Interview with Gene Sperling (Director of the National Economic Council under Presidents Clinton and Obama, Senior Adviser to President Biden and Implementation Coordinator for the American Rescue Plan)
Gene Sperling served as the Director of the National Economic Council under both Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, making him the only person to hold this position under two US presidents. He served as a Senior Advisor to President Biden and the Implementation Coordinator of the American Rescue Plan, and also as a senior economic adviser to Kamala Harris’ election campaign.
Interview conducted 21st February, 2025
Q: Looking back on the historical period since 2020, how would you characterise “Bidenomics”? What would you say from the beginning it was aiming to achieve and how would you say it’s performed?
In the summer of 2020 we had some very interesting meetings. Some of them were just with Jake Sullivan, Brian Deese and myself and the then Vice President Biden. What culminated was our response to the [COVID] crisis. The first discussion for President Biden was around how he would handle a major downturn after what he had experienced himself during the Great Recession.
Remember that the job I had managing the American Rescue Plan was essentially the job that President Obama had assigned him really, which was the implementation, not the design and negotiation, but the implementation.
But we were also dealing with the question: what type of more permanent agenda did we want going forward? On the more permanent agenda, it’s interesting to look at what was in “Build Back Better” that he campaigned for in 2020. He was very personally involved. I would say that doing calls with his policy team on this was probably something he enjoyed in the middle of the pandemic.
What you really saw there was, and this is very significant, is the outlines of a progressive industrial strategy.
What was interesting is that, in many ways, this wasn’t a shift in the Democratic Party so much as giving Joe Biden permission to pursue the policy he already believed in. Biden always felt strongly about a manufacturing renaissance in the United States. He believed we should be less reliant on outside supply chains, for both economic and foreign-policy reasons. In his view, he—not Donald Trump—was the real deal on this.
In other words, he truly understood the impact of manufacturing in the United States. He saw the devastation in Delaware when he was growing up—factories closing down. Through the American Recovery Act, he noticed that whenever people requested exemptions to “Made in America,” they often did it hastily or lazily. But when they checked around, they found plenty of companies capable of doing the work. So for him, that was a major plank—both economically and politically.
Now, economically, he had probably been influenced by the fact that many of the top traditional economists he used to listen to always told him he was wrong—that any kind of industrial strategy was just picking winners and losers and wouldn’t go well. But now there’s more recognition that in the era of China, in an era of transitioning to global competition in industries like electric vehicles and semiconductors, it’s not only economically responsible, it’s economically essential to have a strategy.
I always thought to myself: did the push in Democratic economic thought influence Joe Biden, and the answer is yes and no. It influenced him, not by making him think something he wasn’t inclined to think before, it more gave him a permission structure to say yes, this is what I’ve always thought.
He did worry at times, he’s looking around, he’s seeing Gene Sperling, he’s seeing Brian Deese, he’s seeing Jake Sullivan. He’s seeing Jared, he’s seeing Heather, and he’s saying, well, is this a balanced view? He very much wanted to make sure that we were at least letting him know what people he really respected like Larry Summers and others, who were a little less active during the summer of 2020, what they would have thought. He pressed us quite a bit.
He moved decisively because not only was it a major economic policy shift, but it was a political move he felt good about. “I don’t want to just respond to Donald Trump’s America First, I’m going to trump him”, so to speak. “I’m going to go out first and mine is going to be intellectually coherent”. That’s a really important point, when you look at the Biden economic policy.
There’s three strategies you can see. I should start by saying I don’t love the whole neoliberal, post neoliberal. I think it’s an oversimplification. But there was a more traditional market view that open markets cause disruption and didn’t always lead to industry development that you may or may not prefer but you just had to go with it. Another had been pure protectionism. If you had an industry that was never going to be competitive again, you just had to help save it to prevent temporary suffering.
Biden came up with a third option, which is that you can have a smart industrial strategy, one that invests in production in the United States, but does so in a way that it intelligently looks to the future. One thing I always remember is a conversation where he told us that he never wanted any of us to ever tell him that something was going to be good for the country if it meant that certain communities would be devastated, but other communities would get a new life.
He would say: factory workers today do care about the future. If you tell them you’re looking out for their job, they will care deeply that you are looking out for their kids’ and grandkids’ job. But you can’t go to somebody and say I’m looking out for a 22-year-old in Arizona when you live in Pittsburgh and expect them to support you.
