Don’t Give In on Economics

This week, we’ve got a post-election take from Roosevelt Forward President and CEO Felicia Wong that might help you look forward in this moment of anxiety—though setbacks are likely in the next four years, a longer view shows how the center has shifted. This piece was originally published by our friends at Democracy Journal as part of their new essay series on what might come next for our politics and democracy.

With the victory of Donald Trump in the 2024 election, the United States followed a global anti-establishment trend into an era of uncertainty and paradox. Trump once again tapped into decades-long popular frustrations, winning working-class voters with policy plans that are at best uneven. And now, in the early days of his transition, he is filling key roles with titans of industry and finance (and at least two Fox News hosts). 

In the short term, the broad American left must be frank about the realities we face. The next four years will involve a lot of defense: protecting hard-won policy victories and doing all we can to prevent new harms.

But even in our fragile and perilous state, we cannot lose sight of the long view. The next four years can also be a time for us to reckon honestly with the anxieties so many Americans still feel today and to clarify our vision of an economy with a better balance of power between labor and capital.

Over the last few years, we have worked hard on the economics, and gotten far more right than wrong. Now is the time to build a politics around those policies. 

The Long View Is Necessary

The powerful combination of despair and apathy that Americans expressed in this election has long roots. The many inequalities that plague our economy did not start with Joe Biden’s presidency, and they will not end with it. Many keen observers have reminded us that people began to lose faith in 2008, when the financial crisis left ten million Americans without homes while bankers enjoyed bailouts. But we can go back even further, to 1999, when tens of thousands of people converged to protest globalization at the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle. They were angry about global trade deals, like 1994’s NAFTA, which ultimately cost thousands of auto industry jobs in the upper Midwest. Today, those workers’ children and grandchildren are still angry.

The Biden years are part of this much longer tapestry. 

The Economy Trump Will Inherit

It may no longer be fashionable to praise Joe Biden’s economic victories, and certainly many have lamented the President’s inability to sell those accomplishments to the American people. But for the sake of historical accuracy, and so that we learn the right lessons, we must remember the Biden wins. With precious little political leverage in a bitterly split Congress, the Biden presidency did a lot of excellent policy work—from a COVID rescue package that led to a record-fast and internationally strong economic recovery, to policy supporting a full-employment economy and increased power for workers, to longer-term industrial policy investments that brought manufacturing back to corners of the country left behind by globalization. As Nicholas Lemann wrote in The New Yorker before the election, “Biden is the first President in decades to treat government as the designer and ongoing referee of markets, rather than as the corrector of markets’ dislocations and excesses after the fact.” 

But a shift this big takes time and public trust, and those were both in short supply for Biden and his team. Many of the Administration’s biggest legislative accomplishments were either temporary—like the American Rescue Plan’s expanded child tax credit—or slower burns like the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), set to deliver most of its benefits over the next decade. And while the new jobs and infrastructure created by the IRA in the last two years might not have been visible or at least immediately traceable to the Administration’s efforts, most Americans were seeing the effects of inflation at the grocery store and in their rents in real time. Rebalancing power would take longer than a four-year term, as Biden’s painfully flat “finish the job” campaign slogan hinted at before he dropped out.

This is the economy that Donald Trump is inheriting: one that is historically strong on many metrics, from employment and growth to business starts and investment numbers. It’s “the best economy in recent U.S. history, other than perhaps the last one he inherited,” as The New York Times’s Talmon Joseph Smith wryly noted. We should remember just who laid the groundwork for these positive economic trends, on track to continue in 2025 and 2026, when Trump begins to take personal credit for good numbers that did not, in fact, originate on his watch. 

Trump will also inherit all of the structural cost-of-living and quality-of-life challenges that were not solved by a gridlocked Congress. These costs, of course, have been rising for decades. Our economic system has never fully adjusted to the realities of the costs of living for two-parent working families. And almost 40 percent of Americans still can’t afford to pay a $400 emergency expense in cash. 

