Elizabeth Warren's Plans Don't Add Up

The Warren Worldview of Ill-founded Economic Pessimism is Both Bloodless and Moralizing.

- Peter Suderman

At the heart of Elizabeth Warren’s campaign for president—and of her entire career as a politician and public intellectual, really— are two simple ideas.

The first is that the economy is fundamentally broken. This downer of an idea was present in the speech that launched her presidential campaign on February 9, 2019, in which she declared that

“millions and millions of American families are also struggling to survive in a system that has been rigged by the wealthy and the well-connected” and in which she insisted that the only response was to fight for “big structural change.”

It was present at the first Democratic primary debate, in which she inveighed against corporate profits and monopolistic businesses and corrupt lawmakers who have “made this country work much better for those who can make giant contributions, made it work better for those who hire armies of lobbyists and lawyers, and not made it work for the people,” and in which she scored the opening night’s standout moment by offering a full-throated argument for the elimination of private health insurance.

It was present in the 2007 essay that imagined what would eventually become the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a federal agency premised on the notion that American families were being “steered into overpriced credit products, risky subprime mortgages, and misleading insurance plans” and that many of these products needed to be regulated as pervasive dangers to the American family.

It was present in the very title of her breakout 2004 book, The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke, which promoted a systemic view of America’s economic fragility, driven by data that Warren had compiled during her career as an academic bankruptcy researcher.