Putting Trust in the U S Budget or The Education Gospel

Putting Trust in the U. S. Budget: Federal Trust Funds and the Politics of Commitment

Author: Eric M Patashnik

In the United States many important programs, such as Social Security and Medicare, are paid from trust funds. At a time when major social insurance funds are facing insolvency, this timely book provides the first comprehensive study of this significant yet little-studied feature of the American welfare state. Trust funds are at the heart of US budgeting and public social provision, and also raise a fundamental question of democratic politics: can current officeholders bind their successors? Through detailed case studies Patashnik shows how long term government commitments are effectively designed.

Table of Contents:

	List of figures
	List of tables
	Preface
1	Introduction: trust funds and the politics of commitment	1
2	Political transaction costs, feedback effects, and policy credibility	18
3	Trust fund taxes vs. general fund taxes	40
4	Social Security	63
5	Medicare	94
6	Highways	113
7	Airports	135
8	Superfund	154
9	Barriers to trust fund adoption: the failed cases of energy security and lead abatement	173
10	Conclusions: the structure and normative challenges of promise-keeping	188
	Bibliography	205
	Index	226

Books about: Freedom or The Puritan Dilemma

The Education Gospel: The Economic Power of Schooling

Author: W Norton Grubb

In this hard-hitting history of "the gospel of education," W. Norton Grubb and Marvin Lazerson reveal the allure, and the fallacy, of the longstanding American faith that more schooling for more people is the remedy for all our social and economic problems—and that the central purpose of education is workplace preparation.

But do increasing levels of education accurately represent the demands of today's jobs? Grubb and Lazerson argue that the abilities developed in schools and universities and the competencies required in work are often mismatched—since many Americans are under-educated for serious work while at least a third are over-educated for the jobs they hold. The ongoing race for personal advancement and the focus on worker preparation have squeezed out civic education and learning for its own sake. Paradoxically, the focus on schooling as a mechanism of equity has reinforced social inequality. The challenge now, the authors show, is to create environments for learning that incorporate both economic and civic goals, and to prevent the further descent of education into a preoccupation with narrow work skills and empty credentials.

Michael Duffy - Times Educational Supplement

This is a major work that is balanced, analytical, [and] accessible.

George Keller - Review of Higher Education

Every once in a rare while, a book appears that causes us to reassess much of what we believe in. It questions our basic beliefs and suggests that the allegedly wise persons among us may have no undergarments and be blind in one eye. This is such a volume. The Education Gospel is amiably written and forcefully argued...What Grubb and Lazerson have produced collaboratively is a provocative contrarian tract about schools, colleges, job training, and politics...This book is a powerful and salutary assault on educational evangelism, and a compassionate plea that meritocracy may have some new requirements for social justice.