Trump’s plans will not truly solve any of this. If enacted, his agenda—implementing very high across-the-board tariffs, making tax cuts for the wealthy permanent, and deporting millions of immigrants—is likely to raise costs even more, exacerbate inequality, and cause labor shortages that will further drive up inflation.

What Comes Next?

The extent to which Trump will advance his stated agenda is, of course, unknown. But we can bet on several things.

First, especially with a reasonably comfortable Republican majority in the Senate, Trump will be able to staff the government as he chooses. If his transition team is any indication, a Trump cabinet will not reflect J.D. Vance’s pledges to stop “catering to Wall Street” and “commit to the working man.” Instead, federal agencies entrusted with making decisions for the public good could soon operate primarily to protect private interests.

We will likely see a rollback of labor rights. One of the most important shifts in the Biden Administration was a stronger National Labor Relations Board, which protected workers who organized—including long-term contractors at major firms like Amazon. Given both Donald Trump’s and Elon Musk’s clear views on labor unions, workers should worry.

Meanwhile, to take just one agency as an example, the Treasury Department—whose core jobs include managing the nation’s finances in the public interest, enforcing tax laws, ensuring that our banking system is well regulated, and combating international money laundering—will likely be run by the sorts of financiers who believe in deregulation and reducing funding for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). This would make banks even less safe than they were before the financial crisis of 2008 and could well risk another crisis like the 2023 failure of Silicon Valley Bank and two other institutions. We would see the IRS regress from its improved 2023 and 2024 filing seasons, when the agency launched a successful Direct File pilot program and collected $1.3 billion in additional revenues, mostly from tax evaders. 

Second, we know that we have a tax fight coming up. Many provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) are expiring in 2025. Raising record-low taxes on the wealthy and corporations is one of the most important things we can do to rebalance power in our economy and to fund necessary services for the American people. This fight was always likely to be tough, no matter who won the election. But now, we will almost certainly see a Trump-led GOP trifecta fight to extend those tax cuts for the ultrarich. This would increase federal deficits even further, to an estimated $4 trillion over the next decade, despite Trump’s claims that tariffs can offset these costs.

There is little, realistically, to be done—but Democrats have an important role to play in the narrative and politics. They can dare self-proclaimed pro-worker, anti-corporate, anti-deficit Republicans to join them in pro-revenue measures—for example, by challenging Republicans to extend the TCJA only for those who make less than $400,000 per year, which would effectively raise taxes only on the wealthy. Tactics like this would force Republicans to show their voters what they really stand for.

Hope Is Reality-Based

Let’s be honest: The next four years will be brutal for workers, for the planet, for the fight against inequality. Four years of Trump-Vance will also be a devastating delay as we seek to build a better economics with strong public support not just on polls, but also at the ballot box. We always knew this project would take decades, and we risk losing precious time.

But it is also true that the center has shifted. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut is saying it’s “time to rebuild the left” and calling for “a firm break with neoliberalism.” As Murphy puts it, “Real economic populism should be our tentpole.” 

Some candidates followed this playbook successfully this cycle. Elissa Slotkin, senator-elect from Michigan, prevailed with a campaign message laser-focused on industrial policy. Congressman Pat Ryan won reelection in a purple district in upstate New York by calling out “billionaires and big corporations making record-breaking profits while the rest of us struggle.” And Andy Kim won the Senate race in New Jersey by challenging the state’s machine politics, declining to take corporate PAC money, and refusing to “defend what is clearly a broken politics that has contributed to the greatest amount of inequality in our nation’s history.” 

A more worker-focused economics that rebalances power is no longer just the stuff of protest signs in Zuccotti Park or Seattle. We have seen real policy results. And even in the midst of 2024’s cataclysm, we have seen candidates succeed by acknowledging economic pain, and the frustration and anger that result when the status quo won’t act.

Stepping back, we can draw a through-line between today’s successful candidates and the 1999 anti-globalization protestors. They said 25 years ago that “another world is possible.” Since then, many egalitarian policy ideas have become reality. We have much work to do to learn how these ideas play out over time, and even more, to build a politics around this agenda—toward a political economy that works for voters and that they can see themselves in, toward a successful democratic renewal.