In recent weeks, talk of a Green New Deal has moved to the center of our political debate. The Green New Deal aims to address climate change by tackling the underlying socioeconomic inequities that gave rise to the crisis. It calls for overhauling the country’s transportation system, providing universal healthcare, creating a federal jobs guarantee, investing in infrastructure, and other goals.
This ambition echoes the scope of the original New Deal, another wide-ranging political program that was born out of crisis. In the 1930s, President Roosevelt and his allies used the shock of the Great Depression to transform the relationship between government and citizen through a series of reforms addressing the injustices at the heart of the economic crisis.
Today, the US is in the midst of another crisis, one larger than the Great Depression, larger even than climate change. It is a crisis of health. The US spends more on health than any other country in the world, yet our health is consistently mediocre compared to our peer countries.
Read the full piece at Fortune.