![]() ![]() But the point is simply this: a lesson of the past 20 years is that what Elizabeth Warren is thinking about now is what Washington is going to be talking about next. ![]() There are sort of Warrrenites all through the federal government now, and also in elected office: Katie Porter in the House, the member of Congress from Orange County, California, who’s become a total star. And so, she has brought a lot of really talented people up to her staff, trained them herself, and then put them elsewhere into government. Warren pays much more attention to staffing than most figures in Washington. And then this is more subtle, but it’s really important. And now Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is signed onto her plan to have Biden use executive authority to cancel $50,000 in student debt. The debate over canceling student debt, that’s a debate she drove with her proposal to do this a couple of years ago. The bipartisan debate we have now over breaking up big tech firms, that’s a debate she really drove with her proposal to do that a couple of years ago. So in recent years, Warren has led in pushing antitrust back into the conversation. The closest analog to this in recent American politics is - I don’t know - maybe Pat Moynihan from New York. She became then a member of the Democratic Senate leadership team and a presidential candidate. ![]() And then when the Senate Republicans wouldn’t confirm her to run it permanently, she ran for and won a Senate seat in Massachusetts. It went from an article in the journal Democracy to a new federal agency that she set up and ran, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And then she made this move that policy wonks almost never make. She proposed this entire new way of thinking about and then structuring consumer protection. Of course, that research was built on her work on bankruptcy, but it also fed into her work on financial regulation. A lot of the modern economic debate is built on that. It moved the focus from this pretty narrow lens of wages and overall economic growth that had dominated in the Clinton era towards this deeper analysis that we now take for granted on the affordability and precarity of a modern middle class life. So “The Two-Income Trap,” which is a book she published in 2004 back when she was an academic, it tilted the axis of the Washington economic debate. If you go back decades now, the research she did and then the way she promoted it and sold it and then got it passed has completely changed how we both view and make policy, particularly economic policy. Elizabeth Warren is the single most important policy thinker and doer of this generation. Let me just start the show today with a claim that is going to sound bold, but I think is obvious. I’m Ezra Klein, and this is the Ezra Klein Show. Transcript Elizabeth Warren on What We Get Wrong About Inequality The senator also discusses housing policy, child care costs, billionaires and more. ![]()
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