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The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
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James K Galbraith

The broken US economy breeds inequality and insecurity. Here’s how to fix it

Joe Biden at the White House in September speaks about his American Rescue Plan.
Joe Biden at the White House in September speaks about his American Rescue Plan. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Rising interest rates, a falling stock market, a seesaw in the price of gas, a high dollar and chaos in world finance – we see in all this, once again, the folly of trying to run the world’s largest economy through a central bank. It’s time to rethink the basics: what has happened in America? And what should be done?

Adam Smith wrote: “Wealth, as Mr Hobbes says, is power.” Today in the United States we find islands of wealth and power on one side and an ocean of precarity and powerlessness, alongside poverty, on the other. This is a structural development over 50 years, the effect of politics and policies, but also of industrial change, globalization and new technologies, with intense regional, social, demographic and political implications.

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