Thomas Palley

Like a modern-day Rip Van Winkle, there are indications that the Democratic Party may finally be awakening from its long slumber and realizing it lacks a compelling identity. That lack of identity is especially clear regarding the economy, and it contrasts with Republicans who have long emphasized free markets. The current moment of Republican unraveling offers Democrats an historic opportunity to close this identity gap and change the direction of American politics. (more…)

For the last year there has been a widening split within the ranks of American organized labor, and this split risks hardening as the new Change to Win (CTW) coalition increasingly takes on the complexion of a rival labor federation. (more…)

Jeff Faux and Gene Sperling are two titans of democratic economic policy. Last week (February 23, 2006) they debated the core economic policy differences that define and divide old Democrats from new Democrats. (more…)

In 1962 Rachel Carson published her environmental epic, Silent Spring, which documented how chemical-based agriculture was killing the bird-life and birdsong of America’s countryside. Over the last forty years the Democratic Party has also slowly lost its voice and fallen silent on the economy, with Democrats substituting a laundry list of program plans for economic vision. (more…)

Domestic political economy has historically been constructed around the divide between capital and labor, with firms and workers being at odds over the division of the economic pie. Within this construction labor is usually represented as a monolithic interest, yet the reality is that labor has always suffered from internal divisions. Globalization sharpens these divisions, which helps explain why corporations have been winning and workers losing. (more…)

Thirty years ago the economic debate between Democrats and Republicans was framed in terms of the case for bigger versus smaller government. Democrats emphasized market proclivities toward monopoly and inequality, failure of markets to efficiently provide public goods, market incentives to pollute, and above all the tendency of markets to produce less than full employment. Republicans countered that such market failures were over-stated. More importantly, using government to solve market failures could lead to even worse problems of government failure associated with bureaucratic inefficiency, policy misjudgments, and private capture of regulatory agencies. In an imperfect world, Republicans argued that it is better to live with the problem of market failure and opt for small government, than try and solve it by resort to big government. (more…)