Robert Kuttner Archive

So now Trump, having bashed the Trans-Pacific Partnership as a wrongheaded product of the despised Barack Obama, wants to join it after all. Or maybe he doesn’t.

The TPP was a lousy deal. It was mainly about helping big U.S. multinationals, and did little or nothing for labor and environmental rights. And despite the latter-day spin about the TPP containing China, it did nothing to restrain China’s predatory trade practices. Further, the United States already has trade deals with all of the major member countries of the TPP.

But the large farm lobby and its allies in Congress have been putting pressure on Trump to back off the trade-war talk, and TPP is emblem of a more establishment sort of trade agenda. Based on past behavior, we have no idea whether Trump will change course. He says whatever pops into his head based on the issue du jour.

This, of course, drives his advisers crazy. There is a serious schism between the trade hawks—led by U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, and economic adviser Peter Navarro—and the traditional globalists around Trump, now including economic chief Larry Kudlow, Treasury Secretary (and Goldman man) Steve Mnuchin, plus Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue.

Name, Please?

Peter G. Peterson.

And what makes you think you deserve admission to the Pearly Gates?

I’ve led a virtuous life, made billions, and gave most of it to charity.

What sort of charity?

Well, I gave over $1 billion to create the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, to warn Americans about the dangers of deficits and debts, and the excesses of Social Security and Medicare.

Yes? And where’s the charity part?

Too much spending will bankrupt America, especially the dreams of the young.

I’m just a saint, not an economist. But are you saying that it’s Social Security and Medicare that are destroying the life chances of the young, rather than—oh, I don’t know—college debt, insecure jobs, unaffordable housing, the very rich taking more than their share?

My one regret on Earth was that the young people just wouldn’t listen to what I was telling them.

And where did you say you made your money?

That would be private equity.

We have a saying around here: It’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than—

I know … than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

You’ve heard that one.

For more than a year, my pragmatist friends and colleagues have under-estimated the appeal of Bernie Sanders. As a big Sanders win approaches in the New Hampshire primary, they insist that this will be Sanders' last hurrah and urge his supporters to get real and get with the program -- which is to unite behind Hillary Clinton as the Democrat best positioned to be nominated and to win in November.

Many of my political friends are simply missing the import of the Sanders campaign. Much of his appeal is a blend of generational and economic.

The millennial generation has gotten the worst economic screwing since the generation that came of age in the Great Depression. In some ways, their plight is worse, since in the Depression generation there was broad understanding that an economic catastrophe had occurred and it was correctly understood as political.

Until very recently, the plight of the millennials was seen as merely personal. Questions that should be, and are, deeply political have been taken as private problems -- how to best cope with a bad economic environment; how to pick a shrewd career path given lousy choices. But it was only a matter of time before self-awareness of this reality finally took political form.

The economy generated almost 300,000 jobs last year and cut the nominal unemployment rate to five percent. But family incomes for most people are still deeply depressed.

Yet a lot of experts seem to think this is the best the economy can do. The Federal Reserve last month actually voted to raise interest rates on the premise that growth would soon pick up, and inflation might be a threat.

Meanwhile, slowing growth has made fools of the Fed's experts. The collapsing stock market in China produced reverberations around the world and projections of slower growth at home and abroad.

The U.S. economy is relatively strong compared to the rest of the world (faint praise). But as the deep slide in domestic stock markets during the first week of the New Year suggests, we are hardly immune to global trends.

Nor is the current American economy strong enough to serve as a growth engine for the rest of the world. And nothing in the mainstream policy debate would significantly change the economic outlook for ordinary working families and the economy as a whole, though the proposals of the Sanders campaign are at least a down-payment.

What the economy needs is a massive program of investment in public infrastructure to provide jobs and domestic growth that is relatively insulated from global trends. Such a program could also accelerate an overdue transition to a greener economy.

That would require on the order of about half a trillion in outlays a year, some of it financed by higher taxes on the rich and some of it financed by debt. Try to find a mainstream politician calling for that level of public outlay.

Ever since she faced a stronger than expected challenge from her left, Hillary Clinton has been sounding more progressive than expected on economics. Let's hope she means it.

She has come out against the Keystone Pipeline, against the really dubious Trans-Pacific Partnership, in favor of substantial debt relief for college students. Her July speech on economic issues at the New School, calling for significant increases in public investment and regulation of corporate excesses was exemplary.

However, there is one key area that could undercut all of what she has offered. That is her choice of a senior economic team. The recent history of Democratic presidents is not reassuring on that score.

