The President’s final budget

Robert Reich
5 hrs · Richmond, CA ·
The President’s final budget he’s now submitting to Congress will be dead on arrival regardless of what he asked for. Which makes it particularly unfortunate that he’s asking for so little. Rather than set out an agenda for the future – and possibly influence the national discussion about how to respond to widening inequality and mounting job insecurity -- his budget assumes American workers will continue to get the short end of the economic stick, and the best that can be done for them is to supplement their incomes when they lose a job and have to settle for a new one that pays less, extend unemployment benefits to part-time workers, and encourage employers to automatically enroll them in 401(k) plans.
These are all perfectly respectable proposals (I’ve been advocating the first two for more than 20 years) but they don’t even attempt to slow the shift from full-time jobs to contract work lacking all the protections of the last 75 years of labor law, or limit the corporate tax deductibility of sky-high executive pay, or increase penalties on companies that fire workers for trying to form unions, or do much of anything else to alter the balance between large corporations whose market power keeps growing, and ordinary workers whose bargaining power keeps shrinking.
As I’ve said before, I believe President Obama will be remembered as a good, thoughtful, intelligent president possessing great integrity and moral authority. But he will also be remembered as someone whose values are more akin to liberal Republicans three decades ago than to the bold progressivism America needs at this point in history.