01.19.07

The Agenda: A Three Part Look at New Economic Policy Ideas

Posted in General at 6:01 pm by JTinDC

Introduction

We’ve voted for and sworn in a new congress now controlled by the Democrats. They ran on promises of change, and no doubt they’ll keep reminding everyone that Americans voted for change, especially on Iraq. But they’ll also attempt to bring major policy changes to other issues defining the economic lives of Americans.

EPI, the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington D.C. based nonprofit, is one of the leading think tanks who will be thinking hard and coming up with plans to solve the problems plaguing American economics. And these are the people who will help shape the bills brought to the table in the 110th Congress.

On January 11th, 2007 they released two briefing Papers that will begin to advance their economic program. The papers are “Globalization that Works for Working Americans” by Jeff Faux, and “Health Care for America: A proposal for guaranteed, affordable health care for all Americans building on Medicare and employment based insurance” by Jacob Hacker.

“The American public is hungry for and ready for big ideas and solutions to the big problems that have been eating away at their sense of security and optimism,” said EPI President Lawrence Mishel. “We created this initiative to be a forum where those big solutions can grow from ideas into full-fledged, viable, workable plans to bring America’s families long-overdue relief.”

Mishel has also published a report entitled Talking Past Each Other: What Everyday Americans Really Think (and Elites Don’t Get) About the Economy, which, according to EPI’s news release, “offers both fresh insights and practical advice” to policy makers. “There is an enormous gulf between the experts who interpret the economy and the people who live it everyday—and that gulf impedes developing a national conversation that can address our economic problems,” said Mishel. “This research is the first, crucial step toward developing a common understanding and common language for discussing sound policy.”

Talking Past Each Other explains how both liberals and conservative both miss the mark. It outlines what everyday Americans understand about the economy. “Communication between the elites and the people are a classic case of the blind men and the elephant,” said Ruy Teixeira, one of the authors of the report. “The liberals feel the trunk, the conservatives grapple with the leg, and the entire animal remains a big, poorly understood mystery. The challenge for policy makers is to craft a plan and language that incorporates and illuminates all the parts.”

This three part series will cover EPI’s launch of their “Agenda for Shared Prosperity.”

The first part “Economy Wars” examines the history of EPI and their political position in the Democratic climate and why we all should be listening very carefully to this particular think tank.

The second part “Hacker’s Health Care” will cover Jacob Hacker’s briefing paper. Hacker, a Yale University political scientist, says that our system of health care is “enormously wasteful, ill-targeted, inefficient, and unfair.” He describes health care as “the epicenter of economic insecurity in the United States today.” According to EPI’s news release “the core elements of (Hacker’s) Plan earned very high support (8 out of 10) from all voters and support ranging from 7.8 to 8.0 from three key swing groups. These results support Hacker’s conclusion that the Plan not only desirable and affordable, but also politically doable.” I’ll blog that it is also misguided and explain why.

The third part “Blue Collar Globalization?” will cover Jeff Faux’s briefing paper “Globalization that Works for Working Americans.” Faux, the former president of EPI takes an interesting position on globalization and calls for a “strategic pause”—a halting of “the headlong rush of following bad trade agreements with more bad agreements—in order to both correct the flaws in current policy and to address the problems it has created.” He proposes changes to refocus globalization policy from deal making to policy that “benefits American living standards and opportunities.”

This blog will keep an eye on how well this group of experts can actually grapple the animal and bridge the gap to the average American. Hopefully, we will have enough background information from this think tank to truly begin to understand the economic policy ideas behind the jibber-jabber we hear from politicians.