One of the interesting things, and I thought signature things, was electric vehicles. He looked at that and said why can’t you have a strategy that when you make the transition, you do so in that community and you give those workers the first shot at those jobs? So you’re allowing the US to move forward and compete but whilst looking out for communities and workers.
For me personally, this is something I had been writing about and thinking about ever since I left the Clinton Administration. We seem to have this bad choice, which got worse as globalisation went on and as you saw more communities hurt. If I worried about that, I would be told I’m becoming a protectionist. The reason I wrote the book Economic Dignity was to say: hold it. You shouldn’t be taking a position on your view of trade per se. You could be taking your position on what’s good for the economic dignity of people, and that might mean that you need to have technology advances, compete for the future, but you have to do so in a structure that did not exist in the 90s, where there was a real choice of not just giving people little help if they lost their job, but actually investing in their own communities. I think that that got him excited.
Q: How would you characterise the difference between the Clinton approach and the Biden approach. It’s clearly a different time, but is there a different philosophy?
What is interesting about President Clinton was that he had the right vision. He spoke about globalisation with the human face. His goal was to create universal healthcare, universal training and to have more place-based investment. But he found himself between the two sides. A lot of people on the Democrat side were worried that even if open markets were well-intentioned – say in terms of foreign policy – trying to work closer with Mexico and help them develop, bringing China into the global economy and so on requires that you need to have measures to protect people.
On the Republican side—and among some Democrats—there was another view that trade is good, globalisation lowers prices and fosters competition, and we just have to figure out how to “compensate the losers.” I know it’s rooted in Kaldor-Hicks, but it’s one of the most odious expressions because it’s dehumanising. It essentially says, “We’re going to take care of everyone else, and at the end, we’ll trickle down something for people who lost.”
So, the issue for Clinton was that he had a vision, but when he lost the Congress and couldn’t move forward with any of his domestic agenda, he went forward with a vision of trying to bring the global economy together. He was pioneering in terms of labour standards and environmental standards.
When he agreed to China’s WTO accession, he had an anti-surge provision. Well, the world might have been different if Al Gore won, but Al Gore didn’t win. George Bush won and George Bush let China just run all over the United States. At that point, the view became that if you can’t get the structure in place, then maybe you just have to hold back until you do so.
In some ways, President Clinton had the right vision but lacked the political power to implement it. The economy was thriving in his second term. I tell people that when you look at these developments, everyone wants to cast blame, but I think that’s the wrong approach. Instead, we should learn from what happened under George Bush, who was willing to let huge surges come in that devastated communities. That was a warning to us all.
I think there was still a negative view of industrial policy—seeing it as “big government picking winners and losers.” Now, with competition from China, it’s clear that if you don’t have a strategy on electrification, electric vehicles, and semiconductors, you’ll get left behind. That’s the major shift.
When Biden took office, he passed CHIPS and the IRA, so it wasn’t just a campaign commitment—he actually implemented it, and one of them even had bipartisan support. That’s a more explicitly pro-manufacturing approach, even though Clinton and Obama were also pro-manufacturing. The difference is a shift in economic thinking that let people say “this is a sound economic view,” rather than “you’re just protecting unions in blue states.”
Biden was also the most pro-union president since FDR. That wasn’t just campaign talk—he told us that in the Oval Office. Some might think a handful of us pushed him to it, but I believe this is the strategy for the future: you can’t stop change, but you can’t stand by and let billionaire industrialists dictate our direction.
We first saw proof of this under Obama, when we saved the auto industry. That was industrial policy. It wasn’t just about rescuing Chrysler, GM, and Ford—it was about becoming leaders in electric vehicles. If we’d let the market take its course, we wouldn’t just have lost jobs; we’d have lost the future, much like what happened when consumer electronics went entirely to South Korea and Vietnam, leaving us unable to compete in the inputs for the iPhone.
Q: There are four things we want to ask about. How important was the hot economy in the early Biden years? Secondly, how important was dynamism and reallocation in the labour market when unemployment went up and came down again? Thirdly, on industrial policy, what do you think were the most important things they did and which bits would you criticise? And fourthly, what lessons should the UK learn?
[Critics of the hot economy] are disappointingly, consistently and unreflexively wrong. At best, they are consistently and reflexively far too simplistic in their claims and not willing enough to look at the full mix of data. I think that the one thing we would agree to in theory is that when you’re judging an economic policy, you have to ask at the time: did you take the right risk approach?
