What Does a True Populism Look Like? It Looks Like the New Deal<br />But often the response of the government has been to plead incapacity in the face of inexorable global economic realities: “We cannot tax the winners — the wealthy investors, financiers<br />and skilled professionals — because they are footloose and they would move to other countries.” This reinforces populists’ yearning to reassert national economic control.<br />But many of the Populists’ economic ideas, such as the progressive income tax, regulations on big business<br />and much greater government control of the economy, were absorbed by the progressive movement and became part of the political mainstream.<br />In other words, in its late stages, globalization looks less<br />and less as if it is expanding the overall economic pie and more and more as though it is simply taking money from some groups and giving it to others.<br />And the rules of the gold standard enforced tight money and credit conditions — what we would today call austerity policies.<br />By then the United States was mired in the Great Depression,<br />and Franklin D. Roosevelt had decided the economy needed the monetary boost that adherence to the gold standard precluded.