Ever since the administration of her husband, senior economic posts have been given over to Wall Street Democrats. The financial deregulation that collapsed the economy in 2008 was the work of the Robert Rubin economic team that worked for (and on) Bill Clinton.

After that collapse helped propel Barack Obama into the White House in the 2008 election, he disappointed supporters by naming many of the same people or their protégés as his senior economic officials -- Larry Summers as top economic honcho, Tim Geithner as Treasury Secretary, more Clinton ex-budget staffers to the Office of Management and Budget. Paul Volcker, useful as a symbol, proved too left wing for the rest of the Obama crew because he was serious about breaking up the big banks. The key economic post in the campaign went to another Robert Rubin protégé, Jason Furman, now head of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers. The top trade job went to yet another Rubin ally, Michael Froman.

Chinese president Xi Jinping will be in Washington this week on an official state visit. President Obama had hoped to impress Xi with an all but sealed trade deal with major Pacific nations called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) to demonstrate that America is still a force to be reckoned with in China's backyard.

But Obama's trade policy is in tatters. The grand design, created by Obama's old friend and former Wall Street deal-maker, trade chief Mike Froman, comes in two parts -- a grand bargain with Pacific nations aimed at building a U.S.-led trading bloc to contain the influence of China, and an Atlantic agreement to cement economic relations with the European Union.

Both are on the verge of collapse from their own contradictory goals and incoherent logic.

This past June, the President, using every ounce of political capital, managed to get Congress to vote him negotiating authority (by the barest of margins) for these deals. Under the so-called fast-track procedure, there is a quick up-or-down vote on a trade agreement that can't be amended.

The assumption was that the Administration could deliver a deal backed by major trading partners. But our partners are not playing.

This is the season when we hear calls to cut Social Security. That's because of the annual trustees report on the system's financial condition.

Last week, the trustees reported that Social Security can pay all of its projected obligations through about 2034. To keep faith with today's workers and tomorrow's retirees, Social Security will need additional funds, though the shortfall is entirely manageable if we act in the next few years.

The report prompted the usual rightwing blarney about cutting benefits or privatizing Social Security, as well as familiar bleatings from billionaire deficit-hawks about the need to delay the retirement age for people far less fortunate.

One part of the system, the disability insurance fund, needs additional resources by 2016 -- and of course Republicans are calling for cuts in benefits to some of society's most needy people.

Thanks to a last-minute deal last Thursday between President Obama and the Republican leadership in Congress, the fast-track bill is still alive. Its passage depends on whether a handful of Senate Democrats can be persuaded to go along.

Quick recap: The trade negotiating authority that Obama needs to complete his cherished Trans-Pacific Partnership has been linked to passage of Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA). The House at first voted down assistance in order to kill the whole deal, but then Republicans promised a separate vote on adjustment assistance; and so the House on Thursday narrowly approved fast track, 218-208, with 28 Democrats in support.

Now the Senate has to concur. Back in May, when the Senate voted for the package that was rejected by the House, 14 Democrats supported it. But that package included trade adjustment assistance. The one that will come before the Senate Tuesday includes only a promise to approve adjustment assistance later.

There are enough Democrats in the Senate to block passage with a filibuster, if they hang together. But a few key Democratic senators are on the fence -- and being pushed hard by Obama.

Republican presidential hopeful Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, thinks he's hit political pay dirt with his proposal to gut faculty tenure protections at his state's public universities, notably the flagship University of Wisconsin, long one of the nation's best state universities. His idea is to remove tenure protection from state law, and leave the actual policy to the Board of Regents, his political appointees.

For Walker, this is a three-fer. It's another attack on a public institution, in the wake of his successful campaign to weaken collective bargaining rights for Wisconsin public employees. It is a thinly disguised assault on a university perceived as a hotbed of liberals and liberalism. And it continues Walker's faux-populist theme by seemingly going after a bastion of privilege -- the elite, pointy-headed professoriate.

All this plays well with the Tea Party base. Walker needs to differentiate himself from the other presumed top-tier GOP contenders. Unlike Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, often mentioned with Walker and Jeb Bush as the leading candidates, Walker as a governor can point to his state as a laboratory of conservatism.

Our current political situation is unprecedented. The vast majority of Americans keep falling behind economically because of changes in society's ground rules, while the rich get even richer—yet this situation doesn't translate into a winning politics.

If anything, the right keeps gaining and the wealthy keep pulling away. How can this possibly be?

Let me suggest seven reasons:

1. The Discrediting of Politics Itself

The Republican Party has devised a strategy of hamstringing government and making any remediation impossible. Instead of the voters punishing Republicans, the result is cynicism and passivity, so the Republican strategy is vindicated and rewarded.

