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In this new global economy, Reich writes, it matters little whether a company is based in London or Los Angeles. A Honda built in Ohio may have more "domestic content" than an Oldsmobile. The only policy that will benefit all Americans, Reich writes, is for Washington to "invest" in the two assets that won't leave the country: "human capital," such as education and job training; and physical infrastructure, from roads and bridges to high-speed railroads and fiber-optic communications. Such public investments, Reich argues, will encourage both U.S. and foreign firms to create jobs in America. How would Reich finance these expensive new investments? By raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans and cutting defense spending.
These themes are familiar, of course, to anyone who heard even a snatch of a Clinton campaign speech. While other economic advisers, particularly Robert Shapiro of the Progressive Policy Institute and corporate consultant Ira Magaziner, contributed heavily to the lyrics of the Clinton economic plan, most agree that the music came straight from Reich. Says John Isaacson, founder of an executive-search firm in Boston, and a friend of both Clinton's and Reich's: "The Work of Nations provided a conceptual framework for the whole campaign." Gene Sperling, economic-issues director for the campaign (and a former research assistant for Reich), goes further: "Bob is the person most responsible for how progressive Democrats talk about economic growth today."
Reich attracts both admirers and critics across the political spectrum. Andrew Kopkind writes in The Nation that the Reich-Clinton plan "does not touch the problem of a powerless, alienated and potentially disruptive work force." Conservatives, meanwhile, see Reich's call for more federal "investment" in education and infrastructure as merely an attractive new label for a bigger, more wasteful, more intrusive bureaucracy. Milton Friedman, the Nobel-prizewinning economist, predicts that the Reich-Clinton program "would destroy far more productive jobs than it would create, because it relies on more government spending and taxing." Jim Pinkerton, an iconoclastic Republican thinker who until recently worked in the Bush campaign and White House, says, "I agree with three-fourths of what Reich writes." But Pinkerton doubts that simply throwing more money at poorly run public schools will produce results, when neither Clinton nor Reich has embraced market-oriented reforms such as school vouchers.
The Reich-Clinton plan would also throw billions of dollars at new public- works projects without persuasively describing how it would keep the money from being wasted by lawmakers such as Senate Appropriations chairman Robert Byrd, who has made it his mission in life to pave his home state of West Virginia with federal office buildings and roads. Reich holds that "there is nothing wrong with being indebted so long as the borrowings are invested in means of enhancing our future wealth." But he agrees that some way must be found to "guard against pork-barrel spending."