Setting the record straight will protect FDR's greatest achievements.

Whether or not right-wingers such as Fox News "entertainer and enlightener" Glenn Beck, South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, and Texas Governor Rick Perry actually uphold Ronald Reagan's conservatism, they are clearly sustaining his practice of using and abusing the past to reshape popular memory and the politics of the present. In particular, they're mimicking his efforts to hijack the Founding Fathers and Franklin Roosevelt. At the same time, Beck and Company have actually broken with Reagan's perverse "historical labors" in a very significant way.

In their respective books -- "Broke", "Saving Freedom", and "FED UP!" -- Beck, DeMint, and Perry, like their late Republican hero Reagan, celebrate the Founders as freedom-loving, God-fearing, small-government and States' Rights folk. They variably ignore or downplay not only their revolutionary sins such as slavery, but also their finest revolutionary commitments and accomplishments like the separation of church and state. However, in contrast to Reagan, who did his best (worst?) to try to lay claim to FDR to historically bolster his own political agenda, Beck and Co. portray FDR and the New Dealers as subversives who ruined American life and liberties.

Reagan, himself a former New Deal Democrat, knew how much most Americans loved FDR and continued to revere his name. So he regularly sought to appropriate Roosevelt's words in his campaigns, even as he set about trying to undo, and suppress the memory of, what FDR and his fellow citizens achieved in the 1930s and 1940s. Examples abound. Recall that to appeal to working and middle-class Americans, Reagan -- to the dismay of conservatives such as George Will -- enthusiastically cited and quoted both Thomas Paine and FDR in his acceptance speech at the 1980 Republican National Convention. And recall that in July 1987 Reagan audaciously re-stated FDR's Four Freedoms -- freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear -- as "the freedom to work", "the freedom to enjoy the fruits of one's labor", "the freedom to own and control one's property", and "the freedom to participate in a free market."

Breaking with the Gipper, Beck and his ilk not only have no desire to lay claim to FDR's memory and legacy, they also want to bury them. Truly, they talk as if they want to march on Washington and level the Roosevelt Memorial in favor of erecting a monument to the Gilded Age. Despite thirty years of conservative politics and policies -- three decades of intensifying insecurities, deepening inequalities, and subordinating the public good to corporate priorities and private greed -- they actually assert, as DeMint himself writes, that "America is clearly sliding towards socialism." And they hold Franklin Delano Roosevelt most responsible for the slide.

Following Amity Shlaes' crackpot history of the New Deal, "The Forgotten Man", Beck, DeMint, and Perry link the New Deal to fascism (Fascism? Socialism? What's the difference? It's all godless statism) and insist that it was World War II, not the New Deal, that rescued America from the Great Depression. Here they ignore how the New Deal, by way of the CCC, WPA, and PWA, dramatically transformed and improved the American landscape; how the New Deal energetically engaged a generation in rebuilding the nation and themselves; how the New Deal empowered working people and democratically expanded the "We" in "We the People"; and how the New Deal progressively nationalized the Bill of Rights. All of this afforded Americans the wherewithal, confidence, and courage to fight Nazism, fascism, and Japanese imperialism and extend and deepen freedom, equality, and democracy overseas and at home.

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In the name of the Four Freedoms, 16,000,000 Americans donned uniforms to fight fascism in the 1940s. But DeMint apparently wants us to forget that. You can hear it when he states unabashedly: "Socialists are now marching under the banner of a new secular-progressive style of freedom: the freedom from responsibility, the freedom to behave destructively without moral judgment, the freedom from risk and failure, the freedom from want, the freedom from religion, and the freedom to have material equality with those who work and accomplish more."

Moreover, Beck and his buddies have nothing to say about the G.I. Bill that helped turn the Greatest Generation into the American middle class of the 1950s and 1960s. Sounding like American Liberty Leaguers of the 1930s, Beck and Co. also go on to lambaste Social Security as both the source of Americans' loss of freedom and -- failing to mention things like the Reagan and Bush tax cuts -- the reason for the ballooning federal deficit. In that vein, Rick Perry not only exaggerates. He lies: "We are fed up that Social Security... teeter[s] on the verge of bankruptcy..."

