The Great-Society Welfare State and the Fiscal Crisis Ever since Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, chairman of the House Budget Committee, released his daring deficit-reduction plan in April, policymakers and policy experts have been touting “entitlement reform” as the key to controlling run-away federal spending. Even before the Republicans took control of the House of […]
Read MoreWhy Medicaid Reform Requires a Revival of Marriage That Medicaid is in crisis, few will dispute. Total Medicaid expenditures reached $373.9 billion in 2009 (15 percent of all national health expenditures), up dramatically from $200.5 billion in 2000, from $73.7 billion in 1990, and from just $26.0 billion in 1980.[1] Even appropriate adjustments for inflation […]
Read MoreRestoring the Family-Friendly Roots of Social Security When Rick Perry called Social Security a Ponzi scheme, the Republican presidential hopeful did himself few favors if he becomes the GOP nominee to challenge President Obama in 2012. At the same time, the Texas Governor may believe that his characterization of the relatively successful and popular social-insurance […]
Read MoreBecause of the negligence of many states in submitting vital statistics to the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), national reports of the number of marriages and divorces since the late 1990s have been based on incomplete state records. In an effort to obtain a more accurate accounting, the Census Bureau recently began including marital […]
Read MoreWhen American parents take on the burden of bearing and rearing a child, they deliver a huge dividend to society. So concludes a team of economists from Berkeley and Syracuse universities intent on assessing “the net fiscal externality to being a parent.” Through careful economic accounting, the researchers assess, on the one hand, the costs […]
Read MoreEvidence continues to mount that misguided public policy has played a key role in reducing American birthrates from their robust levels of the Baby Boom era. John D. Mueller makes the case in Redeeming Economics (2010) that Roe v. Wade triggered a dramatic drop in the Total Fertility Rate. Likewise, a study by University of […]
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Toward a Humanist Justice: The Political Philosophy of Susan Moller Okin Edited by Deborah Satz and Rob Reich Oxford University Press, 2009; 260 pages, $85.00 In that attractive but rather closed community known as American higher education, feminists own a lot of real estate. The small number of courses in “women’s studies” in the 1960s […]
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Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men Mara Hvistendahl Public Affairs, 2011; 314 pages, $26.99 This brave and timely book has many strengths and one glaring, but understandable, weakness. The strength of this book is the reporting. Mara Hvistendahl, a liberal, pro-choice feminist, painstakingly documents the catastrophic […]
Read MoreHow President Obama Executed a Campaign Pledge and What It Means for America When a lame-duck Congress voted last December to overturn a 1993 law, one passed by huge majorities of both houses of Congress and which unambiguously proscribed homosexual conduct as incompatible with military service, the repeal engendered a widespread reaction that the whole […]
Read MoreThe Disaster of No-Fault Divorce and Its Legacy of Cohabitation When Ronald Reagan signed the nation’s first No-Fault Divorce legis-lation as governor of California in 1969, little did he suspect that this policy innovation would lead not only to a dramatic increase in divorce rates but also a consequent plunge in marriage rates and a […]
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