On December 12, the Campaign for America’s Future hosted Jacob Hacker to talk about his important new book, The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care, and Retirement – And How You Can Fight Back at a forum in Washington. CAF is working with Hacker to promote widespread discussion of both his book and his plan for health care for all. That same day we arranged a video interview on the KaiserNetwork by Jackie Judd of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Jacob hacker’s new book, called The Great Risk Shift. It hit the bookstores with perfect timing –just before the watershed 2006 election. Just in time to validate what was on the minds of a majority of voters – and to have the voters validate the book’s basic thesis.

I urge you all to check out CAF’s analysis of voter attitudes during the election – and the poll we did with Stan Greenberg – at www.ourfuture.org.

We found that, beyond Bush’s failed Iraq war policy, this election was also about growing economic insecurity – and the voters’ perception that conservative politicians were on the side of special interests who are outsourcing our jobs, getting rid of our health care and pensions, raising the price of drugs for seniors, trying to privatize social security and medicare, and putting the oil companies in charge of our energy future.

The book’s subtitle says it pretty clearly: The Assault On American Jobs, Families, Health Care, And Retirement—And How You Can Fight Back. Voters went to the polls with these populist ideas in their heads, and the results of this election were a pretty amazing rejection of conservative policies.

So we get to say:

• Goodbye Tom Delay
• Goodbye Rick Santorum
• Goodbye Donald Rumsfield
• And goodbye “Ownership Society”

Well, conservatives haven’t really given up on the pieces Ownership Society. (There is money to be made for their backers.) They will continue to push HSAs (health savings accounts) as substitutes for real health insurance. They will continue to try to undermine Medicare through subsidies to HMOs and voucher strategies like “premium support.” And they will probably even try another run at privatizing Social Security.

But a bubble has been burst. The aura of inevitability among the Washington elites – the assumption by those elites that the “ownership society was a viable governing philosophy -- has been deflated. First by our defeat of privatization – which made George Bush a lame duck. And now by the judgement of real voters in this election. So Jacob’s book comes at an important watershed of public discontent – pointing to new politics.

I first met Jacob Hacker many years ago – I think he was still working on his PhD at Harvard. Prof. Ted Marmor told he was an idea guy to watch. Since then Jacob has written several books, among them: THE DIVIDED WELFARE STATE and THE ROAD TO NOWHERE (about the Clinton health care plan) and most recently he was co-author of OFF CENTER: THE REPUBLICAN REVOLUTION AND THE EROSION OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY, a highly-praised analysis of the right wing ascendancy. He is now a professor of political science at Yale, and a frequent commentator on TV and radio and in a variety of magazines and blogs.

I really want to urge you to read his new book, The Great Risk Shift – don’t just put it on the shelf thinking that you’ll use it as a reference. The book is a good read. It is important because of its compelling description of the many ways corporations and governments are “offloading” responsibilities for health care, retirement, education, recovery from job loss – onto the shoulders of individuals and families.

But the most important thing about the book is the way it describes how real people experience the economy – via growing job volatility and greater risk – the increasing chance that people up and down the income ladder – can suddenly have their livelihoods (and their sense of who they are) – massively disrupted by economic forces beyond their control. yes, wages are declining for many – but economic insecurity is affecting far more people in this economy. And the knowledge that our public and private safety nets are either frayed or under attack simply adds to the insecurity.

This book has a lot of explanatory power. And it is made more compelling by Jacob’s skillful use of short vignettes -- stories of individuals and families coping with sudden unemployment, the loss of a breadwinner, a seriously sick child, or the mounting costs of education. The stories remind us that – except for the very rich, who can “self-insure” against risk – most of the rest of us, from people on the poverty line to people in the upper middle class, are constantly dealing with volatile changes that could cause us to suddenly lose it all.

This book calls attention to – and gives a name to – a reality that millions of Americans are experiencing. I’m old enough to remember the large impact of a similar book, Michael Harrington’s The Other America. Jacob hacker’s book could end up having a similar impact. And this time the subject is not just people in poverty but all of us -- except the wealthy.

We already know that the trends that Hacker writes about are changing American politics. We stopped privatization primarily because average Americans made a judgment that they already have enough risk in their lives and didn’t need more in their retirement, than you very much.

Even more interesting is the growing public support for positive changes in our social insurance safety net. Hacker has advanced a plan for health care for all that would guarantee choice – of either traditional private insurance or a new Medicare-style system – while rapidly getting all Americans covered.

We at the Campaign For America’s Future have worked with Jacob to develop that proposal. And we’ve gotten valuable guidance from the public opinion research work of Celinda Lake and American Environics – under the auspices of the Herndon Alliance. We are working with other groups to stimulate a robust public debate. Our goal is to build a groundswell of support for this plan that is simple and understandable and comprehensive and affordable.

And that’s why we are delighted that the Economic Policy Institute has commissioned Hacker to produce a revised version of his plan for health care – and that it will be published in January with great fanfare as part of the launch of their new Agenda for Shared Prosperity project.

In an era of growing economic uncertainty – with more and more risk shifting on individuals and families – now is the time to be talking about a new social contract. Because – as Hacker eloquently argues – if we want an economy where people are free to take risks and create wealth – we need to make sure that people have more, not less, economic security.

Please join me in welcoming Jacob Hacker.