T he passage of President Clinton’s budget, marked by its one-half trillion in deficit reduction, is already restoring respect for the administration. Clinton will be tempted to move on to other issues. The urgent need to make good on health care reform and the generally sour nature of budget discussions will add to this impulse. […]
Economic Policy
Posted inEconomic Policy
Ending Welfare Reform as We Know It
Liberals who embrace welfare reform have conceded too much of the argument to the right. The main problem is not lazy, shiftless welfare mothers; it’s the collapse of the lower middle-class economy.
Posted inEconomic Policy
The House That Crack Built: The Inmates of Clark County Jail
T here’s a lot of talk about Crack these days but not much about the house that Crack lives in. So we the inmates of the Clark County Jail will take you on a tour of the Crack House himself. So come on up here on the porch of this old house, it sure ain’t […]
Posted inEconomic Policy
What Works: Applying What We Already Know About Successful Social Policy
Three decades of anti-poverty policy have shed much light on the best strategies for helping families.
Posted inEconomic Policy
Liberals and Public Investment: Recovering a Lost Legacy
T he emerging debate over the efficacy of public investment– a debate the Clinton administration seems certain to accelerate– has a familiar ring to anyone acquainted with the history of the 1930s and 1940s. Among the staples of economic discourse then were warnings that the United States was suffering from what many called “economic maturity” […]
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Saving Disgrace? More on Savings
F red Block and Robert Heilbroner, in “The Myth of a Savings Shortage” (TAP, Spring 1992), want to persuade us that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, there is no scarcity of savings in the U.S. economy today. They say that the present national savings rate is as high as ever; that it plays no depressing […]
Posted inEconomic Policy
Saving Disgrace? More on Savings
F red Block and Robert Heilbroner, in “The Myth of a Savings Shortage” (TAP, Spring 1992), want to persuade us that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, there is no scarcity of savings in the U.S. economy today. They say that the present national savings rate is as high as ever; that it plays no depressing […]
Posted inEconomic Policy
Who’s Bashing Tyson?
L aura D’Andrea Tyson’s appointment to chair the Council of Economic Advisers received savage treatment from some of her professional colleagues. According to Peter Passell of the New York Times, “jaws dropped” in academe at the announcement. Passell went on to describe Tyson as “trendy” and a “polemicist.” And the addition of Princeton’s Alan Blinder […]
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The Politics of Repudiation 1992: Edging Toward Upheaval
Not a major realignment, but ominous rumblings.
Posted inEconomic Policy
Avoiding a Fiscal Dunkirk
A more progressive tax code is an essential part of any new economic plan.