New America Foundation : article -1313- "White Collar Blues": "More balanced, full-spectrum private-sector development, including a more sophisticated approach to trade, immigration and growth controls, would reduce many of these risks. Imports from countries that don't maintain reasonable environmental or labor standards could be limited, for example, or legal immigration levels more strictly enforced. Yet America's two major political parties seem unable to escape their ideologies and consider policy alternatives that would help diversify the economy.
Democrats have largely abandoned their New Deal, pro-industrial political legacy in favor of an elite-dominated, anti-development sensibility. The powerful public-sector unions that now dominate the party have little incentive to expand the private sector, in no small measure because they disproportionately benefit from the accumulation of massive wealth in a small number of pockets.
Across the aisle, Republican economic thinking is increasingly shaped by what political commentator Michael Lind calls 'Southernomics' -- a primitive commodity capitalism inspired by 19th century industries like cotton and oil production. Its adherents are unlikely to be troubled by the expansion of a concentrated, aristocratic-style wealth distribution. The party's once vocal advocacy for entrepreneurial, egalitarian development is today rarely heard.
It may be that America's flexible labor force is enough to stimulate an unexpected creative breakthrough, reinvent the U.S. economy, replace the nation's dwindling supply of quality jobs and pay off the nation's huge public deficits. But it's just as likely that the next boom will be even more volatile and short-lived than the last one. If so, the pathologies latent in the U.S. economy may become even more entrenched and increasingly difficult to treat."