The Beginnings of a New New Deal

The next step after Covid relief: relieving employers of health insurance costs — and allowing them to finally pay workers $15/hour

Allow me to explain.

The huge federal economic relief package that’s about to be enacted, thanks exclusively to Democrats, will give three-quarters of Americans a nice extra piece of the national economic pie, those $1,400 checks. Huzzah.

But just this once. What we need are some permanent changes in how we slice our economic pie for when we aren’t coping with pandemic emergencies. It is a truth not yet universally acknowledged in America that all economies are political economies, that our economy is a complex man-made system that gets perpetually tweaked — and sometimes redesigned and rebuilt, as it was during the last quarter of the last century by and for big business and the rich.

The big permanent systemic change that got cut from the CARES Act was a doubling of the federal minimum wage, to be phased in over four years, to $15. As you may know, the minimum wage used to be the equivalent of more than $12, and was still more than $10 when I had a minimum-wage job in the 1970s. But then starting in the 1980s, when that last radical economic redesign-and-rebuild got going, Congresses and…