The Guarantee asks us to imagine an America where housing, health care, a college education, dignified work, family care, an inheritance, and an income floor are not only attainable by all but guaranteed, by our government, for everyone.
But isn't this pie-in-the-sky thinking? Not by a long shot, as this provocative new book reveals. As it stands, our current economic system is chock full of government-backed guarantees, from bailouts to bankruptcy protection, to keep the private sector in business. So why can't the same be true for the rest of us?
Author Natalie Foster, cofounder of the Economic Security Project, has had a front-row seat to the dramatic leaps forward in government guarantees over the past decade, from student debt relief to the child tax credit expansion. Her brilliantly sketched vision for a new Guarantee Framework is rooted in real life experiences, collaborations with some of today's most important activists and visionaries, and a concrete sense of the policies that are possible—and ready to implement—in twenty-first-century America. The Guarantee is the rare book that will shift the terms of debate, moving us from the expired and defunct assumptions of no-guardrails capitalism to a nation that works for all of its people.