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OPINION
We’ll Never Recover Fully Until All Americans Understand Capitalism
The veil has been lifted, and it’s time
There is much to applaud in President Biden’s plan to get the country back up and running. The amount of “investment” (yes, also just known as “spending,” depending on which side of the aisle you sit) is the hot sticking point, but, if the president gets what he wants, trillions are about to flood into the U.S. economy to get the engine roaring again. While I am thrilled that he is in office, as opposed to the former guy, the conversation around the recovery is still distinctly from a pre-COVID point-of-view. We are trying to get “back” to something that is gone.
The pre-COVID mindset says this: we should talk about the economy as businesses and workers, producers and consumers, the board room and the union; we should argue about the minimum wage, try to reach a compromise about $15 or $12; we should complain about homelessness and how inconvenient and unseemly it is; we should spend months debating the finer points of taxation law, unemployment payments, and the jobs report. Graphs. Charts. More graphs. More charts. We should debate, then go on summer recess to the Hamptons. I’m not an economist, but I am a citizen watching my nation fight for its life. All would be (somewhat) valid conversations had the last 14 months never happened.
But they did. They opened our eyes to the devastating pain millions of small businesses shuttering across the country. They made clear what a house-of-cards the U.S. economy really is, and the ease with which we are willing to wait months — leisurely, arrogantly — to send recovery checks to struggling families. They revealed startling and disturbing facts about how our system works, like the one that broke my heart in two last year when I learned it: should our schools not re-open, 22 million kids would not have food for the day. We cannot unsee what we have seen with our own eyes. And we cannot unlearn what the pandemic has taught us. If The Great Pause woke us up, we cannot go back to sleep. It wasn’t working.
By contrast, the post-COVID mindset says this: everyone must thrive in our system. Everyone. We must teach all Americans how capitalism really works. We all know “The Big Lie.” Here is the Big…
