- Moving to a postal banking system would reduce living expenses for the poor by relieving them of the $2,400 a year they pay in interest and fees to predatory “alternative financial services” like check-cashing stores and payday lenders.
- Legitimate corporate governance practices could rein in CEO compensation and more equitably spread profits.
- Keeping common resources like energy and infrastructure public, rather than privatizing those functions, also can lower the cost of living, raising inflation-adjusted wages.
- Adding good jobs with proper pensions in the public sector — which employs the fewest workers since 1966 — could help.
- Empowering labor through both unionization and laws around freelancing and contract work can only help restore wages and employee rights.
- Better retirement through expanding Social Security puts money in the hands of people who will spend it.
- Even increasing housing density in expensive residential areas, more of a market-based approach, could yield benefits at the margins.
- Heck, not raising taxes on the middle class because of dubious ideas about the budget deficit would at least minimize the pain.
That is one of our policy objectives, isn't it?