And fancying himself a preacher -- a preacher of "frugality", I would note -- Beck charges FDR with not only leading us away from our founding principles, but also from God: "The United States was founded on Judeo-Christian principles, which embraced personal giving and charity as fundamental. And that was the way most Americans lived: charity through voluntary giving, in service of God. Then FDR and progressives came along and changed all of that. Charity still meant fulfilling your financial obligations to a higher power, but that higher power went from being God to being the United States government."

Sure, it's all laughable as "history." But we cannot leave it at that.

Reagan knew he could not denigrate Roosevelt because Americans not only revered him, but recognized how much they owed to the President and people who fought the Great Depression and struggled against fascism. But time is passing. The Greatest Generation is passing away. And the children of that generation -- myself included -- are turning 60. To defend the great democratic advances of the 1930s and 1940s and to build upon them, we must remember what they were and how they were secured, which means we must not only speak smartly of politics and policy, but also of the past.

Indeed, let us not forget Roosevelt's words at the dedication of the FDR Library at Hyde Park on June 30, 1941:

[A] Nation must believe in three things.
It must believe in the past.
It must believe in the future
It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future.

Harvey J. Kaye is the Ben & Joyce Rosenberg Professor of Social Change and Development at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and the author of Thomas Paine and the Promise of America. He serves as an historical adviser to the Four Freedoms Park project.

Further cutting their salaries will only mean a weaker government.

The Bowles-Simpson chairman's mark strongly implies that government employees are overpaid (see here). But the evidence from any number of sources is that this is completely false, even when you include benefits and control for everything imaginable. Reihan Salam brought up an corollary argument, Andrew Bigg's argument that you have to include unfunded benefit liabilities in these comparisons. This was taken apart months ago by the National Institute on Retirement, so let's review that.

To get there, I'm going to first run through EPI's Debunking the Myth of the Overcompensated Public Employee (pdf), a pretty fantastic paper.  Lots of people have also done this research at the state level: Jeffrey Thompson and John Schmitt of CEPR for New England, California from the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the University of California-Berkeley, etc.

We can break the entire argument about government employee compensation into three steps.

First step: education level

The first is an apples-to-apples comparison of workers among education levels. The government's workforce is more educated than the private workforce. For instance, the government's "college plus" level is 54%, while all private workforce is 35%, for instance. "Some college" is 14% of government workers, 19% of the private workforce. Here is the penalty government workers take when you include all benefits across both categories:

On average, government workers make 3% less total compensation when you control for education levels. As someone who once considered doing regulatory work with his professional Master's degree work, I completely agree that there's a 30%+ pay gap between the private and public sector. Tom Ferguson and Rob Johnson had a good paper at INET comparing the evolution of regulatory salaries and industry salaries -- the results were in line with the real incentive for regulators to be joining the industries they regulated.

Some groups make more in government.  This appears to be more the result of the declining wages and benefits over the past 30 years for non-college educated workers in this country than runaway government compensation. The paper notes: "The public sector appears to set a floor on compensation particularly improving the compensation of workers with high school educations, when compared to similarly educated workers in the private sector. This result is due in part because the earnings floor has collapsed in the private sector," citing Lee 1999. But on average, there's a compensation penalty for working for the government.

Second step: gender and race

On the first approximation, government workers are underpaid. So are we done? No. There are two more steps. Beyond education, there are other things we need to control for. State and government workers are "slightly less experienced (21 years compared to 23 years); are more likely to be female (57% to 43%); work fewer hours (42.6 to 43.3); are more likely to be black (14% to 12%); are less likely to be Asian (3% to 6%); and are less likely to be Hispanic (10% to 13%). [p. 9]"

We need to control for all of these factors, as they impact the comparison of wages. Government workers leave 6 minutes earlier each day, women make 80 cents on the dollar as the result of systemic gender discrimination men make $1.25 on the dollar because they are compensated for their evolution-derived risk-taking, aggression and promiscuity, older workers make more than younger workers, etc.

So the paper controls for all that (they put some time into this), and this is what they find:

Once again, controlling for everything imaginable, government workers make less in total compensation than regular workers.  The result is less pronounced at the local level (1.8% less rather than 7.5% at the state level), though still significant.