Why on earth did the Scots, largely quiescent as part of Great Britain for three centuries, suddenly become the mouse that roared?

It wasn't because they became besotted watching re-runs of Braveheart or Rob Roy, or even because they coveted more of a share of North Sea oil revenues. No, the Scots got sick and tired of Thatcherite policies imposed from London.

Thanks to the partial form of federalism known as "devolution" provided by the Labour government of Tony Blair in 1997, Scotland got to keep such progressive policies as free higher education and an intact national health service, while the rest of the U.K. partly privatized the health service and began compelling young people to go into debt to finance college like their American cousins.

If everyone in America got a PhD, the job market would not be transformed. Mainly, we’d have a lot of frustrated, over-educated people.

The current period of widening inequality, after all, is one during which more and more Americans have been going to college. Conversely, the era of broadly distributed prosperity in the three decades after World War II was a time when many in the blue-collar middle class hadn’t graduated from high school.

I’m not disparaging education—it’s good for both the economy and the society to have a well-educated population. But the sources of equality and prosperity mainly lie elsewhere.

When you consider what has been happening to the average working person since the era of Ronald Reagan, it's amazing that the Republicans have fought the Democrats about to a draw.

The recipe of Reagan and both Bushes has been to weaken government, undermine the regulation of market excesses, attack core social insurance programs, tilt the tax system away from the wealthy and towards the middle class, gut the safeguards that protect workers on the job, make college ever more unaffordable, and appoint judges who undermine democracy itself.

Can the right continue to succeed as the party of unreality? In the recent past, conservatives have denied climate change, as well as evolution. Now, their strategy is to deny the reality of increasing concentration of income and wealth.

When Thomas Piketty's book appeared, providing new documentation on increasing capital concentration, the right was temporarily thrown off guard. Some resorted to the claim that inequality was, by definition, earned, and necessary to produce incentives in a capitalist system. But somehow, our market economy did just fine -- better in fact -- back in the 1950s and 1960s with far lower levels of inequality. And much of Europe matches our growth rates with far less inequality. Others simply denied that inequality has been increasing.

I've not exactly been shy about criticizing President Obama when I felt criticism was warranted. But the pile-on by Republicans and the media on his foreign policy challenges is excessive. I mean, what would you have him do that is more sensible than what he's doing?

Let's take the big issues one at a time.

For more than 30 years, the right has been throwing long passes. The Democrats, with some fine individual exceptions in the Senate and House, have been playing an incremental game, eking out gains of a few yards at a time and often being thrown for big losses.

Guess which side has been winning.

As readers of these posts will recall, I'm not the biggest fan of the Affordable Care Act. My view is that the legislative compromises needed to get the ACA through Congress made it an unwieldy mess; that the bungled roll-out was a logical outcome of its Rube Goldberg structure. The claims of the president's loyal supporters that all is being fixed and that the ACA will still be a net political winner by November sound like so much whistling past the graveyard.

With the loss of a close House special election in Florida, the entry of several strong Republican contenders in close Senate races, and continuing fallout from flaws in the Accordable Care Act, Democrats are in a panic about their president dragging down the Democratic ticket in this November's mid-term elections.

Obama is being branded a populist by the establishment press and irresponsible by Republicans for what is really a very tame program. He should at least earn these adjectives and get the public's attention.

How about a large infrastructure program that would create a lot of middle class jobs? How about paying for it with a serious crackdown on corporate tax evasion? How about proposing a true living wage instead of having taxpayers subsidize business?

The agenda of global finance, carried out via "trade" deals, has diverted attention from the real economic issues -- rising inequality and insecurity for ordinary people, the use of globalization as a battering ram to empower capital and weaken labor, and to prevent government interventions from averting financial speculation and collapse.

Amid these real crises of neo-liberalism, enhanced trade has been portrayed as a deux ex machina, which will solve our problems if only we get rid of what's left of the mixed economy. It won't. The proposed deals would only make matters worse.

Something is horribly wrong with both America's employment situation and with the way we measure it. In case you missed the 7.0 percent to 6.7 percent.

How can that be? Simple: more and more people have just given up looking for work. The percentage of prime age people in the active work force is now just 62.8 percent, the lowest since 1978, a time when far fewer women worked. And the proportion of long term unemployed remains stuck at historic highs.

It's a scandal that Republicans in the House keep blocking an extension of normal and customary unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed. But unemployment compensation is a poor substitute for a job.

There are three convenient myths going around to explain what is occurring. First, it is said that there are plenty of jobs -- Americans just lack the skills that the labor market needs. But there is no good evidence for that proposition; it's just a convenient alibi.