The United States Badly Needs Another "New Deal"

The United States is in deep trouble -- and it's not just from the Coronavirus pandemic. There were serious economic and racial problems that was affecting our democracy long before the virus showed up. The virus just made those problems easier to see.

The Roosevelt Institute has issued a report on how to fix our problems and save our democracy. I urge you to read the entire report. Here are 9 broad policies the report says should be instituted:

This report outlines a true New Deal for the COVID-19 era, with nine essential policies:

• canceling student, housing, and medical debts—and implementing structural change to address the accumulation of debt;
• creating a federal jobs guarantee;
• federalizing and expanding unemployment insurance;
• building a modern Reconstruction Finance Corporation;
• guaranteeing universal childcare;
• mandating sectoral bargaining;
• ensuring corporate accountability through federal chartering;
• reinvigorating antitrust law for real trust-busting; and
• rebalancing political power through institutional reform.

You can go here to read the entire policy, and a discussion of those broad policies. Here is the report's conclusion:

From the uncertain trajectory of COVID-19 itself to the economic despair in its wake, our country is being tested in ways that we could not have foreseen even a few months ago. There are a number of things our government can and must do to mitigate the pandemic and alleviate the suffering it has caused and exacerbated.

The solutions we highlight here are particularly important because they target not only the effects of COVID-19 but the broken economic system that has amplified them. Well before Americans even knew the term “COVID-19,” our country was already in deep despair, and too many were already suffering. In an emergency like the one we currently face, some policymakers will argue that we must deal with the most pressing problems at hand and save the rest for later. But the policies proposed here show that this is a false choice. We can address the pandemic while also dismantling systemic racism, strengthening democracy, diminishing outsize corporate power, creating better jobs, and building worker power. During the New Deal era, if government institutions were unable to meet the public’s needs, we updated them to meet the moment rather than curb the scale of our ambition.

In his address at the Democratic National Convention in 1932, FDR declared, “We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature. They are made by human beings.” Through the New Deal, he was able to pull his country out of crisis, rewrite the rules of the economy, and foster broader prosperity. We must do the same today—for all.