Robert Pollin is Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, and is a founding co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI). His research centers on macroeconomics, conditions for low-wage workers in the U.S. and globally, the analysis of financial markets, and the economics of building a clean-energy economy in the U.S. His books include A Measure of Fairness: The Economics of Living Wages and Minimum Wages in the US and Contours of Descent: US Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity.
In February 2010 Pollin talked with Paul Jay of The Real News Network and during the interview outlined a careful combination of job-generating public investments, incentives to mobilize private investment, and policies that protect economically vulnerable populations that can create the economic, regulatory and policy environment that Obama could have already been using to create 18 million jobs and lower the unemployment rate to only 4 percent by 2012 - a proposal that has never been given any serious consideration by the Obama administration, policy makers, or mainstream media.
Instead the Obama administration chose to continue listening to people like Ben Bernanke whom Obama had re-nominated as Federal Reserve Chairman in August 2009, and who, as the top bank regulator in the country, had played a central role in the creation of the ongoing economic crisis we are experiencing.
In another interview published last week on April 17, Pollin again spoke with Paul Jay discussing Obama's recent budget speech in which he made clear that he is more or less taking on the argument that the big problem is the debt and that austerity for the masses is his plan for reducing it, pointing out that Obama is accepting the notion of the debt being a bigger problem than a recession, that Obama's premise is "wrong to begin with [and] we've got to stop the cuts to state and local governments, period. I mean, that is pushing the economy back into recession. And there's some interesting research out of the National Bureau of Economic Research which finds that whatever the stimulus has done over the past couple of years--and, again, we can debate how good it was, but whatever it was done is completely counteracted by cuts in state and local governments. So the net impact: we've had no stimulus. The net effect has been zero".
On Friday April 22 Bob Pollin again joined in another video discussion with The Real News Network, this time with his analysis of the recent Congressional Progressive Caucus alternative budget proposal that "instead of attacking the poor and middle class... balances the budget by putting America back to work", a plan that Pollin agrees with Jay would go far beyond the Obama administration proposals and will "Eliminate the deficit by 2021 without devastating Medicare, Medicaid, and social security" through "[targeting] the true drivers of deficits: the Bush tax cuts, the wars overseas, and the causes and effects of the recent recession", and "[b]y implementing a fair tax code, by building a resilient American economy, and by bringing our troops home achieves a budget surplus of over $30 billion by 2021".
Real News Network - April 22, 2011
"The People's Budget"
Robert Pollin discusses the Congressional Progressive Caucus budget proposal
...full transcript here...