From author Jacob Hacker, probably the best advice for the Democrats I’ve ever seen. From his new book (go read the whole excerpt):

The premise of The Great Risk Shift is that risk — more precisely, the growing economic insecurity faced by middle-class Americans — is the defining domestic issue of our time, one that increasingly lies at the heart of our nation’s polarized politics. It provides a powerful opportunity for Democrats to reclaim the political high ground as bold protectors of middle-class interests.

The big question is whether Democrats will seize the opportunity. President Bush gambled that Americans increasingly imbued with the ethos of self-reliance would embrace private Social Security accounts — and lost. He’s since placed individualized and market-based Health Savings Accounts at the center of his domestic agenda. Democrats know they’re against the Republican agenda. Yet they don’t really know what they’re for. Nor have they developed their own vision of the role of government. Instead, they’re mostly clinging to the programs of the past. Their rhetoric has often suggested, moreover, that they want to protect only those who’ve fallen on hard times, not those who are striving to get ahead. They’ve appealed to our hearts, not our heads — and many middle-class Americans aren’t on board.

The cornerstone of a powerful alternative vision is the simple idea that security is not at odds with helping people get ahead in a market economy; it is the key to doing so. Just as corporations enjoy limited liability and bankruptcy protection to encourage entrepreneurs to take risk, families need basic financial security to be encouraged to invest in good education, better jobs, strong parenting, and valuable assets like homes and retirement accounts—in short, in all the things that make upward mobility possible. Indeed, there’s a wealth of evidence that opportunity and security go hand in hand, that people with a basic safety net feel more confident and capable in stepping out on the shaky tightrope that our economy has increasingly become.

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Understanding this argument requires grasping how much our economy has changed. We all know instinctively that health insurance, pensions, jobs, and family finances have become less secure. But often we look at these issues in isolation, failing to see the big picture: a massive transfer of economic risk from the broad structures of insurance, both corporate and governmental, onto the fragile balance sheets of American families.

Using a unique dataset, I have discovered that the up-and-down swings of working-age Americans’ family incomes are now two to three times more violent than they were in the early 1970s. This “volatility” of income has risen far faster than inequality, and it means that Americans are plunging down the economic ladder much more often than in the past. In the early 1970s, the chance that a person with average demographic characteristics would experience a 50 percent or greater drop in income was around one in fourteen. In 2002, it was more than one in seven.