Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Can America Govern Itself?: Deficits, Debt, And Delay, Ron Haskins

Brookings Scholar Lecture Series

America has now been in the throes of a deficit and debt crisis for nearly a decade. Over the last three years, the federal government has tied itself in knots trying to reach a long-term solution. Any effective solution will involve tax increases and entitlement cuts. But both parties have been unwilling to openly bargain about either the tax increases or spending cuts they are willing to consider as part of a grand bargain. Why are both parties being so intransigent? What are the prospects for a grand bargain and what might it look like? What are the consequences if …

Voice Without Say: Why Capital-Managed Firms Aren’T (Genuinely) Participatory, Justin Schwartz

Justin Schwartz

Why are most capitalist enterprises of any size organized as authoritarian bureaucracies rather than incorporating genuine employee participation that would give the workers real authority? Even firms with employee participation programs leave virtually all decision-making power in the hands of management. The standard answer is that hierarchy is more economically efficient than any sort of genuine participation, so that participatory firms would be less productive and lose out to more traditional competitors. This answer is indefensible. After surveying the history, legal status, and varieties of employee participation, I examine and reject as question-begging the argument that the rarity of genuine …

Devolution: The Retreat Of Government, Judith Kurland

New England Journal of Public Policy

Devolution as practiced in much of the world is decentralization of program authority and responsibility to achieve greater administrative efficiency or program standards. Devolution as practiced by the Bush administration and the Republican Congress is not that, nor is it a diminution of federal power and the strengthening of states’ rights. Rather, it is a radical restructuring of government to prevent the expenditure of funds for traditional Democratic programs of the New Deal and the Great Society, and to prohibit states from being either more generous in social programs or more stringent in regulating industry than this administration desires.

This …