Millennial Pulse

How to Pensa 2040: Italy's Millennials Share Their Blueprint for Change

May 13, 2013Alan Smith

An Italian offshoot of the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network shows that Millennial policy priorities reach across national borders.

An Italian offshoot of the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network shows that Millennial policy priorities reach across national borders.

In 2010, the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network created the Blueprint for Millennial America, a generational vision for the country we hoped to see by the year 2040. In the conversations that established the backbone of the blueprint, we identified a core set of values shared by Millennials. The top three -- a deeply held concern for equity, a respect for the individual and society, and a belief in community empowerment and self-determination – represent a commonality that we think underlines what is unique about this generation of Americans. We are a group that seeks self-empowerment and strives to improve our society, but not always through the traditional power structures.

Over the last year, a similar project has been taking root on university campuses and among active Millennials – except this time it’s in Italy, where students have stepped up to take charge of their country’s uncertain future. “Pensa 2040” has taken the values-based collective ethos of the Roosevelt Blueprint and the Budget for Millennial America but introduced an Italian perspective. More than a thousand Italians have participated in conversations similar to those that built the Blueprint, and a Millennial vision for Italy is coming into focus.

If we’ve learned anything at the Campus Network, it’s that ownership of the process is equally as important as ownership of the outcomes. From what we’ve seen so far, the leaders of the Pensa 2040 process have carried on the successes of the Thinks 2040 framework by being willing and able to customize their discussions for the people in the room and the issues that are near and dear to their hearts. Holding discussions that engage people through the fundamental framework of values, and in so doing asks participants to examine which issues they truly believe are the most important, can yield a deeper and more lasting engagement on the issues that the community decides on together. 

So, what happened in Pensa 2040? The top-ranked value listed by the Italian Millennials reveals a clear difference between our two cultures: a deeply held respect for the idea of “legality.” This concept, rooted in Italy’s ongoing problems with the mafia and organized crime, extends to ending tax evasion and corruption within government. The very fact that the idea of legality would be a core value reveals a desire for order that is not at the forefront of many Americans’ minds. Still, some of the outcomes that students hope for in this category include a fair tax system and a more effective and fair legal system – important underpinnings of the Government By and For Millennial America discussion. 

It is in the second and third values expressed by the Italian students that we find a direct match with their American counterparts: equality and respect for the rights of the person. These essentially match word for word the underpinnings of the American Blueprint, and we find kinship with a generation focused on an absolute right to citizenship, same-sex marriages, and “civil service for all” (outcomes under “Uguaglianza”) as well as a right to health and full access to the sorts of “primary goods” that people need to be active and successful citizens (outcomes listed under “Rispetto per i diritti della persona”). There is something here, direct and definable, that speaks to a global generational identity. 

This sympathetic outlook makes sense: there are more and more shared experiences for people across borders and oceans. Not only could we jump on Skype to hear the results of the Pensa 2040 discussions, but many of the core issues facing Millennial Italians are the same issues facing American students in the Campus Network. Global climate change, economic uncertainty, and the challenges of a consistently volatile yet ever-more-interconnected world mean that the experience of being young often establishes a stronger bond than the experience of being “American” or “European.” While the 39 percent youth unemployment rate in Italy dwarfs the 17 percent unemployment rate for American youth, both countries are experiencing talk of a “lost generation,” and anyone trying to get a job out of college right now can tell you that unemployment is only a part of a bitter cocktail that includes low-wage jobs and student debt.  The economic example serves to highlight a greater truth: that a generational movement is real and important. 

Pensa 2040 has moved from the conversation stages to the building of a values-based blueprint for Italy. Students are working with other stakeholders now to write policy recommendations for Italy going forward, and to follow in the footsteps of the Campus Network by creating a crowd-sourced and collaborative budget for Italy that tackles their ongoing economic woes from a place of shared values. We’re excited that Italian students have taken on a part of our brand of collective discussions and are using it to build something equally as empowering and exciting for themselves. Look for a Blueprint for Millenario Italia entro il 2014! 

Alan Smith is the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network's National Policy and Program Director.

 

"Made in Italy" image via Shutterstock.com

Read more

Share This

The WPA: A Flawed Model for Women, but an Inspiration for Progress

Apr 9, 2013Andrea Flynn

The New Deal left women behind, but it proved government can be a champion for the economically downtrodden.

The participation of women in the American work force has expanded dramatically in the 78 years since the Roosevelt administration launched the WPA to provide jobs to Americans out of work and on relief. Today women comprise nearly half the work force and typically work through the life cycle, not episodically, before and after childrearing, which for so long was considered their principal occupation.

The New Deal left women behind, but it proved government can be a champion for the economically downtrodden.

The participation of women in the American work force has expanded dramatically in the 78 years since the Roosevelt administration launched the WPA to provide jobs to Americans out of work and on relief. Today women comprise nearly half the work force and typically work through the life cycle, not episodically, before and after childrearing, which for so long was considered their principal occupation.

Today married, as well as single, women play a critical role in the U.S. economy. In nearly half the country’s dual income families, women earn as much or more than men. And as a percentage of the total, there are many more single women heading households today. For these reasons, today’s employment policies must be sensitive to gender in ways they never have been before.

Women were an afterthought of policymakers back in the Roosevelt years. Prevailing cultural mores still viewed work among married women as a threat to the sanctity and moral fabric of the family. New Dealers actually passed legislation (over the objection of Eleanor Roosevelt and others with feminist leanings) that prevented two workers in any one family from claiming a government salary, which meant that women during the Depression often were fired or forced to quit their jobs.

Women actually claimed only 13.5 percent of the 8.5 million total jobs created by the WPA, the majority of them in traditionally female occupations such as sewing, childcare and eldercare, teaching and education, etc. No surprise, these jobs paid less than other positions occupied by men, with WPA salaries ranging from only $20 to nearly $100 dollars per month. And most of those jobs, in fact, went to women who were divorced, widowed or unmarried.

With the advent of World War II, record numbers of women entered the work force to fill jobs left by men conscripted to fight the war. Despite postwar conventions that again celebrated domesticity and pushed women out of positions reclaimed by returning veterans, the war actually ignited a behavioral shift that forever reshaped the U.S. labor force.

