Larry Summers
While president Barack Obama's handling of foreign policy suggests that the 2016 election may see a sharper than usual focus on international issues, it is important to remember that most Americans vote on pocketbook issues in presidential elections.
Protecting the American people from another devastating financial crash and the economic wreckage it causes begins with reflecting honestly about the past and trying to learn the right lessons.
The result of such austerity policies has been lost output and overall wealth that several economists say could last for years--and may even be permanent--hurting both jobs and economic output.
Even former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke has been irked by right wing conservatives for doing just the thing that most conservative economists, such as Martin Feldstein, and even arch-free market theorist Milton Friedman, said was the right thing to do during recessions--inject more money into the economy.
WHAT'S HAPPENING
While the Trans-Pacific Partnership deal is being hotly debated in Congress, the fact is that this trade deal -- or any trade deal -- will have little impact on American jobs, or more specifically, on the decline in good-paying jobs for middle-class Americans.
At last month's JFK Jr. Forum, Jason Furman, who served in President Obama's administration eight months before it was formed, talked with Larry Summers, former President of Harvard and U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, in a fireside chat on the current state and future of the U.S. economy.
The May 10th Agreement struck the right balance between the need to promote innovation and the need to protect public health. TPP must meet the standards set in the May 10th Agreement. Right now, it does not.
I am reading "Daniel Patrick Moynihan, A Portrait in Letters of an American Visionary" edited by Steven Weisman. It is a good title because Moynihan was indeed a visionary.
Everything will, instead, be online. Education will be free. It will be worldwide. It will be accessible. It will be meritocratic. Gone will be professors. Gone will be PhD degrees. Gone will be Harvard. Carey now knows The Secret of Education.
The class bias of American politics has not only cost us our democracy. It has also cost us our jobs, our health, and our security. For years, the recovery was crippled by the politics of austerity, as a bipartisan coalition took a butcher's knife to the public sector, and as balanced budgets took precedence over basic needs.