Budget Issues in the U.S.

In the political forum of the United States, budgetary issues and welfare reform have emerged as possibly the two most important public policy issues of the 1990s. In part this is a matter of prominence-by-default. With the end of the Cold War, defense issues no longer take on the life/death urgency that potential nuclear holocaust impressed upon the electoral imagination for over four decades. Yet, since the devastating recession of the late 1970s/early 1980s, Americans have been deeply concerned with budgetary issues such as deficit spending and the national debt. In casting about for the vocabulary with which to address those concerns, America's body politic has tried on a number of "suits": i.e., pure economics as a solution ("Supply-Side" Theory); free trade v. protectionism (GATT and NAFTA v. Buchanan and Perot); tax reform (and its corollary, the "flat" tax); and social reform. As a matter of capturing the public imagination, there is no doubt that issues such as welfare, affirmative action, and health care hit home with the electorate far more effectively than economic subjects involving pricing ratios, percentages, and other such technical arcana. No issue is more easy to identify - and concurrently vilify or sanctify - than welfare. It will be the goal of this brief paper to identify how welfare reform fits into the larger subject of budgetary public policy issues - and to provide an overview of the players, the political environment, the policy choices and

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, "federal spending on the program most people refer to as welfare - Aid to Families with Dependent Children - amounts to less than 1 percent of the federal budget" (Burns 2). The OMB estimates that health care entitlements are expected to grow at a combined 10 percent rate this year, compared to the 2 percent growth in the rest of the budget (Rubenstein 18). Nevertheless, in the recent Republican-sponsored welfare reform bill signed by President Bill Clinton prior to the national elections, the entitlement aspects of the issue were glossed-over in favor of tightened controls on those programs servicing the poor. This is despite the fact that low-income-oriented programs have minimal impact on the federal budget deficit. Yet, as the presidential campaign wound to its close in the first week of November, both Clinton and challenger Bob Dole hailed the welfare reform bill as a major step toward a balanced budget (Cohen 44). The passage of this welfare reform bill, which Clinton promised he will "work on with Congress" during his next term to alleviate some of the funding that was cut (Dentzer 50), provides a very clear picture of the partisan and ill-defined context in which the issue is debated. During one phase of debat

Category: Government - B