In 1948, women comprised 29 percent of the labor force overall, and 17 percent of married mothers worked outside the home. Most of them were part of families living at the edge of poverty and needing two salaries, but some were in the professions and in business and simply rejected prevailing values. Those numbers have steadily increased over the last 60 years. Today, women make up nearly 47 percent of the labor force, with more than 79 percent of mothers now working.

But old ways die hard. Women may make up nearly half the American work force, but they still face an ever-increasing number of obstacles to balancing work and family and to achieving economic security. A report recently released by the Ms. Foundation for Women illustrates the myriad challenges facing women workers:

  • The Bureau of Labor Statistics lists more than 440 occupations. Four out of five women are concentrated in only 20 of these jobs, most of them traditionally female roles such as secretaries, home health care and childcare workers, teachers, waitresses, etc. that barely afford women a living wage.
  • Approximately 63 percent of minimum- and sub-minimum-wage workers are women.
  • The recent recession has had a particularly negative impact on women. By 2011, women had regained only 11 percent of jobs lost (compared to men’s 24 percent), and by the end of 2012, the women had regained 46 percent (compared to men’s 50 percent).
  • Of families headed by single mothers, 28.7 percent — 4 million of them — live in poverty compared with 13 percent (or 670,000) of those headed by men.
  • Underemployment is a serious issue facing women workers. Approximately 26 percent of working women are in part-time jobs, which do not provide essential benefits and job security.

Though not sufficiently attentive to the needs of women at the time, Roosevelt’s New Deal and WPA exemplified the role government can and should play in guaranteeing a basic floor of well being for all Americans. We would be wise to revisit those ideals today as we think about how to protect and advance women workers across the United States.

President Obama has suggested many such initiatives: universal pre-school; better job training to equip students to pursue trades; a historic expansion of Medicaid and private health insurance that will guarantee all women basic preventative services (including reproductive health care and family planning); and pay equity and a raise in the minimum wage.

Indeed, the first piece of legislation President Obama signed upon entering office was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which overturned the 180-day statute of limitations for women to contest pay discrimination. Today, in commemoration of National Pay Equity Day, President Obama said:

Wage inequality undermines the promise of fairness and opportunity upon which our country was founded… Our country has come a long way toward ensuring everyone gets a fair shot at opportunity, no matter who you are or where you come from. But our journey will not be complete until our mothers, our wives, our sisters, and our daughters are treated equally in the workplace and always see an honest day's work rewarded with honest wages. 

There are other significant steps we can take:

  • Congress should pass the Paycheck Fairness Act, legislation that has been introduced a number of times since 2009 but has failed to secure support from both chambers of Congress. The legislation – an update to the 1963 Equal Pay Act – would prohibit employers from paying a man more than a woman for the same job and would prevent employers from punishing women who call attention to pay disparities.
  • We should ensure that women who work as nannies, home health care workers, housekeepers, etc. – positions that are a major backbone to our economy – receive a fair wage and benefits necessary to lead healthy, financially secure lives.
  • We should ensure that all workers are guaranteed sick days and parental leave so their families don’t play second fiddle to a job.
  • We should task our best and brightest with creating innovative job training programs (and job creation initiatives) that will enable women to move beyond the 20 or so occupations the majority currently occupy. And we should think critically about how the federal government can provide better job security for women in part-time and seasonal jobs.
  • We should create affordable childcare programs that would allow women to know their children are being well-cared for while they earn a living to support their families. This would also give women greater flexibility to occupy full-time, more stable positions.

FDR may not have offered women their rightful place in the New Deal’s employment programs. But today we know better. Only by lifting the barriers that prevent women from achieving real economic equity, can we regain real security for American families and re-establish our country’s stronghold as a global economic leader. 

Andrea Flynn is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

Read more

Share This

Rortybomb

The Problem of Rents and the Wilt Chamberlain Example

Apr 4, 2013Mike Konczal

I wrote a piece at Wonkblog over the weekend about economic rents and the possibilities and limitations of conservatives and liberals coming together to tackle them. The issue of combating rents is interesting because it pushes against an argument that is taken to be a common sense and intuitive example of libertarian thought: the Wilt Chamberlain example. Looking at that example might help us understand some interesting issues about rent income. (This argument is taken from an excellent paper on the topic by Barbara Fried. If this blog does nothing but create a bigger audience for Fried's work, as well as Robert Hale's, I'll call it a huge win.)

Let’s take your favorite example of rent income. Perhaps it is excessive copyright, criminal sanctions for unlocking your phone, zoning regulations that protect incumbent interests, live-saving drugs that are rationed above a market-clearing price due to patents, utilities that go unregulated, or something else.

What’s the problem with these situations? At least some of the problem is distributional. People who collect income and wealth off of rents are collecting money that they don’t deserve. Nobody would think the problem of economic rents is that people are willing to pay them. In these situations, people are still buying and selling things. Slipping into a classically liberal mindframe, there's still exchange, and we can assume that both parties are better off by definition, otherwise they wouldn’t have made the trade. We don’t locate the problem of rents in the fact that people will pay too much for a phone, or for land, or for something with extensive copyright. And we also don’t think the fact that people are willing to pay a higher price is, by itself, sufficient justification for those rents. The problem is that one person -- the patent holder, the phone company, the land holder, etc. -- is collecting income that he or she shouldn’t.

To phrase that a different way, the fact that people are willing to pay rents doesn’t justify someone’s ability to collect rents. If you are willing to pay everything you have for a medical drug that costs 5 cents, but it is being priced at a high level due to patent law, your desire to pay doesn’t, by itself, justify the company's profit levels.

But one of the most famous examples of libertarian thought thinks your desire to pay does in fact justify the rents. Let’s look at the Wilt Chamberlain example from Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

In this example, we start in a place called D1, where things are generally agreed upon to be just (whatever that definition may be). Then many people decide, voluntarily, to give Wilt Chamberlain their money to watch him play basketball, and he ends up with a lot of it. Can this state D2 be unjust? Nozick:

If D1 was a just distribution, and people voluntarily moved from it to D2, transferring parts of their shares they were given under D1 (what was it for if not to do something with?), isn’t D2 also just? If the people were entitled to dispose of the resources to which they were entitled (under D1), didn’t this include their being entitled to give it to, or exchange it with, Wilt Chamberlain? Can anyone else complain on grounds of justice?

