With history and the extraordinary parallels between Biden and FDR as his guide, the veteran political analyst diagnoses what’s at stake for America in 2022 and beyondJoe Biden has found his way back to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. After four decades of diminishing prospects for ordinary people, the public likes what Biden is offering. Yet American democracy is in dire peril as Republicans, increasingly the national minority, try to destroy democracy in order to ...

**“Democracy is no longer writing the rules for capitalism; instead it is the other way around. With his deep insight and wide learning, Kuttner is among our best guides for understanding how we reached this point and what’s at stake if we stay on our current path.”—Heather McGhee, president of DemosWith a new Afterword**In the past few decades, the wages of most workers have stagnated, even as productivity increased. Social supports have been cut, while corporations have a...

Why did we lose the broadly decent economy of the era after World War II? Why did reformers win all the important arguments about how to renew a good society, only to lose the politics? Why do democracies keep saving capitalism—only to watch plutocrats undermine democracy again and again? How did the failure to restore broad prosperity lead to political backlash and Trump? What lessons might we learn so that next time we win the arguments and the politics? And how do we make sure ...

With history and the extraordinary parallels between Biden and FDR as his guide, the veteran political analyst diagnoses what's at stake for America in 2022 and beyondJoe Biden has found his way back to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. After four decades of diminishing prospects for ordinary people, the public likes what Biden is offering. Yet American democracy is in dire peril as Republicans, increasingly the national minority, try to destroy democracy in order to c...

Times are changing. Instead of obsessing about what they're against, progressives have begun to think about what they're for—to prepare once again to play their role as agents of bold ideas and political and social transformation. Finding new confidence and imagination, they have begun to renew their political capital. The essays in this volume draw on that new store of capital to sketch the outlines of a progressive agenda for 21st-century America. Authors such as Van Jones, Dean Baker, A...

Why did we lose the broadly decent economy of the era after World War II? Why did reformers win all the important arguments about how to renew a good society, only to lose the politics? Why do democracies keep saving capitalism-only to watch plutocrats undermine democracy again and again? How did the failure to restore broad prosperity lead to political backlash and Trump? What lessons might we learn so that next time we win the arguments and the politics? And how do we make sure ...

A passionate, articulate argument detailing how the United States political system has failed to adapt to the economic challenges of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.The American economy is in peril. It has fallen hostage to a casino of financial speculation, creating instability as well as inequality. Tens of millions of workers are vulnerable to layoffs and outsourcing, health care and retirement burdens are increasingly being shifted from employers to individuals. Here Kut...

One of our foremost economic thinkers challenges a cherished tenet of today’s financial orthodoxy: that spending less, refusing to forgive debt, and shrinking government—“austerity”—is the solution to a persisting economic crisis like ours or Europe’s, now in its fifth year.Since the collapse of September 2008, the conversation about economic recovery has centered on the question of debt: whether we have too much of it, whose debt to forgive, and how to cut the deficit. These quest...

To save both democracy and a decent economy, here’s why it’s crucial that Americans elect a truly progressive president.The 2020 presidential election will determine the very survival of American democracy. To restore popular faith in government—and win the election—Democrats need to nominate and elect an economic progressive. The Stakes explains how the failure of the economy to serve ordinary Americans opened the door to a demagogic president, and how de...

The severity of the Great Recession and the subsequent stagnation caught many economists by surprise. But a group of Keynesian scholars warned for some years that strong forces were leading the US toward a deep, persistent downturn. This book collects essays about these events from prominent macroeconomists who developed a perspective that predicted the broad outline and many specific aspects of the crisis. From this point of view, the recovery of employment and revival of strong growth re...

Joe Biden has found his way back to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. After four decades of diminishing prospects for ordinary people, the public likes what Biden is offering. Yet American democracy is in dire peril as Republicans, increasingly the national minority, try to destroy democracy in order to cling to power. It is the best of times and the worst of times. In Going Big, bestselling author and political journalist Robert Kuttner assesses the promise and peril of this critica...

To save both democracy and a decent economy, here's why it's crucial that Americans elect a truly progressive president. The 2020 presidential election will be pivotal for the credibility of government and for democracy itself, argues Robert Kuttner in this brief and compelling call to arms. Either we continue the twin slides into corrupt autocracy and corporate plutocracy? the course set in the past half century by Republican and Democratic presidents alike? or we elect a progressive Demo...