WAR, SUPPLY CHAIN ISSUES, AND INFLATION ARE REMAKING THE ECONOMY, requiring coordinated national action, yet politics and government remain stuck in polarized deadlock.

Despite high employment numbers, the pre-COVID economy was already leaving millions of people behind. Now high employment is back, but inflation and shortages of goods are destabilizing the economy and making daily living unaffordable for many, raising new uncertainties for the American middle and working classes.

Ensuring the country has high-paying jobs and affordability for the middle and working classes requires broad and sustained action that must be well-coordinated at the national level. We know that the economy has been fundamentally altered by the pandemic lockdowns and supply chain issues. Even if the economy was returning to pre-pandemic normalcy, companies and workers have burned through savings and taken on new debt to survive the shutdown, reducing their financial cushions. They have fewer resources to deal with inflation.

There are paths out of the danger however, but they won’t be easy or quick. Some sectors will continue to expand, like home delivery and internet services, and some manufacturing could return to the US, as nations re-evaluate the risks of global supply chains. So those offer some bright spots in coming years. But they can’t happen quickly without coordination to match people to jobs. And they can’t happen at all if workers don’t have the right skills. The nature of the economy is changing in dramatic and permanent ways, and people urgently need access to this new economy. Coordinating this access is a critical role for our national government.

But even if we had a system to retrain workers and match them to jobs, deadlock in politics and government threatens it all. Since the 1990’s, distortions to commonsense voting have combined with information technology to give the advantage in our elections to political extremists. Those extremists on both sides are locked in a partisan death struggle that has paralyzed government. Deadlock will remain unless we can remove the advantage that extremists have, and make elections and government about the public interest, and not about partisan interest for one side or the other.

Acting together, we can restore functioning government. We can create long and sustained economic growth, with all Americans taking part. We can each be more prosperous than we’ve ever thought possible. But we must recognize that this opportunity will be harder to grasp the longer we wait, and we must act on it.

Learn about the solution.