That was the thought that occurred to me as I read a couple of interesting articles today. The first was about an interview Ezra Klien recently conducted with conservative Bill Kristol about Obamacare. The discussion reaches an interesting conclusion.
Obamacare's political legacy is likely to be a fading negative for Democrats. At this point it won't hurt them much, but it's unlikely to ever help them much, either. In 2014, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told Vox that Democrats were "not running on or from the Affordable Care Act," and that's probably going to be the party's strategy after Obama, too.In other words, they are saying that Obamacare has been successful on #2, but will remain neutral (at best) on #1.
Instead, Obamacare's legacy will be its substance: it has permanently reshaped the social contract in America. It is now the federal government's role to make heath insurance affordable and available to all its citizens, and any Republican president who seriously wants to repeal or reform Obamacare will need to propose a replacement that fulfills that basic bargain.
It's now clear that even most 2016 Republican candidates are going to have to wrestle with the problem of income inequality in this country. Certainly Democrats have been there for awhile. Over the course of the campaign, we'll see a lot of efforts to craft messages that appeal to voters on this one. In a rational world, whether or not those ideas will actually work to reduce income inequality would be the question voters would ask.
It is in that spirit of optimism (or naïveté - take your pick) that I point you to an article at TalkPoverty. They asked several experts to weigh in on their "10 Solutions to Fight Economic Inequality." Of course all of the ideas are worth exploring. But I noticed where they overlapped. Of the six people who offered lists about federal initiatives, five of them mentioned these:
* Raise the minimum wage
* Raise revenue via tax reform
* Invest in infrastructure
Four people included these:
* Provide affordable childcare and/or universal pre-K
* Strengthen the bargaining power of unions
* Require employers to provide sick leave/paid family leave
Those won't sound like rocket science to anyone who has been listening to President Obama, Congressional Democrats and Democratic candidates. And while there might be some differences between them over which solutions to prioritize, there is almost universal agreement among Democrats in support of those six ideas.
So if we want to tackle the problem of income inequality, there is your best answer to the #2 question about what will work. I suspect that it's also not a bad sell for #1.
You need to change tax laws not to 'tax the rich' but to reward staying in business and expanding not going OUT of business and taking the write down cash you now get.More plant closings occur for that sort of dodge than for the lure of outsourcing. PBO's investment tax credit is the first one I've seen in decades. Second, you need to create more subsidies than we have now (praise Obama for this one, too) for converting or starting businesses that are worker owned. Only through real democratic decision making by the true "makers" - working people - will we ever get sustainable, self-sufficient jobs. Labor is not a fungible commodity. It is the true creator of wealth. Those who do the work also know best how to run even complex operations. Providing working people with ownership will end the waste of capital that now goes to passive investors as if they did something good. Ownership by workers is both radical and mainstream. Time to make it far more possible. Everything else keeps working people vulnerable to the whims of either corporate capital or the corporate government. We need security - this is how it's done.
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