As we saw in the financial crisis, it’s not just a case of just what is likely to go a particular way, but how great are the risks of being wrong? There were many things in the financial crisis that both Larry and Tim Geithner and others supported that were very unpopular but we were trying to prevent a 20 or 30% risk of what could be a global recession.
People think this is complicated. It’s not. Most homeowners have home insurance. Until the fires in Santa Monica, I’d never known anybody who had to use their fire insurance. But it still is worth having that insurance against such a negative issue. In the Great Recession, we got a painful lesson on what happens when you go too small on a deep economic crisis.
Now, I am not blaming Barack Obama or Larry Summers or Tim Geithner or myself and others who are around, even though I think Jason Furman and Larry Summers often get unfair blame. They did not believe the fiscal response was adequate. We just politically couldn’t get a dollar more. So there’s some people who want to blame them to make the case for bigger fiscal policy. I don’t look at it that way. I look at it a little bit like I’ve looked at lessons from the 90s. It’s not about blame. It’s about learning from experiences and not making the same mistake.
Now, interestingly, Larry Summers was the National Economic Council director in 2009 and 2010. I was the NEC director (it was my second run) in 2011, 2012 and 2013. I was the person after we were out of recession and in a painfully slow recovery. We learned really important lessons.
One, you have to have a buffer. You have to have a little extra for what might go wrong, because things go wrong. After the Great Recession, what went wrong? The European financial crisis. Who thought Greece could screw things up so much? We saw gas prices go up with the Arab Spring. We saw the first global supply chain issue with the Fukushima meltdown. We saw a ridiculous, almost default on the debt by the US.
We barely had enough, and when those things happened, the economy got mired. Now let’s just be clear how bad that was. In 2011, two full years after the recovery, unemployment was at 9%. Youth unemployment was at 17%. Long term unemployment was still near record highs for years and years. It became a lesson on what economists call scarring. How much long-term harm do you do to people when they’re out of the economy too long?
Then we also saw that state and local governments ran out of money. They couldn’t deal with the suppliers, and the economic blight because they were strapped. This deeply frustrated President Obama. Jason Furman and I would present to him how much stronger the economy would be if state and local governments weren’t contracting, and we found that they were contracting about 0.4, about 0.5 a point of GDP and that normally they’d be up. So the 2 point percent recovery could have been 3 percent. The 1.5 could have been 2.5. It really mattered.
So when we did the American Rescue Plan, there was a very concerted effort to look at was the risk of going big worse than the risk of going too small? People like Janet Yellen, former Fed Chair or Secretary of Treasury, many others and I certainly felt that way. The risks led to not only going big, but going for a longer period. Making sure people have support in that second or third year.
Now putting the inflation to the side for one second–and I know that’s hard–here’s what’s not controversial. In 2022 and 2023, we had the two lowest years of unemployment since 1969.
Had I ever told anybody that the year after the pandemic, we’d have the two lowest years of unemployment? Youth unemployment and long-term unemployment, instead of stagnating at high levels, had the largest drop. It was the most equitable recovery. People were expecting a tsunami of evictions. We had an eviction prevention programme that actually had evictions below averages, which was remarkable. We had the lowest foreclosures in memory.
You had real resilience in the economy. We had bad things happen too. We had Delta and Omicron. We had an unexpected war in Europe, and yet the economy remained strong. So if you’re going to talk about this, you have to weigh: what are the risks that those things wouldn’t have happened and that we would have had more suffering? And on the inflation side, how much would you have gained?
Now it is not just people like myself who coordinated the American Rescue Plan [making this argument]. There were some of the top economists. In fact, there’s probably no one that those guys respect as much as Peter Orszag, who was a brilliant economist and Head of the Congressional Budget Office, our OMB Director, who has written that the American Rescue Plan played virtually no role in the inflation.
It’s always good when you look at the forest to look at the trees What’s the forest tell you? There was global inflation everywhere. It was not particularly tied to the degree of fiscal stimulus. And after that Larry Summers famously said that this was so related to demand and that you’d have to have 10% unemployment for one year, or 7.5% unemployment for two years, or I think 6.5% for three years. After he said that it was all demand, he was proven brutally wrong. Inflation came down into the twos, which neither of them would have thought was a big problem before. And you still had a growing economy and unemployment staying at 4%–maybe the best period of low unemployment you’ve had. That should make someone rethink.
