Robert Kuttner
The economy generated almost 300,000 jobs last year and cut the nominal unemployment rate to five percent. But family incomes for most people are still deeply depressed.
Yet a lot of experts seem to think this is the best the economy can do. The Federal Reserve last month actually voted to raise interest rates on the premise that growth would soon pick up, and inflation might be a threat.
Meanwhile, slowing growth has made fools of the Fed's experts. The collapsing stock market in China produced reverberations around the world and projections of slower growth at home and abroad.
The U.S. economy is relatively strong compared to the rest of the world (faint praise). But as the deep slide in domestic stock markets during the first week of the New Year suggests, we are hardly immune to global trends.
Nor is the current American economy strong enough to serve as a growth engine for the rest of the world. And nothing in the mainstream policy debate would significantly change the economic outlook for ordinary working families and the economy as a whole, though the proposals of the Sanders campaign are at least a down-payment.