Wilt Chamberlain’s income is justified on the grounds that people are willing to give him their resources.

Thinking about rents forces us to break exchange into two steps. The first step is the right of someone to give away her resources however she sees fit. This doesn't raise any issues. We want people to have resources precisely because we want them to do what they want with them (“what was it for if not to do something with?”). However, that logic is snuck into doing the work of a second step, which is the right of someone to receive those resources. In the example, the right of someone to give something is doing the entirety of the work. It is presumed that someone giving something away builds in the right for the other to receive it.

But when it comes to rents, there’s no reason to believe this is true. One can turn the intuitive nature of the exercise upside down. Imagine if you are drowning, and Wilt Chamberlain is walking by and asks for $250,000 to throw you a life preserver (an easy act that would only cost $1 of his time). You agreeing to pay him to save your life, which is a sensible action on your part, doesn't presume that him receiving that money must keep the same level of distributional justice. This same issue will extend to a portion of what you will spend buying a cell phone and a plan in a market dominated by a few monopolistic players with extensive legal protections.

So where do we draw the line on rents, and what are the appropriate responses? Is receiving a major inheritance a form of rent? Land? Genetic endowments? Perhaps it is best for long-term growth to keep value with the owner, at least for a period, as many argue for copyright and patent. Maybe, like those following Henry George would argue, taxes are the appropriate response. Or maybe there should be active work to try and ensure fewer rents accrue in the first place. But the key thing to remember is that the answers to these questions won't be answered through abstract ideals of liberty, or pointing to the market itself, but instead can only be answered through democratic accountability.

Follow or contact the Rortybomb blog:
  

 

I wrote a piece at Wonkblog over the weekend about economic rents and the possibilities and limitations of conservatives and liberals coming together to tackle them. The issue of combating rents is interesting because it pushes against an argument that is taken to be a common sense and intuitive example of libertarian thought: the Wilt Chamberlain example. Looking at that example might help us understand some interesting issues about rent income. (This argument is taken from an excellent paper on the topic by Barbara Fried. If this blog does nothing but create a bigger audience for Fried's work, as well as Robert Hale's, I'll call it a huge win.)

Let’s take your favorite example of rent income. Perhaps it is excessive copyright, criminal sanctions for unlocking your phone, zoning regulations that protect incumbent interests, live-saving drugs that are rationed above a market-clearing price due to patents, utilities that go unregulated, or something else.

What’s the problem with these situations? At least some of the problem is distributional. People who collect income and wealth off of rents are collecting money that they don’t deserve. Nobody would think the problem of economic rents is that people are willing to pay them. In these situations, people are still buying and selling things. Slipping into a classically liberal mindframe, there's still exchange, and we can assume that both parties are better off by definition, otherwise they wouldn’t have made the trade. We don’t locate the problem of rents in the fact that people will pay too much for a phone, or for land, or for something with extensive copyright. And we also don’t think the fact that people are willing to pay a higher price is, by itself, sufficient justification for those rents. The problem is that one person -- the patent holder, the phone company, the land holder, etc. -- is collecting income that he or she shouldn’t.

To phrase that a different way, the fact that people are willing to pay rents doesn’t justify someone’s ability to collect rents. If you are willing to pay everything you have for a medical drug that costs 5 cents, but it is being priced at a high level due to patent law, your desire to pay doesn’t, by itself, justify the company's profit levels.

But one of the most famous examples of libertarian thought thinks your desire to pay does in fact justify the rents. Let’s look at the Wilt Chamberlain example from Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

In this example, we start in a place called D1, where things are generally agreed upon to be just (whatever that definition may be). Then many people decide, voluntarily, to give Wilt Chamberlain their money to watch him play basketball, and he ends up with a lot of it. Can this state D2 be unjust? Nozick:

If D1 was a just distribution, and people voluntarily moved from it to D2, transferring parts of their shares they were given under D1 (what was it for if not to do something with?), isn’t D2 also just? If the people were entitled to dispose of the resources to which they were entitled (under D1), didn’t this include their being entitled to give it to, or exchange it with, Wilt Chamberlain? Can anyone else complain on grounds of justice?

Wilt Chamberlain’s income is justified on the grounds that people are willing to give him their resources.

Thinking about rents forces us to break exchange into two steps. The first step is the right of someone to give away her resources however she sees fit. This doesn't raise any issues. We want people to have resources precisely because we want them to do what they want with them (“what was it for if not to do something with?”). However, that logic is snuck into doing the work of a second step, which is the right of someone to receive those resources. In the example, the right of someone to give something is doing the entirety of the work. It is presumed that someone giving something away builds in the right for the other to receive it.

But when it comes to rents, there’s no reason to believe this is true. One can turn the intuitive nature of the exercise upside down. Imagine if you are drowning, and Wilt Chamberlain is walking by and asks for $250,000 to throw you a life preserver (an easy act that would only cost $1 of his time). You agreeing to pay him to save your life, which is a sensible action on your part, doesn't presume that him receiving that money must keep the same level of distributional justice. This same issue will extend to a portion of what you will spend buying a cell phone and a plan in a market dominated by a few monopolistic players with extensive legal protections.

So where do we draw the line on rents, and what are the appropriate responses? Is receiving a major inheritance a form of rent? Land? Genetic endowments? Perhaps it is best for long-term growth to keep value with the owner, at least for a period, as many argue for copyright and patent. Maybe, like those following Henry George would argue, taxes are the appropriate response. Or maybe there should be active work to try and ensure fewer rents accrue in the first place. But the key thing to remember is that the answers to these questions won't be answered through abstract ideals of liberty, or pointing to the market itself, but instead can only be answered through democratic accountability.

Follow or contact the Rortybomb blog:
  

 

Read more

Share This

The Next Big Obamacare Battle: The Low-Wage Workers Who Get Left Out

Apr 1, 2013Richard Kirsch

Reformers should start building a coalition to push for expanding the bill and making it more affordable.

Reformers should start building a coalition to push for expanding the bill and making it more affordable.

