The Guarantee: Dispatches from the Front Lines of America’s Next Economy

With a foreword by Angela Garbes

From the president of the Economic Security Project, a book that shows how a just future is around the corner, if we are ready to seize it

The Guarantee asks us to imagine an America where housing, health care, a college education, dignified work, family care, an inheritance, and an income floor are not only attainable by all but guaranteed, by our government, for everyone.

But isn’t this pie-in-the-sky thinking? Not by a long shot, as this provocative new book reveals. As it stands, our current economic system is chock full of government-backed guarantees, from bailouts to bankruptcy protection, to keep the private sector in business. So why can’t the same be true for the rest of us?

Author Natalie Foster, co-founder (with Dorian Warren and Facebook’s Chris Hughes) of the Economic Security Project, has had a front-row seat to the dramatic leaps forward in government guarantees over the past decade, from student debt relief to the child tax credit expansion. Her brilliantly sketched vision for a new Guarantee Framework is rooted in real life experiences, collaborations with some of today’s most important activists and visionaries, and a concrete sense of the policies that are possible--and ready to implement--in twenty-first-century America.

The Guarantee is the rare book that will shift the terms of debate, moving us from the expired and defunct assumptions of no-guardrails capitalism to a nation that works for all of its people.

Natalie Foster is the president and co-founder of the Economic Security Project and a senior fellow at the Aspen Institute Future of Work Initiative. She has served as CEO and co-founder of Rebuild the Dream with Van Jones and as digital director for President Obama’s Organizing for America and the Democratic National Committee. The Guarantee: Dispatches from the Front Lines of America’s Next Economy (The New Press) is her first book. She lives in Oakland, California.