Thread by @fawfulfan

The problem is clear. There is no shortage of jobs, but there is a shortage of good-paying jobs.

Decades of corporate consolidation and union-busting has removed all market pressure for corporations to share rising profits, and falling tax burdens, with their workers.

https://twitter.com/kamalaharris/status/1026272144416751616

In many sectors, the markets keep chugging along because low wages mean higher, cheaper production, so people can afford more with less.

The problem is, that doesn't apply to the biggest, most inelastic goods people need to survive: housing, health care, and education.

The supply-side religion the GOP has promoted for decades — cut taxes on the rich, let them produce more so prices fall and everyone can afford everything without a raise or govt subsidies — is only sustainable as long as supply grows uniformly across all industries. It doesn't.

After 40 years of Reagan's experiment, we see the result.

Superficially, workers have never had more prosperity or choice. Practically, they have very little of either.

Superficially, we have never employed more people or given workers more options of where to work.

Practically, workers have no bargaining or organizing power, little prospect of pay raises, and have weaker job security than at any time in decades.

Superficially, markets are surging and businesses are thriving.

Practically, the rate of new businesses being created is at its lowest level in a generation, monopolies impose barriers to entry for entrepreneurs, and anyone successful gets bought out by rent-seekers.

Superficially, the lack of wage growth is offset by the fact that we have never produced more goods more cheaply, so even the poor's standard of living is up.

Practically, that's true if you want a microwave, but not if you want a house, or health care, or to go to college.

Superficially, Reagan's dream was achieved. Under low taxes, capital, production, and employment are exploding.

Practically, those were just means to Reagan's deeper end. Reagan wanted to eliminate the whole concept of it being a problem to be in poverty.

He failed.

And the reason he, and all the Republicans who came after him, have failed is that every market has different rules.

More capital does not always mean more supply. More supply does not always mean lower prices. And even when it does, sometimes people change faster than markets.

And the other big reason this vision failed is that the same policies that let a market take off, also let it consolidate. Which leads to rent-seeking, and price-fixing, and political lobbying, undermining the rules that let that market work in the first place.

It's time we cast off this orthodoxy and adopted a new approach.

For too long, we've responded to every market failure by trying to increase supply. It's time we took a more nuanced, evidence-based approach.

Which leads me back to the point I made at the start of this thread.

The job market is broken, despite high supply. So many policy experts either don't know what to do or don't even see a problem, because they are primed by U.S. politics to think supply is all that matters.

The real problem is that prices in the jobs market are *too low*. People don't want to work, or keep working, in jobs with low pay, low benefits, and little to no rights.

You'd never see that if you were only looking at the unemployment rate.

What we need is not to increase the number of jobs, but to raise wages, benefits, and bargaining power so that more people want to work.

From raising the min wage, to mandating paid leave, to repealing laws that restrict unionization, to antitrust actions, a lot can do this.

We must, in short, return to an era where the goal was not to promote the general profit or the general production, but to promote the general welfare.

Crazy idea. Right?