The whining from some fast food chains that they won’t be able to afford paying for their employee’s health coverage under Obamacare have gotten a lot of press. But what is more troubling is the recent news that some big chains are concluding that the costs won’t be nearly as high as they had projected. The reason: their employees won’t be able to afford the health insurance and will instead pay a fine and remain uninsured. This fight is just the first battle in the coming war over Obamacare that will center around those who get left out. Big flaws in the bill will mean that many low-wage workers will be forced to choose between paying huge chunks of their income on premiums or on a penalty that leaves them with no coverage at all. Reformers should take note and get ready for the coming struggle.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Wendy’s lowered its estimate of the cost of Obamacare for each of its restaurants by 80 percent, from $25,000 a store to $5,000. The hamburger chain figured that many of its full-time employees, who will be offered health insurance through the company, will turn down the coverage because, as the Journal reported, “they can get insurance through Medicaid or a family member, or because they prefer to pay the penalty for not having coverage.” That penalty starts at $95 a year, although it will go up to $695 by 2016.

Wendy’s isn’t alone. Several other fast food chains have come up with similar estimates. One example is Popeyes, which figures that since only 5 percent of its employees have signed up for the high deductible plan now offered at a price of only $2.50 a week, few workers will choose to pay an estimated $25 a week for the improved coverage it will offer under Obamacare. While the new coverage required under the law will be far superior to the plan Popeyes now offers, with a good list of benefits, it will still include a steep deductible, particularly for a low-wage worker.

The debate over fast food chains and their workers is revealing one of the biggest flaws in the Affordable Care Act. Many low-wage workers will be put in a very difficult position: pay a big chunk of their limited wages for health insurance that is costly to use, or pay a fine for the privilege of remaining uninsured. This is an example of how the debate around Obamacare is about to take a huge turn. Instead of partisan opponents fearmongering about the theoretical impact of the law, the new struggle will be around the actual experience of those Americans whom the law was written to protect: people who are uninsured because they can not afford coverage or are locked out of the system because they have a pre-existing health condition.

Come January 2014, millions of people will get affordable health coverage for the first time. These will mostly be working people who do not get insurance on the job now but will become newly eligible for Medicaid or income-based tax-credits to buy insurance in the new health insurance marketplaces (“exchanges”). This will also include those who will no longer be turned down because of a pre-existing condition. The expansion of Medicaid – in states that give that the green light – and the income-based subsidies will create a huge new constituency for Obamacare that will oppose any attempts to roll back the law.

But due to problems written into the Affordable Care Act, the news won’t all be good for many people who can’t get affordable coverage now. There are some for whom the coverage in the marketplaces will still be too costly because the subsidies are too stingy. For example, a single person who earns just $33,500 will be required to pay $258 a month in premiums, which is more than 9 percent of his or her gross income, for coverage. That’s a big chunk out of a moderate income and is more than twice as much as that person would pay under Massachusetts’s current, successful law. In fact, people who earn more than two times the federal poverty level would be required to pay premiums from 6.3 percent to 9.5 percent of their incomes. If those costs are out of their financial reach, the bleak alternative is to pay a fine for remaining uninsured. It’s true that the coverage will include good benefits, free preventive services, and a cap on out-of-pocket costs. But unless it is already paying high medical bills, that won’t help a working family pay a high premium. The millions who face this dilemma will not be happy to have to make the choice between premiums that will put a big squeeze on an already tight budget or paying a fine they can’t afford for no benefits at all.

Which brings us to the second big group of people who will face this dilemma: low-wage workers who work more than 30 hours a week for a business that has 50 or more full-time employees. These employers can require employees to pay up to 9.5 percent of their incomes as premiums. The premiums are likely to be less for individuals; Popeyes estimates $1,200 a year, which would be similar to what has been found workable in Massachusetts. However, unlike in Massachusetts, the minimum coverage will have very high out-of-pocket costs, so workers will face high premiums for coverage that they can’t afford to use (although preventive care will be free). Furthermore, employers could decide to put more of the costs on to their workers, forcing them to choose between the premium and fines.

The news is much worse for family coverage. The IRS ruled earlier this year that the 9.5 percent rule will apply to the cost of individual coverage, even if family coverage costs much more than this. Here is how the New York Times editorial board explained the impact, in an editorial titled, “A Cruel Blow to American Families”:

A Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that in 2012, employees’ annual share of insurance premiums averaged $951 for individual coverage and $4,316 for family coverage. Under the I.R.S. rule, such costs would be considered affordable for an employee with a household income of $35,000 a year — making the employee’s spouse and children ineligible for a public subsidy on a health exchange, even though that family would have to spend 12 percent of its income for the employer’s family plan.

The Times goes on to report that between 2 million and 3.9 million spouses and children could lose access to affordable coverage because of the ruling. Those are millions of people for whom the law will be an empty promise.

The major purpose of the Affordable Care Act was to make decent health coverage affordable to Americans, and the law’s success will depend on how well it does just that. Next year, many millions of now uninsured people will gain access, but there will be millions of others for whom the promise remains out of reach. In the toxic political atmosphere surrounding Obamacare, the people left out will take center stage.

Republicans will seize on this situation to argue that the law is not working and use these people’s frustrations to portray the law as an expensive failure. The task for the champions of the ACA will be to unite those who are benefiting under Obamacare with those who will only benefit if the law is made more affordable. And since making coverage more affordable will take the government and, ideally, employers paying for more of the premiums, enacting the fixes will require a big political lift, particularly in the current Congress. Meeting this challenge will require organizing the winners and the losers to push for strengthening the law together.

All of this will become an issue in the 2014 and 2016 elections. In this way, Obamacare will join Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid as perennial issues of public debate, with competing visions of the role of government in assuring the security and well-being of our citizens. It’s a fight that never ends. 

Richard Kirsch is a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, a Senior Adviser to USAction, and the author of Fighting for Our Health. He was National Campaign Manager of Health Care for America Now during the legislative battle to pass reform.