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Third step: cost of benefits

Now there is a third critique, led by Andrew Bigg of AEI, which says these two steps don't get the entire costs of providing benefits because "most state and local employees also become eligible for defined-benefit pensions and health benefits in retirement. But state and local governments haven’t come close to fully funding these obligations. That means that the amount government employers spend today may be well less than what employees will actually receive when they retire." He believes this is not the case for private employers, hence government workers are likely overpaid.

Let's hand the microphone to the National Institute on Retirement, which is specifically addressing Bigg's claims (my bold):

Some have argued that because many public pension plans around the country are not fully funded, the entire cost of defined benefit (DB) pension benefits is not recognized in the data we used in our study, which comes from the National Compensation Survey (NCS).  While the NCS, like any survey, does have some limitations, it remains the definitive source researchers use for assessing the cost to employers of non-wage benefits...

In other words, if an employer fails to fully pay for the benefits accrued in any given year, then it is possible that the cost of the pension benefit -- and therefore, the full cost of employee compensation -- may be slightly understated in the data.  The corollary to this is that if an employer’s contributions to a pension plan exceed the cost of benefits accrued in that year, the NCS will overstate the cost.  Because employer contributions can vary with the funded status of the plan, which in turn, is driven by macro-economic factors like the performance of stock and bond markets, there may be a cyclical bias in the data.  Over time, though, these over- or under-estimates should average out, which is why we used an average (from 2004 to 2008) of benefit costs, rather than a point estimate in our analysis.  Moreover, it is important to note that any bias (positive or negative) would apply equally to public or private sector employers.

So, claims that our analysis systematically understates costs for public employers are invalid on this basis.

Similarly, claims that our study should have added the value of the entire unfunded liability (of state and local government DB plans) onto a single year’s compensation costs are completely off base. Any analysis that does so will reach conclusions that are equally inappropriate and flawed.

First, an unfunded liability represents all accrued benefits, from all years past, that are not currently funded.  Yet the point of the analysis is to compare the cost of annual compensation.  Therefore, it is inappropriate to include the entire unfunded liability from all prior years into the calculation of the cost of benefits in a single year.

Second, even if one felt that incorporating the cost of unfunded liabilities served a purpose (notwithstanding that this is not how economists define current compensation), one would have to apply the same standard to the private sector side of the analysis, too. Currently, many private sector DB plans have unfunded liabilities -- a result of the recent stock market downturn that affected investors of all stripes. If the idea is to compare public and private pension costs in a fair, “apples to apples” manner, then the unfunded liabilities of private sector pensions should be calculated as well.

Third, adding the expected annual cost of paying off unfunded liabilities (even under the worst-case scenario) would not change the result.

The Center for Retirement Research at Boston College recently calculated that it will cost states on average just 2.2% of payrolls to pay off their entire unfunded liability over 30 years. In the Out of Balance report, we found that total compensation is 6.8% lower for state government employees and 7.4% lower for local government employees than for comparable private sector workers. So, even if we were to add 2.2% of payroll to state and local employee compensation -- which would pay off the entire unfunded liability -- state and local workers would still be paid 4.6% and 5.2% less, respectively, than their private sector counterparts.

In conclusion, the results of the Out of Balance study stand up to scrutiny. Even acknowledging the additional contributions that will be required to restore pensions to full funding does not alter the ultimate findings of the study. State and local employees still receive significantly less total compensation than their counterparts in the private sector.

Posted on July 19, 2010 by: Keith A. Bender, Associate Professor and John S. Heywood, Distinguished Professor; Department of Economics, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

The idea that private market pensions are in tip-top shape doesn't strike me as accurate, and piling on the entire unfunded liability into a single year is, of course, going to distort the scales and not focus on the specific hypothesis testing that is being carried out. And yes, even if we were expecting to pay off the entire unfunded liability, we are talking about 2.2% of payroll, still less than what NIR, EPI and others found as the pay gap.

Again, there's simply little fat to cut here. Government workers are less compensated than private workers -- more cuts will simply mean a weaker workforce with less human capital, which will lead to weaker government services.  Which will discredit the idea of government, which I guess for some people is the point.

Mike Konczal is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

If the government follows the deficit commission's early report, we really will saddle our grandchildren with burdens.

It all started so innocently: deficit hawks wanted to restore their credibility in the face of the global financial crisis and the comprehensive discrediting of their ideology. They slowly emerged from their caves, trying to re-engage in the policy debate by appearing reasonable. They started saying that "now we should have deficits," but soon (unspecified) "we will need surpluses" to "pay back the excesses."

