To David Brooks, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair are the good kind of progressive—i.e., they don’t pose a threat to the rich.
David Brooks (New York Times, 5/12/15) used the victory of the Conservative Party in the British elections to celebrate the “center-right moment” in his latest column. To make his case, he largely creates a caricature of the left to argue for the greater wisdom of the center-right. He tells readers:
Over the past few years, left-of-center economic policy has moved from opportunity progressivism to redistributionist progressivism. Opportunity progressivism is associated with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair in the 1990s and Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago today. This tendency actively uses government power to give people access to markets, through support for community colleges, infrastructure and training programs and the like, but it doesn’t interfere that much in the market and hesitates before raising taxes.
This tendency has been politically successful. Clinton and Blair had long terms. This year, Emanuel won by 12 percentage points against the more progressive candidate, Chuy Garcia, even in a city with a disproportionate number of union households.
Redistributionist progressivism more aggressively raises taxes to shift money down the income scale, opposes trade treaties and meddles more in the marketplace. This tendency has won elections in Massachusetts (Elizabeth Warren) and New York City (Bill de Blasio) but not in many other places.
For political purposes, it is undoubtedly advantageous to imply that the “opportunity” progressives favored the market more than the “redistributionist progressives,” but it is not true. Take the case of President Clinton: He promoted trade agreements that deliberately placed manufacturing workers in direct competition with low-paid workers in the developing world, while maintaining or increasing the protections for highly paid professionals like doctors and lawyers. This had the predicted and actual effect of raising the incomes of those at the top at the expense of those at the middle and bottom. This upward redistribution was not due to market forces, but to policy design.
Similarly, Clinton allowed for the growth of huge financial firms that relied on the government for implicit too-big-to-fail insurance. This free government insurance was a massive subsidy to the top executives and shareholders of these institutions.
Clinton also strengthened and lengthened copyright and patent monopolies. These are forms of government intervention in the market that have the same effect on the price of drugs and other protected items as tariffs of several thousand percent. In the case of drugs, the costs are not only economic, but also felt in the form of bad health outcomes from mismarketed drugs by companies trying to maximize their patent rents.
And the federal government directly intervenes to redistribute income upward when the Federal Reserve Board raises interest rates to slow job creation, keeping workers at the middle and bottom of the income distribution from getting enough bargaining power to raise their wages.
In these areas and others, David Brooks’ center-right politicians, as well as “opportunity” progressives, are every bit as willing to use the government to intervene in the market as people like Warren and de Blasio. The difference is that the politicians Brooks admires want to use the government to redistribute income upward, while Warren and de Blasio want to ensure that people at the middle and bottom get their share of the gains from economic growth. (Their agenda is laid out in more detail in this report from the Roosevelt Institute.)
Economist Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. A version of this post originally appeared on CEPR’s blog Beat the Press (5/12/15).
“Opportunity progressives ” ?? David Brooks in a moment of almost-honest, almost told the truth… The Clintons and their ilk it should referred to as “opportunist progressives” , as in never missing an opportunity to “redistribute ” upward to the parasitic over class, from the pockets of working people. David Brooks is a dirty bird that only tweets one note. That fact that he still has a column from which to beg and plead for more special treatment for his class gives insight into A). The low reading comprehension and critical thinking skills of the average “consumer” of corporate “media products”, and B). the universally low character of those in editorial positions in that same corporate media.
@ Fessup: For me, it’s encouraging that at least one other person in the world understands how depraved David Brooks and those who sponsor him are. He supports those who have replaced our democracy with a vicious plutocracy in two major media outlets, the New York Times and PBS Newshour.
Almost! Unfortuneatly, while you may be able to find small ups and downs correlating wages and interest rates, the overall trend of wages as you know is downward since the Reagan admin. We also know that interest rates have been fairly high and low during these 3 decades, and that the current Fed policy of virtual free money has done nothing to reverse the wage trends.
Maybe we should Rename David Brooks as “Redistributionist” Journalist , he only writes articles to assuage and massage folks in the upper incomes, about as useful as milk sacs on a duck.