Although, I like the fact that Warren has devoted roughly the past (24) Years towards issues such as Bankruptcy Protection and Financial/Banking Sector Reform (and is a verifiable expert on these subjects), these issues are peripheral to me, simply because, like many working-class Americans, we don't have enough financial assets on the table to have a stake in the system, and bread and butter issues like minimum wage increases, cost of health insurance, a tax structure that is overwhelmingly geared towards the money bags at the top, while we get no pay raises.
Mind you, Warren's interest in Household Finance precedes her interest in Financial/Banking Sector Reform and defined her approach to Bankruptcy Protection as well. She began working on this issue with Jay Westbrook, her collaborator in
As We Forgive Our Debtors when she began teaching at UT Law in 1981. By the mid-1980s she was writing strong arguments against the conservative Law and Economics movement and its tendency to put theoretical economics over the empirical study of households and their situations. But the subject is highly personal for her as it ultimately derives from her childhood experience of her father's heart attack in 1961 and her mother's entry into the workforce. You can see this in her work throughout her career, like in
The Two Income Trap, where she points out that single income households have a reserve worker that can pick up the slack.
For Warren, the Household is the unit of the economy and its financial condition is the prism by which she examines the economy more broadly. The 2004 video of her explaining the mechanism of the 2008 financial crisis, you see her framing it in terms of Household Finance. And her policies are built around this frame as well. The biggest household expense is Housing, so she released an aggressive housing plan early. In addition to Healthcare, which already gets a lot of attention, Childcare and Education are huge expenses, and she released detailed plans on those early as well. On the income side? When asked why she's running for president she says because a single minimum wage job is not enough to support a family. This approach of focusing on the micro and personal and expanding out from there is her signature.
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