Moral Economic Policies Are Good/Effective Policies

 

The charts above are from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). They show some of the economic problems that have occurred in our economy over the years. These policies created one of the largest inequalities between the rich and the rest of America in this countries history -- resulting in the rich doing extremely well while everyone else struggles just to keep up. This did not happen by accident, but by policies instituted by the Republican-controlled government.

But policies created by the government can also be solved by the government, and we have a moral imperative to do that. The good news is that the moral economic choices are also good economic choices -- choices that would benefit everyone and the economy in general.

Here are some things the EPI thinks should be done. These things are both moral and economically wise:

Transformative policies

Because policy and fiscal choices have been used to perpetuate and deepen inequality, they can also be used to usher in an era of greater equality and equity. Here we offer 10 discrete, ambitious policy changes that would be transformative, especially for the 140 million poor and low-income people who were facing significant challenges even before COVID-19.

1. Prioritize ‘high-pressure’ labor markets

Policymakers must commit to ending recessions and restoring “high-pressure” labor markets (in which unemployment is very low) as quickly as possible. This would represent a fundamental break with decades of past practice, when policymakers’ prime concern was very low inflationary pressures, which led them to engineer (or at least tolerate) excessively high unemployment.57 High-pressure labor markets fundamentally change the bargaining dynamic between workers and employers, forcing employers to go begging for workers and increasing workers’ leverage over wage negotiations.

2. Raise the federal minimum wage

In 1963, the March for Jobs and Freedom (a.k.a. the March on Washington) demanded a federal minimum wage of $2 per hour. Adjusted for inflation, this would be roughly $15 today. Adopting the march’s demand and boosting the federal minimum wage to $15 by 2025 would give a raise to 32 million workers, with Black workers and women seeing the greatest gains. If the federal minimum wage had kept up with productivity since its inception, it would be over $23 per hour today. A labor market is only as strong as its floor, and the federal minimum wage needs to be significantly strengthened to bolster this floor.58

3. Uphold the right to form and join unions

We should act to close loopholes in current labor law to protect workers from employers’ anti-union tactics. Passage of the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act would strengthen workers’ rights to form unions and negotiate with their employers for better wages and working conditions. Specifically, it would reform our nation’s labor law so that private-sector employers are no longer able to intimidate workers seeking to unionize or perpetually stall union elections and contract negotiations.59 Further, passage of the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act would give public-sector workers the ability to form unions and engage in collective bargaining on the federal level.60 Currently, more than half of the states in the United States lack comprehensive collective bargaining laws for public-sector workers like teachers.61

4. Reform unemployment insurance

We should follow the lead of other rich countries and greatly expand the share of the unemployed who receive unemployment insurance (UI) benefits in normal times while also making normal UI benefits significantly more generous. A transformed UI system can be a revolutionary change for U.S. workers, significantly blunting the anxiety and deprivation inflicted by even short spells of joblessness.

5. Provide universal health care

The COVID-19 shock has been only the latest crisis highlighting the perversity of tying access to health insurance coverage to specific jobs. Nearly every other rich industrialized nation has delinked health insurance and the labor market and has instead made access to insurance coverage a universal right. The United States should join this community and provide coverage to all—and, more importantly, this coverage should not become degraded or ruinously expensive whenever one loses a job. The steps forward made by the Affordable Care Act have exposed an important truth: we need substantial increases in publicly provided insurance, beginning with the expansion of Medicaid. Universal health care not only would have profound effects on the economic security of households in the United States but also could boost wages and jobs, leading to labor markets that match jobs and workers more efficiently.62

6. Provide universal access to vital goods and services

High-quality child and elder care, and early childhood and higher education, are examples of vital goods and services that are out of reach for too many families. These should also be universally accessible through public programs. The upfront costs of providing these are considerable, but the payoff over time to society is huge.63 Some studies find that investments in top-notch early childhood education, for example, are more than 100 percent self-financing; when the participants reach adulthood, they are more productive, have higher wages, pay higher taxes, and, with a strong early foundation of systemic supports, are less likely to end up in the criminal justice system. High-quality elder care can allow a large expansion in the labor force of adult women. And access to free, or at least more affordable, higher education would produce a better-prepared workforce while reducing student debt.

7. Create a new poverty measure and expand social welfare programs

In order to respond to the changing, post-pandemic economy, we need to have accurate measures of poverty and economic insecurity to inform social welfare programs that truly meet all basic needs. Instead of the current official and supplemental (yet still inadequate) poverty measures, the federal government should establish a new poverty measure that reflects what it takes to have a decent standard of living in the country today. This new measure should provide the basis to expand public benefits, including cash assistance and other programs to guarantee adequate incomes, housing, food, water, and other human needs.

8. Invest in safe communities

Recent years have seen a growing recognition that the brute force model that combines aggressive policing and mass incarceration has failed as a mechanism for guaranteeing public safety. We need a new model that rests on investments in health, education, and opportunity for people in chronically under-resourced neighborhoods. These investments can include pilot programs that give primary responsibility for ensuring public order and safety—and the investment to back it up—to community-based organizations. Many community-based organizations already do much of this work, building safe public spaces and intervention programs to prevent violence or crime. These organizations are forced to do this work on the cheap, but their work is often effective and, if financed publicly, could build trust rather than antagonism between communities and those tasked with providing public safety.

9. Tax the rich and corporations

In the 30 years following World War II, the fruits of economic growth were far more evenly distributed and tax rates for the rich and corporations were substantially higher.64 These higher tax rates provided revenue for needed public spending and reduced the incentive for privileged economic actors to rig the rules of the market to tilt more gains their way. We should raise taxes progressively to help finance needed public investments and safety net spending and to reduce the payoff to exercising market power. This market power should also be confronted directly with legislation and regulation, but as a backstop we should tax its payoff.

10. Protect and expand voting rights

For any of the policies above to be advanced, we must protect and expand voting rights, especially for poor people and poor people of color. A motivating belief of the Poor People’s Campaign is that the votes of poor and low-income Americans can make a difference in our elections. And, in fact, the increase in turnout among these voters in the 2020 presidential election—six million more than in 2016—may have tipped the scales.65 But voter suppression laws continue to proliferate across the states. Pushing back begins with restoring the full power of the Voting Rights Act by updating the preclearance formula to cover all jurisdictions—those with deep-rooted histories of voter suppression as well as those that have more recently passed voter suppression laws or used these tactics. Other key changes include making Election Day a national holiday, establishing a fair redistricting process that eliminates racist and political gerrymandering, increasing polling locations, modernizing voter registration (with online, same-day, and automatic registration), implementing early voting and mail-in voting in every state, and ending felony disenfranchisement.

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If America does not address the problem of inequality by making visionary social and economic choices, the health and well-being of the nation will continue to decline. We need long-term policies, enshrined in law, that establish justice, promote the general welfare, reject decades of austerity, and build strong social programs that lift society from below.

Such policies will help us not only live up to the constitutional and moral commitments this country was founded on but also revive our economy. By organizing against the policies that have pushed millions of people out of the political narrative and increasingly out of any economic power, we can begin a path to recovery that will reduce inequality, increase workers’ power, and morally and economically benefit us all.