As time progressed, however, the comeback attempts became outrageous and outright distortion entered the picture. Figures such as Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan (along with a whole host of Wall Street economists, whose employers had been large, albeit misdirected, beneficiaries of government largess) began to launch revisionist efforts to deny that fiscal policy had any positive impacts. Some went as far as asserting that government intervention actually worsened the recession by virtue of creating great "uncertainty", which allegedly held back business investment.

This latter development has now gathered pace and found its fullest expression through the US National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (an Orwellian title if ever there was one) established by President Obama. The Commission has proposed a $3.8 trillion deficit cutting plan that would trim Social Security and Medicare, reduce income-tax rates and eliminate tax breaks, including the mortgage-interest deduction. Yes, there are token cuts in Defense spending in the interests of "fairness", but the cuts are heavily skewed toward middle class entitlements. (Which is a deceiving word because it implies that we're just a bunch of weak supplicants, dependent on the graces of the government. Why don't we call these programs "enablements"?) The priorities laid out by the Commission are truly symptomatic of the degeneracy of our governing class compared to the days of the Great Depression. Grand projects started then are still delivering value to communities and private business interests some 80 years after their completion.

The financial crisis delivered significant empirical blows to mainstream economics, which has consistently downplayed the effects of fiscal policy. Along with the usual ideological hatred of government spending (except, of course, when it favored their particular industries), most of the supporters of this commission continue to trot out the usual fantasies of excessive government spending "crowding out" the private sector. They also cited the perverse idea of "Ricardian equivalence", which says the reason that the private sector is not spending is because it expects higher taxes in the future due to budget deficits, which will have to be paid back sometime -- so they are saving up to pay those bills. And anybody who has the nerve to challenge their ludicrous assumptions is castigated as being "stridently opposed" to any reforms at all.

Yes, some of us remain strident in our opposition to stupid, irrational policy that invokes financial, rather than real, resource constraints. What we need is a policy that puts unemployed people to work to produce output needed by seniors. Providing adequate Social Security benefits to retirees will generate effective demand, which will put labor to work. Just as the rapid growth of effective demand during the Clinton boom allowed sustained growth in the employment rate, even as productivity growth rose nearer to United States long-term historical averages, tomorrow's retirees can provide the necessary demand to allow the United States to operate near full employment. This is a "virtuous combination" of the high productivity growth model followed by Europe and Japan from 1970-95 and the high employment model followed by the United States during the 1960s, as well as during the Clinton boom.

Instead, we now have a commission where people are invoking a bogus "national solvency" argument to justify cuts in Social Security. They fail to understand that resource availability in the future will be enhanced by the fiscal outlays that are done now. Mainstream remedies to perceived budget blow-outs typically manifest as cuts to education, for example. Nothing could be more counterproductive to growth.

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As far as the national debt itself goes, those who want to paint the scariest picture possible use the larger gross debt to GDP ratio, which is around 90% of GDP. But that is highly misleading, because it includes the debt held in federal government accounts -- in other words, debt the government owes itself. This includes securities held in civil service and military retirement funds, Social Security, and Medicare, as well as unemployment and highway trust funds.

And Social Security has run large budget surpluses since the early 1980s. It has used those surpluses to accumulate treasury debt. In the future, the program will sell the bonds back to the treasury when Social Security revenues are less than its benefit payments. To all intents and purposes, Social Security's treasury holdings really amount to internal record keeping -- a sort of reminder that someday the treasury will have to cover Social Security's shortfall. The relevant debt figure is the treasuries held by the public.

