Tag Archives: syndication

By James Kwak Our business and household sectors are losing lots of money every day, and will continue to lose money for the foreseeable future. People no longer spend money at restaurants. Restaurant owners can no longer pay the rent or pay back their business loans. Restaurants fire their workers, who lose their paychecks and can no longer pay their rent, or their credit card bills, or their student debt. In an economic crisis like this, the overriding question is: who ultimately bears...

By James Kwak PPE, as we now know, stands for Personal Protective Equipment, like face masks and gloves. Right now there isn’t enough of it, and that’s one of the constraints on being able to test people, which is one of the biggest problems we face. Photo by ehpien (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) The only point I want me make here is this: This is how capitalism is supposed to work. If you’re a for-profit healthcare provider—or any kind of provider that is trying to provide the most value, however...

By James Kwak Today is the day of the New Hampshire primary, and, perhaps more importantly, lots of people in California are getting their ballots around now. Before you cast your vote in the Democratic presidential primary, I wish you would read Take Back Our Party, either online (for free) or in print. But I know most of you won’t, so this is what I want to say. As a preamble, if you are a moderate Democrat—if you think welfare reform and financial deregulation were good ideas; if you...

By James Kwak I’ve never wanted to write a book as much as I wanted to write Take Back Our Party. And I’ve never wanted people to read one of my books as much as this one—in particular, before the 2020 Democratic primary season ends. For that reason, I bypassed the usual publication route. (As my editor at Pantheon liked to say, the period for turning a manuscript into a book is, for unknown reasons, the same as the gestation period of a human. In his defense, he did get both 13...

By James Kwak David Brancaccio of Marketplace has started a new radio project called Econ Extra Credit: reading a first-year economics textbook, one chapter per week, along with his listeners. Luckily, he chose one of the textbooks produced by the CORE project, a group of economists who set out to rewrite the economics curriculum in the wake of the financial crisis and Great Recession. David invited me to talk with him about “Economics 101” and the one-sided impression of the world that...

By James Kwak The scene: Two well-dressed, fully employed people sitting at a table in the chic café at their workplace. Martha: Do you like your health plan? George: I love it. Martha: How much do you pay for your plan? George: About $550 per month.* Martha: Do you have a deductible? George: I have a $1,000 deductible for my whole family. Martha: What about co-payments? George: I have to pay 20% of the cost for hospital stays and outpatient surgery. Martha: What if you just want to see...

By James Kwak Ever since I finished Economism (and the 2016 elections, which happened about the same time), there has only been one thing I have wanted to write. I tried in “The Importance of Fairness: A New Economic Vision for the Democratic Party,” and in “A New Economic Vision, in 27 Words,” and again in “Hey Democrats, the Problem Isn’t Jobs and Growth.” I wanted to write this thing because it has become clear to me not only that our economic world is screwed up in all sorts of...

By James Kwak Chapter 2 of Take Back Our Party made the case that the market-centric policies of the Democratic establishment have failed to do anything about—and in many cases have exacerbated—the rise of inequality. Chapter 3 continues the indictment, arguing that the “growth and opportunity” doctrine of Clinton and Obama has also failed as politics. The New Democrats chose to identify themselves as the party of jobs and growth because they did not want to be seen as the party of...

By James Kwak The Democratic Party is at a crossroads. On a host of issues, it is clear what we stand for and how we differ from the Republicans: minority rights, abortion, immigration, gun control, climate change, the importance of facts, and, of course, whether or not the president is above the law. On economic issues, however, the picture is not so clear. Elizabeth Warren’s speech at St. Anselm’s College on Thursday is an attempt to fix that problem—and also a shot across the bow of...

By James Kwak Today’s installment of my new book, Take Back Our Party, evaluates the quarter-century reign of the Clinton-Obama axis over Democratic economic policy. (Chapter 1, if you missed it, is a historical account of the rise of the New Democrats and what they did once in power.) The picture is not a pretty one, no matter how you look at it. This chart, for example, shows the distribution of economic growth across different groups in the income distribution: (Data are from...