Read more

Share This

Alert

Tune in for Telecom Equality: Susan Crawford Criss-Crosses the Nation's Radio Stations

Mar 26, 2013

From staying connected to family and friends to accessing vital resources like job openings, access to high-speed Internet is as vital to today’s Americans as access to electricity was in FDR’s day. No one makes the case stronger than Roosevelt Institute Fellow Susan Crawford, and you can catch her making this argument live today as she does a national radio tour from cities from Seattle to Dayton. Tune in live: 11:30 a.m. on KJR in Seattle, WA; 12 p.m.

From staying connected to family and friends to accessing vital resources like job openings, access to high-speed Internet is as vital to today’s Americans as access to electricity was in FDR’s day. No one makes the case stronger than Roosevelt Institute Fellow Susan Crawford, and you can catch her making this argument live today as she does a national radio tour from cities from Seattle to Dayton. Tune in live: 11:30 a.m. on KJR in Seattle, WA; 12 p.m. on KXYL in Brownwood, TX; 1:20 on America’s Radio News Network in Alexandria, VA; and 3:30 on BlogTalkRadio in Charlotte, NC. Even more interviews will be aired later on in cities from St. Louis to Tampa – the full schedule can be found here. And if you can’t make any of these appearances, don’t forget to get your copy of her book Captive Audience. 

Read more

Share This

FDR Called Minimum Wage Critics "Hopelessly Reactionary." He Was Right.

Mar 19, 2013David Woolner

Like President Obama, FDR faced resistance to guaranteeing workers a decent wage, but he knew he had the American people on his side.

Our Nation so richly endowed with natural resources and with a capable and industrious population should be able to devise ways and means of insuring to all our able-bodied working men and women a fair day's pay for a fair day's work. A self-supporting and self-respecting democracy can plead no justification for the existence of child labor, no economic reason for chiseling workers' wages or stretching workers' hours.

Like President Obama, FDR faced resistance to guaranteeing workers a decent wage, but he knew he had the American people on his side.

Our Nation so richly endowed with natural resources and with a capable and industrious population should be able to devise ways and means of insuring to all our able-bodied working men and women a fair day's pay for a fair day's work. A self-supporting and self-respecting democracy can plead no justification for the existence of child labor, no economic reason for chiseling workers' wages or stretching workers' hours.

Enlightened business is learning that competition ought not to cause bad social consequences which inevitably react upon the profits of business itself. All but the hopelessly reactionary will agree that to conserve our primary resources of man power, government must have some control over maximum hours, minimum wages, the evil of child labor and the exploitation of unorganized labor. –FDR, May 1937

In his recent State of the Union address, President Obama called on Congress to increase the federal minimum wage to $9 an hour and to link the future minimum wage rate to inflation. In doing so, the president took note of the fact that at today’s minimum wage, a family with two children that works full time sill lives below the poverty line. This, he insisted, is unacceptable, as “in the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works full-time should have to live in poverty.” Higher wages, the president insisted, “could mean the difference between groceries or the food bank; rent or eviction; scraping by or finally getting ahead.” And for businesses across the country, it would mean “customers with more money in their pockets,” which translates into the simple fact that “our economy is stronger when we reward an honest day’s work with honest wages.”

Not surprisingly, the president’s call for an increase in the minimum wage has elicited a somewhat predicable response from conservative Republicans. House Speaker John Boehner has called the idea “a job killer,” while House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan called it “inflationary” and “counter-productive.” Some Republican leaders, such as House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, have even gone so far as to advocate doing away with minimum wage/maximum hours laws altogether.

Interestingly, the legislation that gave us the minimum wage, the Fair Labor Standards Act, was also promoted by Franklin Roosevelt in his January 1938 State of the Union address. Here, after taking note of the fact that “millions of industrial workers receive pay so low that they have little buying power,” and hence “suffer great human hardship,” FDR also pointed out that these same workers are “unable to buy adequate food and shelter, to maintain health or to buy their share of manufactured goods,” all of which he insisted was a drag on our national economy.

Moreover, even though a majority of Americans—much like today—supported the passage of legislation that would set minimum wages and maximum hours, the Fair Labor Standards Act aroused fierce opposition among FDR’s conservative critics. The National Association of Manufacturers insisted that the law was but the first step in taking the country down the road to “communism, bolshevism, fascism and Nazism.” The National Committee to Uphold Constitutional Government insisted the act was unconstitutional and part of a larger conspiracy to turn the president into a dictator. To counter these absurd claims, FDR turned to one of his most effective tools, the Fireside Chat, where he calmly cautioned the American people:

not [to] let any calamity-howling executive with an income of $1,000.00 a day, who has been turning his employees over to the Government relief rolls in order to preserve his company's undistributed reserves, tell you—using his stockholders’ money to pay the postage for his personal opinions—tell you that a wage of $11.00 a week is going to have a disastrous effect on all American industry. Fortunately for business as a whole, and therefore for the Nation, that type of executive is a rarity with whom most business executives most heartily disagree.

Since its passage in 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act has helped improve the lives of millions of American workers—especially those at the bottom rung of the income scale. Moreover, contrary to the fear mongers of 1938 and today, minimum wage and maximum hours legislation has not been disastrous for American business. In fact, study after study shows that, on balance, raising the minimum wage has been good for the economy and business overall because it increases the purchasing power of the American consumer.

Given the sluggish state of our economy, and given the fact that the minimum wage as it stands today, when adjusted for inflation, falls far below the hourly income levels achieved in the mid to late 1960s, isn’t it time to offer hard-working Americans a pay increase?

In 1938, Franklin Roosevelt argued that if we want to move “resolutely to extend the frontiers of social progress, we must…ever bear in mind that our objective is to improve and not to impair the standard of living of those who are now undernourished, poorly clad and ill-housed.”

If Congress is serious about improving and not impairing the lives of the millions of working poor in this country, then it needs to act to reverse the downward spiral in hourly income that has occurred in the past four decades and get behind President Obama’s call for an increase in the minimum wage. The president is right. It is outrageous that in the richest country on earth, a person who works full-time is still forced to live in poverty. Surely the simple idea that an honest day’s work deserves an honest day’s pay is something that all Americans—even conservative Republicans—can agree should be part of the American dream.

David Woolner is a Senior Fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian for the Roosevelt Institute. He is currently writing a book entitled Cordell Hull, Anthony Eden and the Search for Anglo-American Cooperation, 1933-1938.

 

Rich man underpaying worker image via Shutterstock.com.

