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The American Social Contract: A Promise to Fulfill
A New American Contract Mini-Site
This New American Contract mini-site provides a history of the social contract from the 18th century to the 21st. Authors Michael Lind and David McNamee offer an informative guide to contemporary trends in health care, retirement policy, education, wages, and other policy areas, concluding with a rich description of the trends and challenges facing the United States in the years ahead.
Through a program of research and analysis, the Next Social Contract Initiative will construct a meta-narrative to help us understand how the American social contract has evolved, why it fails to meet our needs today, and how we can reinvent it for the conditions of a largely postindustrial and increasingly diverse society. Without an understanding of the evolution of our social contract, major institutional reform will be difficult at best and impossible at worst.
The meta-narrative will have two main dimensions. The first will show how new institutional arrangements are better suited to today's social and economic realities than the patchwork policies left over from our recent past. The second will explain why such new arrangements reflect shared American values while making the American public more secure and our society both stronger and healthier.
On June 3, 2003, the Treasury Department’s James Gilleran brought a chainsaw to a photo-op. While speaking to reporters, he promised to cut up piles of paper representing regulations of the financial sector. Joining him were representatives of four other U.S. regulatory agencies in charge of overseeing finance, armed with less formidable (but still sharp) gardening shears. The message was clear: The Bush Administration was tearing down the final pieces of the New Deal regulatory wall.
Now that the
president and the Democrats in Congress have set a fall deadline for
legislative action on universal police protection for all Americans,
battle lines are being drawn on Capitol Hill. On the right are
conservative defenders of America's system of for-profit, private
mercenaries. The Democrats are divided among progressives who favor
universal, publicly funded police who would protect all citizens
against crime, and moderate and conservative Democrats who argue that
any citizen security reform should leave America's existing system of
soldiers for hire in place.
Lost in the ideological battles over fiscal stimulus is one newly authorized
program that is already delivering results: Build America Bonds (BABs).
Unexpected demand has transformed this once-obscure component of the federal
stimulus legislation into the hottest bond since Daniel Craig.
In the summer of 1968, as Soviet tanks rolled into communist Czechoslovakia to end the brief period of liberalization known as the "Prague Spring," W.H. Auden composed a poem titled "August 1968":
In recent weeks, new signs of an economic recovery have emerged in the
form of stock market rallies, surprisingly high bank profits, and
better-than-feared official unemployment and economic growth reports.
But accompanying these so-called green shoots is worrying evidence of a
recovery that could be compromised if not cut short altogether by high
levels of unemployment and by a long period of unusually weak and
uneven job creation. Not only is actual unemployment more severe than
is reflected in official measures, it is also concentrated in those
Recently, discussions around health care reform have begun in earnest among politicians and policymakers in Washington, D.C. and beyond. President Obama has spent the month of June hitting the trail and the airwaves making the case for reform, and legislators are now aiming to pass a health care reform bill sometime this summer. With the possibility of comprehensive changes to health care on the horizon, it is important for leaders and policymakers—as well as citizens—to understand the full argument for… more
Green investment is a major pillar of the president's economic recovery plan. Yet, America's dependence on foreign countries to produce green technologies may undermine this recovery strategy. Using a list of green goods derived from the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), we have determined that the United States ran an overall green trade deficit of -$8.9 billion in 2008, including a deficit of -$6.4 billion in the critical category of renewable energy,… more
Davos Man, by all accounts, is
worried. The severity of the global economic recession has alarmed many of the
architects of the global economy. Fears of resurgent economic nationalism are
rampant. At the same time, some world leaders - most prominently, French
President Nikolas Sarkozy, as well as German Chancellor Angela Merkel - argue
for instituting a new regime of regulation for the financial sector that will
be global rather than merely national in scale.
The United
States now confronts its greatest economic
challenges since the Great Depression. In addition to resolving crises in financial
and housing markets, trade deficits with China
and on oil must be addressed for the U.S. economy to achieve robust
growth.
Late last year, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger called California’s looming budget crisis a fiscal armageddon waiting to strike. Now, as the state faces a $24 billion budget shortfall and major cuts are inevitable, doomsday seems to have come to California, and particularly to its poorest. The one-million-plus Californians on CalWorks, the state’s main welfare program, could lose monthly income beginning in July. Support for those who care for disabled Californians is set to be slashed.
Will China and the Gulf oil states have the U.S. over the proverbial barrel, or will the world's leading capitalist economy get lucky once again? On May 26, 2009, two of the New America Foundation's leading experts on geopolitics and the global economy joined with Foreign Policy magazine to debate which countries will emerge relatively stronger in the aftermath of the Great Recession.
With debate raging over the Obama administration’s budget and policy plans, last Friday the New America Foundation gathered experts from government, academia, and the business community to discuss the merits of using the tax code to dispense more than $700bn of social spending annually. The morning-long discussion, co-hosted by the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis, was titled
With this narrative as a point of departure, the initiative will identify principles on which a new social contract should be based. These guiding principles will reflect the values and aspirations of the great majority of the American people.
They will define the respective responsibilities of the main parties to any social contract. And they will define the risks against which individuals need to be insured, the benefits we should expect government to provide, and how the costs for these social protections should be shared among the primary sectors of society. If the next social contract is to offer a new approach to providing both basic economic security and economic opportunity for all Americans, it will have to be:
Despite widespread acknowledgment of an American jobs crisis, unemployment is more severe than reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the economy is in the early stages of a "jobless recovery." This new paper by New American Contract's Niko Karvounis takes on optimistic commentators who have seized on the recently emerged "green shoots" to declare the economy on the path to recovery, and outlines why high unemployment will persist even as other economic indicators improve.
The “uptick rule” presents a mild mechanism to create bumps in stock price slides, and head off self-feeding selling frenzies made worse by spasms of shorting. The rule is particularly valuable in today’s environment, where the short selling market is so dominated by piggy-backing hedge funds, argues New America's Emily Gallagher in a new paper.
