30 Issues in 30 Days: Capitalism, Socialism and Saving the Middle Class - a podcast by WNYC

On today's show, a rebroadcast of last night's national call-in special America Are We Ready? co-hosted by Brian Lehrer and Latino USA anchor Maria Hinojosa, where they tackled the big issues related to economy and the presidential election, including saving the middle class, in the show's signature election-year series 30 Issues in 30 days! 

Hour One: A Generational ReckoningIn the 30 years since we “won” the Cold War, we’ve seen the first generations of Americans come of age who are not likely to have better standards of living than their parents. Catherine Rampell, syndicated opinion columnist at The Washington Post, political/economic commentator at CNN and special correspondent at PBS Newshour, and Eduardo Porter, economics reporter for the business section of The New York Times and the author of American Poison: How Racial Hostility Destroyed Our Promise (Knopf, 2020), review the statistics and explain how this happened in a post-Communist world in which a rising tide of capitalism and democracy was supposed to lift all boats.

Hour Two: The Capitalist Socialist SpectrumPavlina R. Tcherneva, associate professor at Bard College and research scholar at the Levy Economics Institute and the author of The Case for a Job Guarantee (Polity, 2020) and Oren Cass,  executive director of American Compass, a domestic policy advisor for the Romney presidential campaign and the author of The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America (Encounter Books, 2018), talk about where on the spectrum from capitalist to socialist each candidate stands, from their own very different points of view.

 

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