But this is the first global pandemic we’ve ever had that shut down the global economy. It’s not the first since 1917. 1917 and 1918, we were in the middle of World War One. Nothing was shut down. So this is the first time in history we’ve ever dealt [with it]. How is somebody so sure and so much analysis by the New York Federal Reserve, by Moody’s, by Peter Orszag, by so many people have said that this was either fundamentally supply constrained or it was a mix of complicated figures. And Larry’s view that we had a very small output gap was immediately challenged by Goldman Sachs, by UBS, by others.
Look, we should be reflective and I think there’s a couple of things that are worth being reflective on. We gave out three stimulus cheques. Stimulus cheques go to people in great need and they also go to people who weren’t hurt at all. We should think about whether we should use a mix of better tools because they may not be targeting enough.
That is a serious discussion and we should ask, did that play any part in people trying to buy more goods with semiconductors? But if you have a semiconductor shortage due to supply that you couldn’t necessarily predict and you have a little more demand, I don’t know if somebody could say it was all a supply thing or was all a demand thing.
What’s been disappointing is there seems to be this kind of desire to do a legal brief. “Oh, we said the American Rescue Plan might be a little large, and so we’re going to prove it no matter what”, instead of the reflective view. I think a lot of people think that the American Rescue Plan did an enormous amount of good, that it probably did lift inflation some, but not consequentially. So if it was 1 or 2 percent higher than it would have been, nobody’s really expecting that 8 vs 9 percent was going to change the basic inflation picture–or the unhappiness of voters, as evidenced by the experience of every single country.
Q: Could the US growth post-stimulus be driven more by a reallocation-driven productivity surge than by the stimulus size itself?
I want to make clear that while I don’t agree with people who take a particular point of view against the American Rescue Plan, my main thing is to argue for humility. I don’t think there’s humility in trying to say “I thought the American Rescue Plan should be 800, and it was a trillion more, and therefore, that’s the cause of all the problems.” I don’t think it’s also humility to not be willing to study this once in a modern history occurrence and try to fully understand it.
Let me say something a little broader about dynamism. If you’re having a traditional Economics 101 course on Europe versus the United States, people would say that the United States is more dynamic. We have more small businesses that get started and more that go bankrupt. We get quicker hiring and quicker firing. And Europe has a better, stronger safety net, but maybe not as much dynamism. And then people argue over which is better.
Well, in this case, you may have seen some of the upsides and downsides of dynamism. So in other words, instead of just simply assuming that the inflation was caused by an incremental extra in fiscal policy, one should be looking at other unique factors that could also explain things in the United States.
We, more than most countries, have a housing shortage that developed after the financial crisis. We are more dependent on cars so something that sends car prices up was going to hurt us more.
There’s an anecdote I tell which is that we shut down the economy faster and American companies thought shutting down super fast was a way to save money, and it might have been. But it might have meant that there was more friction on the way back. That friction might have been good for stemming their losses, good for reallocating workers, but bad for inflation and a little bad for disruption.
Let me give you an overall example: do you know that rental car companies got rid of a third of their rental cars in a month? They just got rid of them. So when suddenly people wanted rental cars again, it was super expensive. I lived in Santa Monica and worked in the White House. It became incredibly expensive to lease a car temporarily. It had nothing to do with the American Rescue Plan. That had something to do with the kind of abrupt dynamism.
I get the job offer from President Biden and I proudly go to my favourite clothing store and say I need 3 new suits, and they say, well, it’s going to cost you twice as much. Why? Is it the American Rescue Plan (which would have been hard since it was just the beginning of March)? The guy says “no, we just decided to cut off ties with our factory that makes all those suits so we’ll have to style them ourselves, and that’s much more expensive for you than just getting your usual 40 short jacket”. That had nothing to do with the American Rescue Plan, that had to do with our dynamism.
I do think that certain advocacy briefs—like the one by people I know that love criticising the American Rescue Plan—can distract us from examining the more serious issues, which are probably more complex. I also doubt they’ll demonstrate that the United States’ fiscal decisions alone caused global inflation. I genuinely believe that while our fiscal approach may have contributed more than 1 percent to the inflation differential, the overall benefits outweighed the harms.