The rationale for creating this actuarial accounting fiction can be questioned, but it helped establish the program's political legitimacy in its early days, by creating the illusion that Social Security was a "pay as you go" system, in which you take out what you pay in. In fact, it bears no reality to a private sector social insurance scheme. Those who argue, for example, that the debt owned by Social Security should be counted as part of our overall debt levels do so because it reflects a future obligation of government to future beneficiaries. However, as Randy Wray and Yeva Nersisyan have pointed out, the government has that obligation whether or not Social Security owns treasuries, and it will meet its obligations in exactly the same manner whether or not it holds treasuries, by electronically crediting bank accounts. That assertion might seem controversial to many (including the members of the Presidential commission on the deficit), but no less than the Chairman of the Federal Reserve himself has conceded the point. Ben Bernanke has long claimed that there are no technical limits to government spending (or, more specifically, to financing the fiscal components of monetary policy). In a now famous 2002 speech before the National Economists Club, he argued that the central bank can always finance government spending at no cost, under modern monetary arrangements:

Under a fiat (that is, paper) money system, a government (in practice, the central bank in cooperation with other agencies) should always be able to generate increased nominal spending and inflation, even when the short-term nominal interest rate is at zero. . . . The U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent) that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost.

Bernanke recognizes that the Fed finances government spending by electronically injecting reserves into the system and that there is no limit to its ability to do so. The Commission, however, persists in perpetuating the idea that the American government has run out of money. Meanwhile, American families have spent the past several years facing tough choices in their own lives because the market system failed. This was all due to lax government regulation and dishonest, irresponsible, and indeed fraudulent behavior on the part of the private sector, notably the financial sector, which stands to benefit from any attempt to privatize Social Security.

The deteriorating position of most American families has been exacerbated by the failure of fiscal policy to ensure there was enough spending to support their jobs and, hence, generate increased revenues (which would REDUCE the budget deficit). There are no consequences for the people who helped drive us into the ditch that the President loves to talk about. In fact, to extend the President's metaphor, the very car that veered off into the ditch has run over the people trying to climb out of it. Those victims, in turn, are being blamed for having dug the ditch in the first place. To repeat: the private sector should never spend more than they can afford. That means they should only run sustainable debt burdens and probably not be in debt overall as a sector. But the US government has the unique ability to support spending and employment while the private sector restructures its balance sheet. Policies that maintain high employment and minimize unemployment (both officially measured unemployment, as well as those counted as out of the labor force) are critical to maintain a higher worker-to-retiree ratio. Policy can also encourage today and tomorrow's seniors to continue to participate in the labor force. The private sector will play a role in all of this, but there is also an important role to be played by government.

Even on today's payouts, the vast majority of people will have almost nothing but Social Security with which to support themselves on retirement. The value of their homes has declined, their 401(k)s have been decimated, many have lost their jobs. Yet these are the very people being called upon to make sacrifices to preserve our "national solvency", even as the people largely responsible for this crisis sustain their jobs and lifestyle on the back of huge government bailouts. It is a mark of the degeneracy of our political and economic system that it looks set to succumb to the maniacal protests of the deficit hawks, who urge yet more destructive public spending reductions (how's that work out for Ireland, by the way?), which will drive millions more workers out of jobs. If one really wants to talk about "intergenerational theft" (a theme well beloved by the leading actors of this Commission), then it's fair to say that the government that adopts the recommendations of the commission will truly be guilty of crimes against our children and grandchildren.

Marshall Auerback is a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, and a market analyst and commentator.

Democrats need a new slogan to convince the public they can fix the economy.

After the 2010 elections, progressives need a good alternative to the Republican slogan "less taxes". Even though less taxes will lead to an even worse economy, at least it's an idea that indicates to its intended audience that the Republicans have an answer to the question, "how can we end the Great Recession?"

There may be a trend, if not a consensus, forming around the idea of "more jobs", emerging from the center-right all the way through to the left. In fact, at the far right of the Democratic party we have the example of David Brooks, who wrote about the Midwest: "If America can figure out how to build a decent future for the working-class people in this region, then the U.S. will remain a predominant power. If it can’t, it won’t... The Midwest has lost a manufacturing empire but hasn’t yet found a role... Voters in this region face structural problems, not cyclical ones. Intensely suspicious of government, they are nonetheless casting about for somebody, anybody, who can revive their towns and neighborhoods." Democrats have failed this region, says Brooks, and I can't argue with him. The obvious answer is to bring manufacturing back to the region, and if the Democrats can do that, then they will reclaim the Midwest, and with it, the Federal government.

A similar theme can be heard from the more official right-wing of the Democratic party, Evan Bayh. He writes that "We also overreached by focusing on health care rather than job creation during a severe recession...in the near term, every policy must be viewed through a single prism: does it help the economy grow?" So he poses the issue of job creation as being central, as does Paul Begala, representing the "Clinton center", who argues, "Job creation and reducing the influence of special interests are as mainstream as you get... President Obama and the Democrats should challenge the Republicans to support real investment in the real America: our roads and bridges and airports and mass transit."

