Story highlights Bernie Sanders won Tuesday's Democratic primary in Michigan

Jeffrey Sachs: Sanders is proposing much-needed public investments and lower health care costs

Jeffrey Sachs is director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He is a foreign policy adviser to Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. The views expressed are his own.

(CNN) Tuesday night's surprise result in Michigan showed that Americans are fed up with the status quo. While Hillary Clinton is offering little more than business as usual, voters in the state's Democratic primary ultimately backed Bernie Sanders' calls for much-needed public investments, lower health care costs and worker empowerment. Indeed, Tuesday night's results, coupled with Sanders' strong showing in other contests, reflect a simple reality: Americans want more than a continuation of the same game that Bill Clinton played 25 years ago, and that Obama has continued in his presidency.

The reality is that the United States faces three wrenching economic problems. The first is slow growth. This is no great mystery; the public sector has stopped investing even in the most basic infrastructure, like repairing roads, bridges, dams and waterways. It has not taken the lead in vitally needed low-carbon energy. The near-term infrastructure deficit is on the order of $3.6 trillion, according to the most recent estimates . With no clear investment signals from the public sector, private money sits on the sidelines. Net saving and investment rates have plummeted, and so, too, has long-term growth.

Jeffrey D. Sachs

The second is crippling health care costs. The United States spends around 18% of national income on health care , while our competitors in Europe and Asia spend 10% to 12%. The Institute of Medicine studied the problem carefully. The problem is inflated health care costs, huge administrative overheads and waste. Even the White House has noted that as a nation, we could save perhaps 5% of GDP in lower costs, around $900 billion per year, though it produced no realistic plan to achieve the savings.

The third is stagnant wages. This results from a 30-year assault on union power, international investment agreements that empower internationally mobile capital while hurting immobile labor, and technologies that substitute advanced technologies for traditional forms of work. The shocking fact is not the stagnation of wages; the shocking fact is that the government has stood by and done nothing about it for decades.

Hillary Clinton's answer to all this is the status quo, echoing the approach of both President Clinton and President Barack Obama: Talk about public investment, health costs and wage justice, but in fact do too little about them, instead keeping the alliance with Wall Street, accepting a strong limit on public-sector programs and promising to keep taxes low. Hillary Clinton has waffled on fracking, the now-defunct Keystone pipeline, and international investment agreements that undermine worker and environmental rights.

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