our long-term prospects.
The housing collapse wiped out trillions of dollars in family wealth nationwide, but the crash hit African Americans and Latinos like a tidal wave. And the hit was doubly hard because these were the families that generation after generation, had already been aggressively discriminated against in housing. Restrictive deeds, land sales contracts, redlining--American history is littered with examples of housing laws and lending strategies that were designed to deny black and Hispanic families mortgages.
For most middle-class families in America, purchasing a home is the best way to build financial security. And it worked that way, for much of the twentieth century, at least for white Americans.
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The above quotations are from This Fight Is Our Fight The Battle to Save America's Middle Class by Elizabeth Warren. Click here for other excerpts from This Fight Is Our Fight The Battle to Save America's Middle Class by Elizabeth Warren. Click here for other excerpts by Elizabeth Warren. Click here for a profile of Elizabeth Warren.
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