But the main way that these strategists seem to think we can create jobs is to lower taxes! Marketing note to Democrats: when you're trying to differentiate yourself from Republicans, emphasize the way that you're different. Pepsi doesn't say "We're sorta like Coke!" Countering "less taxes" with "less taxes, but sorta different, and we know it won't be easy to figure out the difference, but our best wonks like it" is not effective. Better to concentrate on building stuff.

In fact, we also have Chris Matthews of MSNBC, not exactly a raving lefty, writing that Democrats lost "because the American manufacturing heart has been cut out. We used to build trains and subways and airplanes for the world... Why don't we build 'anything' anymore? Would we build the subway systems of our country today? Would we build the Empire State building or the Golden Gate Bridge? Would be build this beautiful capital of Washington today? " As I have argued, once we get going we could build lots of electric trains, wind turbines, and high-density buildings, generating tens of millions of jobs.

Once we start building stuff, which requires manufacturing, which requires giving people jobs, maybe we could talk about exporting manufactured goods instead of mostly importing them. Here's an example: it's from... well, hey, it's from the President! He writes, "We need to rebuild on a new, stronger foundation for economic growth. And part of that foundation involves doing what Americans have always done best: discovering, creating and building products that are sold all over the world... We want to be known not just for what we consume, but for what we produce. And the more we export abroad, the more jobs we create in America. In fact, every $1 billion we export supports more than 5,000 jobs at home."

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Let's say we try to eradicate the $858 billion dollar goods trade deficit that we had in 2007, just before the Great Recession. And let's go for a modest 150 billion dollar export surplus, as ambitious as that sounds, for a cool trillion dollars more exports than we have now. Then we would be able to create 5,000,000 manufacturing jobs -- not a bad policy goal to run an election on!

So we can create millions of jobs by using the government to build big infrastructure systems, and based on the ensuing revival of manufacturing, we can create even more jobs through exporting. What's not to like?

Apparently AFL-CIO chief Richard Trumka likes the idea, reports Art Levine: "'Realistically, both Democrats and Obama and the new House majority want to see job creation,' he contends. One arena for common ground is 'infrastructure -- we need $2.2 trillion worth of work on infrastructure and it's making us less competitive -- and we also need it for long term jobs creation.'"

Except that the Democrats aren't putting all of these ideas together, as we saw in this election. Bob Herbert worries, "What voters want is leadership that will help them through an economic nightmare and fix a country that has been pitched into a state of sharp decline. They long for leaders with a clear and compelling vision of a better America and a road map for getting there."

The last time the country was in this much trouble was during the start of the Great Depression. Several policies (and non-policies) were attempted before the government simply started creating jobs. Herbert Hoover mostly urged voluntary charity and waited for the market to work its magic, to no avail. When Roosevelt entered office in 1933, one of the first things he attempted was the Economy Act of 1933, which decreased government salaries and generally did many of the things that deficit hawks, such as Evan Bayh, would like to see done. Of course, it only made things worse; even the National Recovery Administration, which attempted to set minimum price and wage levels, didn't work. Finally, the Works Progress Administration, which directly created millions of jobs, came into being two years after FDR's inauguration.

For all the problems of the Great Depression, however, the country had one thing going for it that it doesn't have now -- the world's best manufacturing system, with over 40% of world output. I think that people sense that the country is in decline now, although thinking on how to turn things around runs from the inchoate sputterings of the Tea Party to the hand-wringing of the center-right to center-left to the disconnected ideas of the left. But we need to understand that in addition to the problem of creating jobs, we need to recreate the self-sustaining, job-creating engine of economic growth, the manufacturing economy.

So let's review: we need tens of millions of high-skill, high-paid, permanent jobs, which we can get by rebuilding the infrastructure of the country, which will also revive the manufacturing sector, which will lead to even more good jobs producing exports. "More jobs, better infrastructure, world-class manufacturing" -- is that better than "less taxes"?

Jon Rynn is the author of the book Manufacturing Green Prosperity: The power to rebuild the American middle class, available from Praeger Press. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from the City University of New York.