The Reconnection Agenda - Jared Bernstein

347 Pages·2015·4.26 MB·English

by  Jared Bernstein

The Reconnection Agenda
Reuniting Growth and Prosperity

By Jared Bernstein

On The Economy
jaredbernsteinblog.com
Copyright © 2015 by Jared Bernstein
Cover by Anthony Martinez and Kate Bernstein
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1511769386
ISBN-13: 978-1511769389
To Kate, Ellie, Sarah, and Kay, with whom the connection
remains eternally strong.

Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction ................................................................. 1
Chapter 2: Growth Without Prosperity ........................................ 24
Chapter 3: Full Employment, the Most Important Missing Piece
of the Puzzle ................................................................................ 44
Chapter 4: Fiscal and Monetary Policies that Work for Working
People .......................................................................................... 66
Chapter 5: Reducing the Persistent American Trade Deficit, a
Steep Barrier to Full Employment ............................................. 116
Chapter 6: A Full Employment Agenda that Reaches Everyone
................................................................................................... 145
Chapter 7: Maintaining the Reconnection with Policies to Sustain
the Booms and Bust the Busts ................................................... 172
Chapter 8: The Federal Government and the Reconnection
Agenda ...................................................................................... 210
Chapter 9: The States of Things to Come—the Reconnection
Agenda at the Subnational Level ............................................... 253
Chapter 10: Politics and the Reconnection Agenda................... 293
Appendix A: Growth Without Prosperity Figures and Tables ... 319
Appendix B: Figures from Explaining the Housing Bubble by
Adam Levitin and Susan Wachter ............................................. 328
Appendix C: Summary of Policy Recommendations ................ 330

Acknowledgments

First, I’d like to thank my family and especially my wife for
helping me carve out the time to write the Reconnection Agenda.
Next, deep thanks to Ben Spielberg, my colleague at the Center
on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), with whom some of this
material was developed, especially the work in Chapter 2 and
much of the analysis of the inequality of opportunity.
Ben and Stephanie Landry were absolutely indispensable in
editing the manuscript, the graphics, and the tables. I make
mistakes; they catch mistakes.
All of my colleagues at CBPP deserve mention as I’m constantly
bugging them and they’re constantly educating me. In absolutely
no order: Chuck Marr, Nick Johnson, Chad Stone, Chye-Ching
Huang, Richard Kogan, Kathy Ruffing, Joel Friedman, Paul Van
de Water, Bob Greenstein, Isaac Shapiro, Bryann DaSilva,
Brandon DeBot, David Reich, Mike Leachman, Mike Mitchell,
Sarah Lueck, Ed Bolen, Edwin Park, Judy Solomon, and Liz
McNichol . . . to name a few. I truly appreciate your generosity
and just because I put a lot of stuff we talk about in here doesn’t
mean I’m finished bothering you about it.
Thanks to CBPP’s Anthony Martinez and Carolyn Jones for help
with “comms” and admin.
And thanks to CBPP writ large for supporting my work on
everything in here along with www.jaredbernsteinblog.com,
where a lot of these ideas were developed.
For literally decades, I’ve worked with and learned from Larry
Mishel and Dean Baker. Their fingerprints are all over the book.
Finally, I thank Alexander Berger and the Open Philanthropy
Project for support of CBPP’s Full Employment Project, from
which much of this work is drawn.