LEVER WEEKLY: High Unemployment Is Not A Cure

Earlier this week, John Maynard Keynes historian Zachary Carter spoke at a gathering focused on making the economy work for working people.

Carter’s talk — the full text of which he published in his Substack “In The Long Run” — covers a lot of ground: the anti-Black, anti-immigrant, anti-worker history of America’s Democratic party, and the party’s general incompetence until Franklin Roosevelt, whose policy reforms created a nationwide social safety net, won the presidency.

The key to Roosevelt’s effectiveness? “This was a comprehensive rejection of both the laissez-faire ideal that had dominated American political discourse and of the elite corporate favoritism that had dominated American policymaking in practice,” said Carter.

As we highlight below, our country’s leaders today would be wise to revisit this history lesson in their pursuit of sound policymaking to tackle inflation, rather than heeding the poor advice of economists more invested in maintaining a status quo that favors the corporate elite over the vast majority of working Americans.

Read all about it in this week’s Lever Weekly, exclusively for supporting subscribers.

Also In Today’s Lever Weekly:

• How the U.S. is botching its monkeypox response.

• Your body, hospitals’ choice?

• The uniquely harmful post-Roe impacts for pregnant folks on probation and parole.