W hen Americans register to vote, they should be issued a credit card by a special public company– call it the Patriot card and color it red, white, and blue. This card will become the basis of campaign finance. Suppose each voter’s card were automatically credited with a $10 balance for the 1996 presidential election. […]
Article
Posted inHealth and Social Policy
Coming Unfringed: The Unraveling of Job-Based Entitlements
Health care, pensions, and other forms of social income should be rights of citizenship, not perks of increasingly unreliable jobs.
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
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” […]
Posted inHousing and Transportation
Cities in the New Global Economy
A lthough it has been eerily absent from the Clinton administration’s otherwise ambitious economic program, an urban economic crisis persists in America. As the economy continues to globalize, it helps to think of the urban economic question as having two parts: Do large central-city economies have competitive functions that will enable them to prosper, or […]
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 […]
Posted inBooks
Can Economists Save Economics?
Economics is what economists do. –Jacob Viner T he trouble with Professor Viner’s delicate evasion is that economists no longer agree about what they do, or even whether it is all worth doing. Critics outside the profession long faulted economists for a host of sins: their deductive method, their formalism, their over-reliance on arcane algebra, […]
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 inLaw and Justice
Race, Liberalism, Affirmative Action (III)
We continue the debate on the future of affirmative action in response to Paul Starr’s “Civil Reconstruction: What to Do Without Affirmative Action,” TAP, No.9. Winter 1992. D iscussion of the candidacies of Pat Buchanan and David Duke, even of the Los Angeles riots, have faded. But they should remain troubling. They are part of […]
Posted inHealth and Social Policy
Healthy Compromise: Universal Coverage and Managed Competition Under a Cap
A promising strategy emerges to break the impasse.
