A New New Deal

There is going to be a lot of debate in the next months and years about economic and national recovery. Here's a brief sketch in The Nation by Robert Borosage and Eric Lotke, "A New New Deal," that usefully summarizes one version of the agenda.

Borosage and Lotke make the traditional but useful rhetorical point, sometimes implicitly, that new policy, especially big national policy change, comes about because in a crisis or widely felt problem, policy thinkers already have reforms worked out in some detail and are just waiting for a chance at implementation. They also add the observation that pressure from further left can move the center in the direction of broadly liberal change (and of course the same thing can happen on the right).