Read more

Share This

Price Point

A New Pope Brings New Hope for Ending Austerity

Mar 18, 2013Tim Price

If Pope Francis raises his voice on behalf of the poor, he could deal the final blow to austerity economics.

If Pope Francis raises his voice on behalf of the poor, he could deal the final blow to austerity economics.

“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” That’s a quote from the New Testament, but it’s easy to imagine many in Europe expressing the same sentiment today, and I don’t just mean the crowd that gathered outside St. Peter’s Basilica last week to watch the newly elected Pope Francis make his first address. It applies just as much to austerity advocates throughout the European Union who continue to assure themselves that economic growth and recovery will come if they just keep cutting deeper. As Pope Francis leads the Church into a new era, he may also be able to help bring the age of austerity to a close.

The man formerly known as Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio has a lot of hopes pinned on him, not the least of which is that he’ll serve as an advocate for the poor and an opponent of the economic policies that are afflicting them. The left has been let down on this front before; Pope Benedict XVI spoke of the “scandal of glaring inequalities" and condemned “unregulated financial capitalism,” but most progressives wouldn’t exactly consider him a staunch ally given his rejection of just about everything else they believe in. Already, critics have highlighted Pope Francis’s condemnation of gay rights and rumored collaboration with Argentine’s dictatorship, and as Mother Jones’s Eric Kain writes, “If the cardinals had elected a pro-choice pope, that would have been real news.”

But there are reasons to believe progressive optimism about Pope Francis isn’t totally misplaced. E.J. Dionne notes that he’s “the first pope to take the name of the saint known for his devotion to humility and to the poor.” He’s also the first pope from Latin America, which brings a new perspective to the Vatican and suggests that he’s “likely to weigh in often on behalf of the world’s poorest regions.” And to top it all off, he’s a Jesuit, which even among Catholics makes him the equivalent of that guy from college who made you feel bad by telling you he spent his summer volunteering with Habitat for Humanity while you were busy doing tequila shots. (There are also anecdotes about the modest life he chose to lead, but that feels uncomfortably close to saying Scott Brown would make a good senator because he drove a truck.)

Still, even if the new pope does emerge as a progressive voice on these issues, some might be tempted (no pun or theological implications intended) to dismiss his influence on economic policy. Regardless of whether you believe he’s really infallible, he’s still just one man (albeit one with a whole lot of employees), and the architects of austerity won’t be swayed by the power of prayer alone. But even they may be starting to question their beliefs – with their citizens protesting in the streets and voting them out of office, they don’t have much choice. The Associated Press reports that European leaders “aren't backing away aggressively from budget cuts and higher taxes, but they are increasingly trying to temper these policies, which have stifled growth and made it harder for many countries to bring their deficits under control.” A strong and sustained condemnation from the Holy See would make their position even more tenuous, even if the Church’s power in Europe is greatly diminished from what it once was. It might even give pause to austerity sympathizers on this side of the Atlantic, like former altar boy Paul Ryan. Okay, maybe we can’t expect miracles.

In Europe, the U.S., and throughout the world, people are losing faith in their leaders. Policies that attempt to prop up the status quo of a broken financial system while ignoring and even exacerbating real human suffering have made us feel cynical, isolated, and angry. Pope Francis has been called on to lead the Catholic Church, but he has an opportunity to provide some much needed guidance to people of all faiths or none. The message that will make that possible is not a sectarian one, but a universal one. We are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers, and caring for those in need, not supporting the rich and powerful, has to be the top priority of a healthy, sustainable society. In our holy texts and our constitutions, we’ve made that promise. Now it’s time to keep the faith.

Tim Price is Deputy Editor of Next New Deal. Follow him on Twitter @txprice.

 

Pope Francis image via Shutterstock.com.

Read more

Share This

Raising the Minimum Wage is a Step Toward Economic Freedom

Feb 20, 2013Annette Bernhardt

Opponents of a minimum wage increase imagine an economic reality very different from the one millions of American workers experience.

Opponents of a minimum wage increase imagine an economic reality very different from the one millions of American workers experience.

The good news from last week is that President Obama called for raising the federal minimum wage – long overdue and desperately needed for low-wage workers who have seen their real earnings decline during the recovery. The bad news is that his announcement set off a flurry of blogging on the economics of the minimum wage, and, predictably, not a small amount of armchair theorizing.

One particular contribution seems innocuous at first, but in fact frames the issue in an unhelpful and potentially misleading way. In his research round-up last Thursday, Matt Yglesias argued that the best case against raising the minimum wage might be economic freedom:

You've got a guy who wants to give someone $8 to do something that'll take an hour and another guy who wants $8 and is happy to do the thing in exchange for the money. Now Barack Obama's going to fine them for agreeing to trade $8 for the work? Seems perverse. In the real world, obviously, the perversity of this is greatly mitigated by the existence of formal exemptions and weak enforcement. If you pay a neighbor's son $10 to mow your lawn and it takes him 70 minutes, you're going to be able to get away with it even in a world of a $9 minimum wage. Which is probably as it should be.

In this theoretical world, the informal economy is a place where teenagers happily mow lawns and babysit for a little extra cash. But in the real America, we are talking about a large and growing sector of unregulated work, where every day, millions of adults work for subminimum wages and no overtime, often in unsafe and hazardous workplaces. Far from peripheral, this sector spans the core industries of our economy, from hotel housekeepers, dishwashers, retail sales workers, domestic workers, and home health aides to janitors, meat processing workers, taxi drivers, warehouse workers, and construction laborers.

And the violations of employment and labor laws are systemic. A landmark 2008 study of more than 4,000 low-wage workers in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles found that 26 percent had been paid less than the minimum wage in the preceding week, 76 percent had been underpaid for their overtime hours, and 70 percent did not receive any pay at all when they came in early or stayed late after their shift. Also important for this discussion: when workers made a complaint to their employer about wages or working conditions, 43 percent were retaliated against. Not surprisingly, many more never complained in the first place, out of fear that they’d be fired or turned over to the immigration authorities.

