They call themselves conservatives but that’s not it, either. They don’t want to conserve what we now have. They’d rather take the country backwards – before the 1960s and 1970s, and the Environmental Protection Act, Medicare, and Medicaid; before the New Deal, and its provision for Social Security, unemployment insurance, the forty-hour workweek, and official recognition of trade unions; even before the Progressive Era, and the first national income tax, antitrust laws, and Federal Reserve. They’re not conservatives. They’re regressives. And the America they seek is the one we had in the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century.

In 2003 he was elected the Professor of the Year by the undergraduate student body. In 2008 Time Magazine named him one of the Ten Best Cabinet Members of the century and The Wall Street Journal in 2008 placed him sixth on its list of the "Most Influential Business Thinkers". In it Reich explained how America's widening inequality had contributed to the great recession and made it difficult for the economy to recover by undermining the purchasing power of the middle class relative to the nation's productive capacity.

He has also been a contributing editor of The New Republic The American Prospect (also chairman and founding editor) Harvard Business Review The Atlantic The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. The Robert Reich - Jacob Kornbluth film "Inequality for All" won a U. Reich is a political commentator on programs including Hardball with Chris Matthews This Week with George Stephanopoulos CNBC's Kudlow & Company and APM's Marketplace.