As we saw in the UK and elsewhere, people weren’t happy, and approval ratings for your head of state weren’t any better at 7 or 8 percent. But in the United States, if we’d seen the kind of suffering we could have had, we might have ended up with the worst of both worlds—higher inflation and an inadequate policy response, much like in 2011 and 2012, which nearly cost President Obama his reelection.
Q: Before we just go to industrial policy, just to the other elements in that early stuff, child tax credits, childcare, those elements, how important do you think they were?
I think that in my entire policy career, the single most heartbreaking thing to me was the child tax credit not being made permanent (the expanded Biden child tax credit). I would say healthcare failing in 1994 comes in second.
I had been brought in to implement the American Rescue Plan. From the moment I got the offer, I said to my wife, I said to anybody, no matter what I do, if those cheques don’t get out monthly, I will be a failure, because that was an amazing experiment, a monthly cheque where the lowest income people got the same as middle income people. And the fact that in four months, not four years like Social Security, you had the first refundable tax credit that went to every family. It went monthly, 90% went into direct deposits, and it brought the child poverty rate under 6 percent, something most of us never thought we’d see in our lives.
For it not to get extended is just heartbreaking. If I could go back in time, I wish we would have extended it more. That would have made the package more expensive. I wish we would have. But on the other hand, it failed for the reason that we only had fifty votes in the Senate. I mean, the real truth is, how did Joe Biden pass so much without being able to spare one vote? He lost by one vote and I do believe that will come back. I think it will be the first thing that happens when Democrats take control of the government again. But I think that is heartbreaking and I think that was something where we wanted it to be permanent.
I think there were a number of experiments that have gone well and a couple have been extended. Giving children some help for food in the summer when they’re not at school is a no brainer. We’ve done that. That’s at least somewhat permanent right now. Increasing spending on the Affordable Care Act that many more millions of people are on. That is positive. I think one thing that we experimented with, that again for me, I think my thing I’m most proud of along with the Child Tax Credit, was the Emergency Rental Assistance. It was the first eviction prevention strategy nationally ever in the history of our country.
It’s not a long-term solution. But when you talk about scarring, the scarring that happens when a parent with children is thrown out of their apartment, particularly in the middle of a crisis or pandemic. The fact that we actually had less addictions for two years, 20% less, I think that is something to really be studied. I know all the warts in it because I had to implement it so I don’t have a rosy-eyed view, but the bottom line is 20% reduction – virtually every country should be looking at. You can’t prevent all evictions, and you shouldn’t prevent all evictions. But there are quite a lot that could be prevented without hurting the landlord, some government help and some negotiation. I think that is a really important lesson.
The last thing I’d mention is that we had an emergency childcare programme. When we sat there with Biden in the summer of 2020, we were really worried about every childcare centre closing and crushing women’s labour force participation. We actually had a programme that went to 80% of childcare centres, across 80% of the country. A third of them said they would have closed permanently without it.
One of the points I always challenge Larry Summers and Jason Furman about is that they feared a decline in labour force participation. Yet within a couple of years, we had the highest women’s labour force participation on record. You can’t criticise the American Rescue Plan on every small point and ignore those record low unemployment figures, record drops in long-term and youth unemployment, and record increases in women’s labour-force participation. Those didn’t happen by accident. A stronger, steadier fiscal response—with buffers to help people not only cope with lost income but also pandemic related challenges—played a very positive role.
Q: Let’s move to industrial policy. How do you assess the performance of industrial policy performance so far – especially those place-based investments?
The other major assignment I had in the Biden White House was to be the Chief White House person for the strike between the big three auto companies and the UAW. That was contentious, worked out well at the end, and President Biden became the first President to walk the picket line.
You can imagine that when I talked to the UAW head, Shawn Fain, who I worked very closely with, and then we talked to the big three CEOs, they had very different views of the world. But one thing that was not disputable–that Mary Barra at GM and Bill Ford and Jim Farley at Ford were very clear on– their footprint for electric vehicles was far larger because of the Inflation Reduction Act.
They disagreed with us and they disagreed with us siding with the UAW on many things. But it was clear that those incentives affected their location. What you would have had is the United States putting cars together and buying everything from South Korea. I really think that was their plan. That’s what would have happened had Donald Trump won a second term then. He was on the sidelines and China was running all over us.