So this is not a world where workers are “happy to do the thing” for subminimum wages. It is not a world where workers and employers come to the wage negotiation with anything even vaguely resembling the equal power one would need to call it economic freedom. (And how low are we willing to go, by the way? Some have called for states to be allowed to experiment with $5 an hour minimum wages – but why stop there? What about $1 an hour? Or abolishing child labor laws, as a 2011 Missouri bill would have done?)

Moreover, this is not a world where weak enforcement of our laws is a good thing. Between 1980 and 2007, the number of federal wage and hour inspectors declined by 31 percent and the number of enforcement actions fell by 61 percent. By contrast, the civilian labor force grew 52 percent during this same period. And while the U.S. Department of Labor has added more investigators under the Obama administration, the current federal staffing level of 1,006 is still below its 1980 peak. (The picture looks even worse for enforcement of health and safety laws.)

In the same vein, there is nothing to cheer about when, for example, 2.5 million home care workers are exempted from minimum wage and overtime protections, which has driven down job quality, increased turnover, and caused staffing shortages in this critical industry.

So let me suggest a different definition of economic freedom. Under this definition, economic freedom means being able to earn a living wage, being able to pay for electricity and rent, being able to afford child care and health care, being able to save for college, and being able to put enough aside for retirement. In short, “freedom from want,” which not coincidentally comes to us from FDR, the father of the minimum wage.

Back then, the fight was to set a strong wage floor and enforce it, against arguments that businesses couldn’t compete without child labor and sweatshops. Now the fight is to set a strong wage floor and enforce it, against arguments that multinational corporations with billions a year in profits can’t afford to raise their wages to the poverty line. In both cases, the stakes remain the same: the strength of our families, our economy, and our respect for the labor of others.

Annette Bernhardt is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and policy co-director of the National Employment Law Project.

 

Housekeeper image via Shutterstock.com.

Read more

Share This

The Real State of the Union Requires a Stronger Government

Feb 15, 2013David Woolner

Instead of downplaying the role of government, we should recommit to a "spirit of charity."

We of the Republic sensed the truth that democratic government has innate capacity to protect its people against disasters once considered inevitable, to solve problems once considered unsolvable…

In this we Americans were discovering no wholly new truth; we were writing a new chapter in our book of self-government . –Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1937

Instead of downplaying the role of government, we should recommit to a "spirit of charity."

We of the Republic sensed the truth that democratic government has innate capacity to protect its people against disasters once considered inevitable, to solve problems once considered unsolvable…

In this we Americans were discovering no wholly new truth; we were writing a new chapter in our book of self-government . –Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1937

In his State of the Union address, President Obama challenged the Congress and the American people to join him in a common effort to make the United States a better nation; to recognize that while we “may do different jobs, and wear different uniforms” we are all “citizens” imbued with the rights and responsibility “to be the authors of the next great chapter in our American story.”

Certainly, the president’s call for “investments” in setting up universal preschool, increasing access to higher education, promoting research and development, fixing our broken infrastructure, and establishing a higher minimum wage so that in “the wealthiest nation on earth, no one who works full-time should have to live in poverty,” is a welcome development. So too is the president’s acknowledgment that there are still communities in this country where, thanks to inescapable pockets of rural and urban poverty, young adults find it virtually impossible to find their first job. “America,” he insisted, should “not [be] a place where chance of birth or circumstance should decide our destiny.”

And yet, if we examine the state of our union honestly, it not only becomes apparent that we are indeed a society where “chance of birth or circumstance” decides our destiny, but also a society that has fallen far behind the rest of the world in education, health care, infrastructure, and a host of other indicators that determine the overall quality of life.

In study after study, for example, Americans are found to be far less economically mobile than their counterparts in Canada and Europe. In education, the U.S. now ranks 17th in the developed world overall, while we are ranked 25th in math, 17th in science, and 14th in reading, well behind our Asian and European counterparts. For decades the U.S, was ranked number 1 in college graduation, but we now stand at number 12, and even more shocking, we are now ranked 79th in primary school enrollment. This is no way to sustain or build a competitive edge in a global economy.

Other statistics tell a similar tale. How many Americans, for example, are aware that out of the 35 most economically advanced countries in the world, the U.S. now holds the dubious distinction of ranking 34th in terms of child poverty, second only to Romania? In infant mortality, the U.S. ranks 48th. As for overall health and life expectancy, a recent report by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council found that among the 17 advanced nations it surveyed, the U.S.—which in the 1950s was ranked at the top for life expectancy and disease—has declined steadily since the 1980s. Today, “U.S. men rank last in life expectancy among the 17 countries in the study and US women rank second to last.” In infrastructure, the World Economic Forum recently ranked the U.S. 25th in the world, behind virtually all other advanced industrialized nations and even some in the developing world.

Still, there are some categories where the United States ranks number one: we have the highest incarceration rate in the world—far higher than countries like Russia, China, or Iran. We have the highest obesity rate in the world and we use more energy per capita than any other nation. And while the U.S. does not possess the highest homicide rate in the world—that distinction goes to Honduras—the rate of death from firearms in the U.S. is nearly 20 times higher than it is among our economic counterparts. And on a city-by-city basis, we would find that if New Orleans were a country, for example, its homicide rate would rank number 2 in the world.

Eighty years ago, when the United States found itself in an even more precarious state than it does today, Franklin Roosevelt used the occasion of his first inaugural address to say to the American people that “this is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly,” to avoid the temptation “to shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today.” The president then went on to implore the American people to reject the fear and apprehension that had paralyzed the nation by reminding them that “in every dark hour of our national life, a leadership of frankness and of vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people” which is essential to overcoming the challenges we face.

Four years later, in the first State of the Union address of his second term, President Roosevelt observed that “the deeper purpose of democratic government is to assist as many of its citizens as possible, especially those who need it most, to improve their conditions of life…” But, he went on, even with the “present recovery,” the United States was “far from the goal of that deeper purpose, for there were still “far-reaching problems… for which democracy must find solutions if it is to consider itself successful.”

President Obama certainly echoed these sentiments when he spoke about the meaning of citizenship and “the enduring idea that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations; that our rights are wrapped up in the rights of others.” But the president said little about the role of government in ensuring that these obligations are met, and he qualified his remarks by opening his speech with his oft-repeated maxim that the American people do not expect government “to solve every problem.”

