Next Social Contract Initiative

Archives: Next Social Contract Initiative Policy Papers

Economic Security Through Employment Assurance

  • By Steven Attewell, PhD Student, Policy History, UCSB
January 27, 2012

There are many reasons why America’s system of economic security is not working. Chief among them is a common factor in almost all of our social policies: they are designed with the assumption that people are constantly employed. For example, most social insurance programs, from Social Security to Unemployment Insurance to Medicare, require people to build up years of contributions before they can access benefits.1

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The Progressive Case for Corporate Tax Reform

  • By Bruce Stokes, Senior Transatlantic Fellow for Economics, German Marshall Fund
January 26, 2012

In his January 2012 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama called for cutting taxes for companies that produce in the United States, especially high-tech manufacturers. He proposed eliminating deductions for firms that move jobs abroad. And he suggested a minimum tax on all multinational corporations.

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Unequal and Unstable

  • By Anant A. Thaker, Boston Consulting Group. Elizabeth C. Williamson, Frontenac Company.
January 11, 2012

Over the past century, the United States has experienced two large-scale financial crises: the Great Depression of 1929 and the recent Great Recession, which began in 2007. These periods also represented peaks in the share of U.S. income collected by the top 1 percent of earners. In 1929, the top 1 percent accrued over 22 percent of total national income, including capital gains – a share several percentage points above its historical average, and one that would not be seen again until 2006. Notably, the number of bank failures in the U.S.

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The Way Forward

  • By Daniel Alpert, Westwood Capital; Robert Hockett, Professor of Law, Cornell University; and Nouriel Roubini, Professor of Economics, New York University
October 10, 2011

Notwithstanding repeated attempts at monetary and fiscal stimulus since 2009, the United States remains mired in what is by far its worst economic slump since that of the 1930s.1  More than 25 million working-age Americans remain unemployed or underemployed, the employment-to-population ratio lingers at an historic low of 58.3 percent,2 business investment continues at historically weak levels, and consumption expenditure remains weighed down by massive private sector debt overhang left by the bursting of the housing and credit bubble a bit over three years ago.

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Losing Middle America?

  • By
  • Lauren Damme,
  • New America Foundation
September 15, 2011

Is the American Dream of opportunity and increasing prosperity out of reach for the average American worker? What is happening to the American middle class? If the labor market ‘polarizes’ into low- and high-income jobs, what does this mean for continuing inequality in America? What does it mean for the American social contract, and the American Dream?

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Yes We Can Create Decent Jobs

  • By Heather Boushey, Senior Economist, Center for American Progress
July 28, 2011

The American economy can produce decent jobs. We know this to be true because it has happened before. Getting back to a decent-jobs economy will require a commitment on the part of policymakers to creating many more middle-skill, middle-wage jobs. While there are important reasons to support the incomes of those at the bottom of the wage distribution, we will not improve the lives of working families without improving and increasing job opportunities in the middle.

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A Vision for Economic Renewal

  • By Task Force on Job Creation
July 26, 2011

The economic environment in America today is more dire than most of us have ever known. We are in the midst of an unemployment emergency, in essence a jobless recovery: notwithstanding recent marginal upticks in official U.S. jobs numbers, there will be no fundamental improvement in the unemployment picture unless major new national economic strategy initiatives are taken. Who will step up to drive them forward?

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The Jobs Question

  • By James K. Galbraith, Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations and Professor of Government, University of Texas at Austin
July 19, 2011

This is by far the most jobless of recent recoveries. Allen Sinai, a man known for describing numbers carefully, already wrote in November 2009:

“Never has business shed so many workers so fast, so many people failed to find work who are looking for work, and so many dropped out of the labor force as in the current circumstance.”

By that time, the stock market was already recovering but payrolls were not. Sinai wrote:

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A Global Minimum Wage System

  • By
  • Thomas Palley,
  • New America Foundation
July 19, 2011

The global economy is suffering from severe shortage of demand. In developed economies that shortfall is explicit in high unemployment rates and large output gaps. In emerging market economies it is implicit in their reliance on export-led growth. In part this shortfall reflects the lingering disruptive effects of the financial crisis and Great Recession, but it also reflects globalization’s undermining of the income generation process. One mechanism that can help rebuild this process is a global minimum wage system. That does not mean imposing U.S.

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A Most Undemocratic Recovery

  • By Joel Kotkin, Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, Adjunct Fellow with the Legatum Institute in London
July 15, 2011

Unemployment over nine percent, the highest rate this far into a “recovery” in modern times, reflects only the surface of our problems. More troubling is that over six million American have been unemployed for more than six months, the largest number since the Census began tracking their numbers. The pool of “missing workers” – those neither employed nor counted as unemployed – has soared to over 4.4 million, according to the left-of-center Economic Policy Institute.

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