Economic Growth Program

Can there be liberalism without labor? Can a progressive movement exist in a country in which organized labor has lost its political influence? My friend Mark Schmitt, the executive editor of the American Prospect, asks that question:

It's no secret that the United States has the most expensive health care system in the world. We spend nearly twice as much per person as do other developed countries for health outcomes that are no better and in some cases much worse. Moreover, the citizens of most other countries, including Canada and the U.K., who are routinely reviled by opponents of "socialized" medicine, express greater satisfaction with their health care systems than we do with ours.

... months after the needle biopsy incident, I read Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, by Annapolis author Shannon Brownlee. ...

To judge from his faltering campaign for healthcare reform, President Obama, well-read as he is, appears to have neglected to read Machiavelli. If he had done so, the American president would have learned this from the Florentine statesman and philosopher in "The Prince":

... president when he says we can have all these good things without paying for it," said Michael Lind, a political analyst at the New America Foundation. ...

Back in the 1960s, Seymour Martin Lipset and Richard Hofstadter and other liberal sociologists, historians and political scientists, puzzled that anyone could support Barry Goldwater rather than Lyndon Johnson, concluded that Goldwater supporters were deranged. They didn't say so directly, of course. They said that members of the radical right were emotionally disturbed victims of "status anxiety." The evidence? They didn't vote the way that Lipset and other academics thought that they should vote. Therefore they had to be crazy.

Another recent study, by Samuel Sherraden and Jason Peuquet of the New America Foundation, a public policy institute in Washington found that America's ...

Michael Lind discusses extending benefits for the under-employed and unemployed. Original clip

In my first foray into political life in the 1970s, I worked during college on the staff of a liberal Democrat in the Texas state Senate. Only a few years earlier, Patty Hearst had been kidnapped and brainwashed by the Symbionese Liberation Army, and a moral panic about cults seducing college kids was sweeping the nation. One result was the rise of a new, thankfully ephemeral profession: "deprogrammers" who for pay would kidnap a young person from a cult and break the spell, by means of isolation, interrogation… more

Indeed a recent study by Sam Sherraden at the center-left New America Foundation finds that, for the most part, green jobs constitute a negligible factor in ...