FDR took a different tack. For him government was the instrument of the common people, and as such its primary responsibility was not to serve as an arbiter between the demands of the rich and the needs of the poor, but rather as the vehicle through which the hopes and aspirations of all Americans could be met. In this he argued that:

The defeats and victories of these years have given to us as a people a new understanding of our government and of ourselves…It has been brought home to us that the only effective guide for the safety of this most worldly of worlds, the greatest guide of all, is moral principle.

We do not see faith, hope, and charity as unattainable ideals, but we use them as stout supports of a nation fighting the fight for freedom in a modern civilization…

We seek not merely to make government a mechanical implement, but to give it the vibrant personal character that is the very embodiment of human charity.

We are poor indeed if this nation cannot afford to lift from every recess of American life the dread fear of the unemployed that they are not needed in the world. We cannot afford to accumulate a deficit in the books of human fortitude.

In the place of the palace of privilege we seek to build a temple out of faith and hope and charity.

To bring about a government guided by the “spirit of charity,” FDR initiated the most far-reaching social and economic reforms in our nation’s history; reforms designed to provide the average American with a measure of economic security; reforms that reduced the vast, unjust, and unsustainable economic inequality that had brought the country to ruin just a few short years before.

If we are going to “honestly” face “conditions in our country today,” then we need to recognize that the steady abandonment of the principles of governance put in place by Franklin Roosevelt in the past three decades have done enormous harm to the state of the union. In light of this, rather than repeat the conservative mantra that government cannot solve every problem, perhaps President Obama should follow the example of President Roosevelt by reminding the Congress and the American people that even though

Governments can err, [and] presidents do make mistakes… the immortal Dante tells us that Divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted on different scales.

Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.

David Woolner is a Senior Fellow and Hyde Park Resident Historian for the Roosevelt Institute. He is currently writing a book entitled Cordell Hull, Anthony Eden and the Search for Anglo-American Cooperation, 1933-1938.

Read more

Share This

The Progressive Economic Narrative in Obama's State of the Union

Feb 13, 2013Richard Kirsch

President Obama has begun telling the right story about the economy. Now we need to make sure that story spreads.

President Obama has begun telling the right story about the economy. Now we need to make sure that story spreads.

Two years ago, frustrated by a conservative resurgence in the 2010 election, a group of progressive activists, economists, communicators, and pollsters came together to write a compelling story about our view of the economy (as Mike Lux relates). Our goal was to write a story that people could easily understand, based on our beliefs about how to create an economy that delivered broadly shared prosperity -- a story that could stand up against the right’s familiar recipe of free markets, limited government, and rugged individualism. The core of the story we developed in our progressive economic narrative (PEN) was: “The middle class is the engine of our economy. We build a large, prosperous middle class by decisions we make together.”

So it was a milestone in our work to hear President Obama tell our story and use our language in his State of the Union address. The key line, delivered at the top of the speech and quoted in almost every news story, was “It is our generation’s task, then, to reignite the true engine of America’s economic growth: a rising, thriving middle class.”

Taking another lesson from PEN, the president prefaced that quote with an explanation of what the economic problem is, focusing on how working families and the middle class have been crushed. In PEN we say, “American families are working harder and getting paid less, falling behind our parents' generation. Too many Americans can’t find good jobs and too many jobs don’t pay enough to support a family. Big corporations have cut our wages and benefits and shipped our jobs overseas.” Here’s the president’s version:

But – we gather here knowing that there are millions of Americans whose hard work and dedication have not been rewarded. Our economy is adding jobs, but too many people still can’t find full-time employment. Corporate profits have skyrocketed to all-time highs, but for more than a decade, wages and incomes have barely budged. It is our generation’s task, then, to reignite the true engine of Americas economic growth: a rising, thriving middle class.

When it came to describing how we build this middle-class engine, the president again used the same ideas frame laid out in PEN: “We build a large and prosperous middle class through the decisions we make together; investing in our people, expanding opportunity and security, paving the way for business to innovate, and to do business in ways that create prosperity and economic security for Americans.” The president’s agenda was based on these same concepts:

  • Invest in people through education (starting at Pre-K), skills we need for today’s jobs, affordable health care, and a secure retirement.
  • Pave the way for businesses through research, infrastructure, and green energy.
  • Do business in ways that create prosperity, with a higher minimum wage and pay equity for women.

The president’s story contrasted sharply with Marco Rubio’s. Rubio also paid homage to the middle class, but he told the conservative tale:

This opportunity – to make it to the middle class or beyond no matter where you start out in life – it isn’t bestowed on us from Washington. It comes from a vibrant free economy where people can risk their own money to open a business. And when they succeed, they hire more people, who in turn invest or spend the money they make, helping others start a business and create jobs. Presidents in both parties – from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan – have known that our free enterprise economy is the source of our middle class prosperity.

So the fight is joined. For too long, progressives have not taken on the conservative story with our own narrative. As a result, even when people agree with us on specific issues, they still hold fast to the right’s definition of how to move the economy forward. We have, with the simple tale told by the president and in the progressive economic narrative, a very different story, an economy driven by working families and the middle class, which we create by decisions we make together, with our government as the catalyst.

Our next task is to tell this same story over and over again in all of our communications. Repetition is key. People need to hear the story whenever we communicate on an economic issue. We give examples of how do to that on job quality, job creation, the federal fiscal mess, and health care at progressivenarrative.org.

President Obama left out one part of the progressive economic narrative in his speech. As we say in PEN, “Our political system has been captured by the rich and powerful and corrupted by big money in politics. The issue is not the size of the government, it’s who the government works for – powerful corporations and the richest few, or all of us. We have to take our democracy back to ensure that our economy will work for all of us. ”

That’s a story that politicians are reluctant to tell. As always, we need to lead and the leaders will follow. It is up to us to build an America and economy that works for all us. Clearly describing our vision of how to do that is a crucial element of building power that progressives overlooked for too long. We’re much closer when the president tells that story to the nation. It’s up to us to keep telling it every day.

Richard Kirsch is a Senior Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, a Senior Adviser to USAction, and the author of Fighting for Our Health. He was National Campaign Manager of Health Care for America Now during the legislative battle to pass reform.

Read more

Share This

Pages