Progressives Need to Be More Radical Than Bernie Sanders - Here's Why

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders. (David Becker / AP)

None of the 2016 presidential candidates’ approaches to politics will fix this country; they won’t even come close, argues Robert Kuttner at The American Prospect. Kuttner then goes on to list all the issues that ail the economy and the “radical reform” that needs to take place.

From The American Prospect:

Nothing in mainstream politics takes seriously the catastrophe of global climate change. Few mainstream politicians have the nerve to call for a carbon tax.

The budget deadlock and the sequester mechanism, in which both major parties have conspired, makes it impossible to invest the kind of money needed both to modernize outmoded public infrastructure (with a shortfall now estimated at $3.4 trillion) or to finance a green transition.

The economy is so captive to financial engineers that even interest rates close to zero do not help mainstream businesses recover. There is still a vicious circle of inadequate purchasing power and insufficient domestic investment. …

To remedy the problem of income inequality would require radical reform both of the rules of finance and of our tax code, as well as drastic changes in labor market regulation so that employees of hybrids such as Uber and TaskRabbit would have both decent earnings and the protections of regular payroll employees. … Politicians would have to reform the debt-for-diploma system, not only going forward, as leaders like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have proposed, but also to give a great deal of debt relief to those saddled with existing loans. … the reforms needed to restore that degree of shared prosperity are somewhere to the left of Bernie Sanders. …