So one has to look at the big picture, and the big picture is that [our industrial policy] dramatically changed the footprint. What it meant was that we were in the game. Electric vehicles may be a little bit like our parents and grandparents using smartphones. It might take a little while. People have to be confident. People talk to each other and they hear, oh, I like to visit my grandma, she’s 300 miles away and I had trouble charging. That’s a big argument. That’s real. We have to acknowledge that.
I do think in time the advantages of never having to pay gas are really going to make a difference. Whether it worked exactly, or there was as much demand, there just can’t be a question that the United States is a stronger economy in the future because we will have an electric vehicle industry in the United States in the 2020s, the 2030s and the 2040s. That would not have happened without Biden’s economic policy.
One of the things that I worked on during the autos was creating the domestic conversion program, where we gave significant grants up to $500 million to people who agreed to do their transition in the same place. That was a brilliant policy. Of course I worked on it, so I think it was brilliant. It’s the kind of thing that’s bigger in the future. You basically said to the big three or to a steel company, “I know you have to transition to compete, but why do you have to devastate this community? We’ll give you more funds if you work with your union, If you work with your workers and if you stay here.”
There was a strong focus like that. I think Brian Deese worked very hard on that with creating the Coal Communities Initiative. I want to say one really important lesson because this really gets to the heart of it. I think in the 90s when people, even people who like Bill Clinton talked about globalisation with the human face, tended to focus a lot more on strengthening the safety net. Oh, you’re going to lose jobs. We’re going to give you training, we’re going to give you healthcare, we’re going to help you keep your mortgage.
Q: And it’s a notional idea about skills?
Skills are crucial, but so is supporting people. That’s something Damon Silvers at the AFL-CIO and Michael Wessel at the Steelworkers really impressed on me: they said, “We like training and skills, but it’s not enough. You have to create jobs right there.” Biden’s industrial policy focused on not only job training or healthcare—that matters, but it’s still not enough. You need more skilled job locations.
Even if not everyone who loses a job ends up in a new factory role, it keeps the community alive and prevents a downward spiral. Some people will shift to different jobs, but at least they have a vibrant community around them. The real damage from globalisation in the US is that certain communities get left behind, lose their economic dignity and vitality, and spiral into higher rates of alcoholism, suicide, and depression. When policymakers don’t seem to care about that, it’s like telling one child in a family of five, “We love your siblings, but not you.” Naturally, that child feels abandoned.
Q: What are the lessons for the UK here? What are the right lessons to draw from what you’ve delivered and lived through?
On industrial policy, I’d focus on areas where there’s no controversy that global competition will happen, and look at it from an economic and a security standpoint. Of course, security matters; it doesn’t mean we’re throwing out comparative advantages entirely.
If you have a friendly nation, great—nobody says you need to compete in every single area, but if you’re not competing in key industries, you risk falling behind. Taiwan leads in advanced semiconductors, for example, but that doesn’t mean they must be the best at everything. Meanwhile, if you aren’t incentivising location, development, supply chains, and relevant skills, you’ll end up falling behind.
Yes, you do need to be strategic. Politics can interfere if you just protect uncompetitive industries forever. I’d say, don’t get stuck in the false choice between letting them fail or freezing the status quo. Look for ways to help those workers and that area transition. That means place-based investments that can work. I think even Brian Deese, who’s championed much of this, would say there will be lessons learned in infrastructure, the IRA, and semiconductors. We shouldn’t defend everything blindly but figure out what works.
It does get harder when you have to pick different companies, like with semiconductors. You need excellent, independent people involved so you don’t wind up just subsidising corporations. And you have to accept that some companies will fail—otherwise, you probably didn’t take enough risk.
Where possible, design tax incentives that don’t force you to pick individual winners but just set criteria—like many of the pro–climate change, pro-jobs measures in the Inflation Reduction Act. Those give the entire field incentives to aim higher. The more you can do that, the better.
Finally, I believe in incentivising people to rebuild where they already live. People give their lives to a place; an employer leaves, and the executives are fine, but the community spirals downward. From my perspective—rooted in economic dignity—when crafting policy, you can’t make everyone equally well-off, but you can protect a baseline of economic dignity. If we let entire communities decline while others thrive, we can’t be shocked when those communities rise up in anger or turn to demagoguery. Taking that seriously from the start means not just place-based policy, but focused, targeted strategies that encourage transition in partnership with workers, communities, and unions whenever possible.
ENDS