Allan Rivlin on Divided We Fall

Leonard Lopate at Large on WBAI Radio in New York

(12-9-22)Partisan warfare and gridlock in Washington threaten to squander America’s opportunity to show the world that democracy can solve serious economic problems and ensure widely shared prosperity. Instead of working together to meet the challenges ahead—an aging work force, exploding inequality, climate change, rising debt—our elected leaders are sabotaging our economic future by blaming and demonizing each other in hopes of winning big in elections. They are weakening America’s capacity for world leadership and the case for democracy here and abroad. Join us when Allan Rivlin shares the late Alice M. Rivlin decades of experience in economic policy making, in which she argued economic policies could lead to sustainable American prosperity and opportunity for all, but crafting them requires the tough, time-consuming work of consensus building and bipartisan negotiation. In a divided country with shifting majorities, major policies must have bipartisan buy-in and broad public support. Otherwise we will have either destabilizing swings in policy or total gridlock in the face of challenges looming at us, on this installment of Leonard Lopate at Large.