What has America done to protect its citizens from life-changing but common risks such as death of a family breadwinner, ill health, disability, involuntary unemployment, outliving retirement savings, and birth into a poor family? Each, in its own way, burdens—and possibly devastates—unlucky individuals and families both emotionally and financially. It is the rare life that is untouched by one or more of these six threats. How do our current policies affect taxation, spending, and the economy, as well as prospects for individual lives? What more might these policies do to protect Americans?
Rich in stories, data, and analysis, Social Insurance provides a strong intellectual foundation for understanding the history, economics, politics, and philosophy of America’s most important social insurance programs. This insightful work provides a unifying vision of these programs’ purposes and reminds us, amidst the confusing and often apocalyptic rhetoric, why we have the programs and policies we do, while arguing for reforms that preserve and enhance the protections in place.
Table of Content
Part 1: American Social Insurance1. Economic Risks and Social Insurance Realities
2. Assessment of the Six Threats to Family Income
3. Philosophies, Policies and Public Budgets
4. The Historical Development of American Social Insurance and its Associated Programs
Part II: The State of American Protections Against the Threats
5. The Threat of Birth into a Poor Family
6. The Threat of Early Death of a Family Breadwinner
7. The Threat of Ill-Health
8. The Threat of Involuntary Employment
9. The Threat of Disability
10. The Threat of Outliving One’s Savings
Part III: Thinking About the Design of Income Security Programs and Their Reform
11. Accomplishments and Limitations
12. Social Insurance, Markets and “Modernization”
About the author
Jerry L. Mashaw, Sterling Professor of Law at Yale Law School, teaches courses on administrative law, social welfare policy, regulation, legislation, and the design of public institutions. His books include Administrative Law: Introduction to the American Public Law System, Sixth Edition (with Richard Merrill and Peter Shane, 2009); Bureaucratic Justice (1983), awarded Harvard University’s Gerard Henderson Memorial Prize in 1993; The Struggle for Auto Safety (with David Harfst, 1990), awarded the Sixth Annual Scholarship Prize of the ABA’s Section on Administrative Law and Regulatory Policy in 1992; and Greed, Chaos, and Governance: Using Public Choice to Improve Public Law (1997), awarded the ABA’s Section’s Twelfth Annual Scholarship Prize in 1998 and the Order of the Coif Triennial Book Award in 2002. He is a frequent contributor to legal and public policy journals, newspapers, and news magazines. Professor Mashaw is a founding member and past President of the National Academy of Social Insurance.More ebooks from the same author(s) / Editor
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