The Pro-Growth Progressive: An Economic Strategy for Shared Prosperity

Glued binding. Paper over boards. [10], 354, [2] p. Notes. Index. . Signed by author. Nice inscription on front end paper. Gene B. Sperling (born December 24, 1958) is an American lawyer and Democratic Party political figure, currently serving as Director of the National Economic Council under President Barack Obama. Sperling was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he attended the alternative Community High School. He received a J.D. from Yale Law School, and attended The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. In the 1990s Gene Sperling worked for New York Governor Mario Cuomo. During Bill Clinton's first term as President, from 1993 1996, Sperling served as deputy director of the National Economic Council while the Council was directed by Robert Rubin, who was promoted to Treasury Secretary. Sperling became National Economic Adviser to Clinton and director of the National Economic Council from 1996 to 2000. Sperling wrote The Pro-Growth Progressive, a book arguing that liberals should seek to harness market forces in pursuing progressive goals, and co-author of What Works In Girls' Education? As director of the NEC, Sperling, who had played a key role in the 1993 Deficit Reduction Act, was a key negotiator of the 1997 bipartisan Balanced Budget Act. Sperling was a principal negotiator with then-Treasury Secretary Summers of the Financial Modernization Act of 1999, also known as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. Gramm-Leach-Bliley repealed portions of the depression-era Glass-Steagall Act allowing banks, securities firms and insurance companies to merge. After two consecutive elections in which Democratic candidates failed to turn clear economic advantages into electoral victory, a debate is raging over what the Democrats should do now. The narrow, red state-blue state argument between chest-beating populists and soulless centrists offers the answer to neither the country's economic future nor the political future of the Democrats. In "The Pro-Growth Progressive, " President Clinton's longest-serving national economic advisor, Gene Sperling, argues that the best economic strategy for our nation--and the best strategy for progressives whether they be Democrat, Republican, or Independent--is to pursue policies that are both progressive and pro-growth, that promote progressive values of upward mobility, fair starts, and economic dignity as well as embrace markets and innovation. Sperling describes how both parties offer the American public impoverished choices: Democrats in the-sky-is-falling party too often pretend that the way to promote progressive values and expand the American middle class is to slow the pace of the global economy, stop all outsourcing, and intervene in the market. Republicans of the don't-worry-be-happy party hold fast to the bankrupt vision that the best thing for economic growth is the smallest government possible, and have made the conservative deficit hawks of the 1990s an endangered species. But "The Pro-Growth Progressive" is neither an all-out assault on the Bush agenda nor a partisan call for Democrats to move further left. Both conservatives and progressives have to accept hard truths about the limitations of their approaches. Drawing on his years of policy experience, Sperling lays out a third way on the issues that are dominating the news and Bush's second term: social security, ownership, globalization, and deficit reduction. He explains the policy alternatives that respect the power of free markets while giving government a role in ensuring that the markets benefit all working families. Focused and timely, "The Pro-Growth Progressive" offers a realistic vision of free enterprise and economic growth in which government can improve education, reduce poverty, and restore the country to fiscal sanity.…