Unemployment in the United States is currently at a historical low, just 3.5 percent — and we’re achieving that low unemployment without any sign of runaway inflation, which tells us that we were capable of this kind of performance all along. Remember when people like Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, told us that high unemployment was inevitable because of a “skills gap”? They were wrong.

But it took us a very long time to get here, because unemployment receded only slowly from its post-crisis peak. The average unemployment rate over the past decade was 6.3 percent, which translates into millions of person-years of gratuitous joblessness.

Why didn’t we recover faster? The most important reason was fiscal austerity — spending cuts, supposedly to reduce the budget deficit, that exerted a steady drag on the economy from 2010 onward. But who was obsessed with budget deficits? Voters in general weren’t — but surveys indicate that even when the unemployment rate was above 8 percent the wealthy considered budget deficits a bigger problem than lack of jobs.

And the news media echoed these priorities, treating them not as the preferences of one small group of voters but as the only responsible position. As Vox’s Ezra Klein noted at the time, when it came to budget deficits it seemed that “the usual rules of reportorial neutrality” didn’t apply; reporters openly advocated policy views that were at best controversial, not widely shared by the general public and, we now know, substantively wrong.

But they were the policy views of the wealthy. And when it comes to treatment of differing policy views, the media often treats some Americans as more equal than others.

Which brings me back to the 2020 campaign. You may disagree with progressive ideas coming from Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, which is fine. But the news media owes the public a serious discussion of these ideas, not dismissal shaped by a combination of reflexive “centrist bias” and the conscious or unconscious assumption that any policy rich people dislike must be irresponsible.

And when candidates talk about the excessive influence of the wealthy, that subject also deserves serious discussion, not the cheap shots we’ve been seeing lately. I know that this kind of discussion makes many journalists uncomfortable. That’s exactly why we need to have it.

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