President Obama is expected to announce Gene Sperling (L) as his new director of the National Economic Council, replacing the recently departed Larry Summers (R), at an even in Landover, Md., today.
If you want to know more about his philosophy, his 2007 manifesto on "Rising-Tide Economics," published in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, is good place to start. He writes:
In my White House days, I was known for tormenting the speechwriters by insisting that we should rip off Ben Franklin's caution that we "must indeed all hang together, or ... hang separately" with the economic refrain "we will grow together or grow apart." My line never made it into a speech, but with the spread of globalization it has never been more apt....
Perhaps a better phrase to capture the notion of shared prosperity was John F. Kennedy's observation that "a rising tide lifts all boats." For progressives, the rising-tide metaphor is not a causal assumption that growth will automatically raise everyone. Rather, it is the aspiration and test for economic policy: Does it both raise the tide and lift all boats? This vision of shared prosperity is not only demanded by the global, interdependent economy, but rooted in the historic values of the progressive vision of the United States. Moving forward, we must recognize that the economy is undergoing a profound transformation, making it distinct from both the industrial era and even the beginnings of the Internet Age just a decade ago. In such a world, economic growth can be explosive, but growth alone is not enough. For Americans, shared prosperity, an opportunity for upward mobility, and economic outcomes determined more by merit than the accident of birth are fundamental to who we are as a nation....