In This Chapter

Chapter Outline

Public Policy Is Government Coercion

1. Public policy is an officially expressed intention backed by a sanction, which can be a reward or a punishment.
2. Public policy can be a law, a rule, a regulation, or an order. It can include a law passed by Congress, a presidential directive, a Supreme Court ruling, or a rule issued by a bureaucratic agency.

The Tools for Making Policy Are Techniques of Control

1. Promotional techniques, which can promote private activity through benefits, are the carrots of public policy. Promotional techniques can be classified into two categories: subsidies and contracts.
2. Regulatory techniques come in several forms—police regulation, administrative regulation, regulatory taxation, and expropriation—but share the common trait of direct government control of conduct.
3. Redistributive techniques usually take one of two forms—fiscal or monetary—but their common purpose is to control people by manipulating the entire economy rather than by regulating people directly.
4. The government’s spending power may be the most important fiscal technique since it can be used for policy goals beyond buying goods and services and regulating individual conduct.

Social Policy and the Welfare System Buttress Equality

1. Prior to 1935, the welfare system in America was composed of private groups rather than government.
2. The founding of the welfare state can be dated to the Social Security Act of 1935; this act provided for both contributory and noncontributory welfare programs.
3. Contributory programs—such as Social Security and unemployment compensation—provide “forced savings” for individuals who, as a consequence of making a contribution, can receive program benefits at a later time.
4. Noncontributory programs—such as food stamps and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF)—provide assistance to people based on demonstrated need rather than any contribution they may have made.
5. Spending on social policies, especially Social Security and Medicare, has increased dramatically in recent decades.

The Cycle of Poverty Can Be Broken by Education, Employment, Health, and Housing Policies

1. Education, employment, health, and housing policies are four ways to break the cycle of poverty and redistribute opportunities.
2. The education policies of state and local governments are the most important single force in the distribution and redistribution of opportunity in America.
3. Employment and job training programs have not been a consistent goal of the modern welfare state.
4. Although states also took the early lead in the arena of public health policy, the federal government began to adopt policies in the early 1900s to protect citizens from the effects of pollution and other health hazards.
5. Democrats won enactment of comprehensive health care reform in 2010, but the politics of health care reform continued to loom large in the 2010 congressional elections.
6. The central thrust of federal housing policy has been to promote home ownership. The federal government has traditionally done much less to provide housing for low-income Americans who cannot afford to buy homes.

Social Policy Spending Benefits the Middle Class More Than the Poor

1. The elderly are the beneficiaries of generous social policies in part because they are perceived as being a deserving population and because they have become a strong interest group.
2. The middle class benefits from social policies in many ways; one way is through the use of tax expenditures, which provide that the government does not tax certain payments made by employers and employees.
3. People who are working but are still poor receive limited assistance from government social programs. Although they may be seen as deserving, they receive only limited assistance because they lack organization and political power.
4. Medicaid and TANF are programs aimed at the able-bodied, nonworking poor, but they receive assistance only if they are supporting children. The unpopularity of such programs has prompted efforts to decrease spending in recent years.
5. Minorities, women, and children are disproportionately poor. Much of this poverty is the result of disadvantages rooted in the position of these groups in the labor market.