An inside look at the 2020 Census that shows the importance of state and local cooperation in the complex federal project of census taking.The census plays a foundational, if all too easily ignored, role in the operation of the American state, shaping everything from congressional representation to the allocation of trillions of federal dollars. While census taking aspires to the high-modernist goal of “seeing like a state”—centralizing, standardizing, and homogenizing kno...

Leading political scientists analyze the presidency of Donald Trump and its impact on the future of American politicsIn virtually all respects, the Trump presidency has disrupted patterns of presidential governance. However, does Trump signify a disruption, not merely in political style but in regime type in the United States? Assessing Trump's potential impact on democratic institutions requires an analysis of how these institutions—including especially the execut...

Leading political scientists analyze the presidency of Donald Trump and its impact on the future of American politicsIn virtually all respects, the Trump presidency has disrupted patterns of presidential governance. However, does Trump signify a disruption, not merely in political style but in regime type in the United States? Assessing Trump's potential impact on democratic institutions requires an analysis of how these institutions—including especially the execut...

Not five minutes after the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was signed into law, in March 2010, Virginia’s attorney general was suing to stop it. And yet, the ACA rolled out, in infamously bumpy fashion, and rolled on, fought and defended at every turn—despite President Obama’s claim, in 2014, that its proponents and opponents could finally “stop fighting old political battles that keep us gridlocked.” But not only would the battles not stop, as Obamacare Wars makes acutely clear, they s...

From the author of Aftershock and The Work of Nations, his most important book to date—a myth-shattering breakdown of how the economic system that helped make America so strong is now failing us, and what it will take to fix it.Perhaps no one is better acquainted with the intersection of economics and politics than Robert B. Reich, and now he reveals how power and influence have created a new American oligarchy, a shrinking middle class, and the greatest income in...

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act signed by President Obama in March 2010 is a landmark in U.S. social legislation, and the Supreme Court's recent decision upholding the Act has ensured that it will remain the law of the land. The new law extends health insurance to nearly all Americans, fulfilling a century-long quest and bringing the United States to parity with other industrial nations. Affordable Care aims to control rapidly rising health care costs and promises to make th...

America is mired in debt—more than $30,000 for every man, woman, and child. Bitter fighting over deficits, taxes, and spending bedevils Washington, D.C., even as partisan gridlock has brought the government to the brink of default. Yet the more politicians on both sides of the aisle rant and the citizenry fumes, the more things seem to remain the same.In White House Burning, Simon Johnson and James Kwak—authors of the national best seller 13 Bankers and cofounders...

"Keep your government hands off my Medicare!" Such comments spotlight a central question animating Suzanne Mettler's provocative and timely book: why are many Americans unaware of government social benefits and so hostile to them in principle, even though they receive them? The Obama administration has been roundly criticized for its inability to convey how much it has accomplished for ordinary citizens. Mettler argues that this difficulty is not merely a failure of communication; rather i...

Why the United States has developed an economy divided between rich and poor—and how racism helped bring this about.The United States is becoming a nation of rich and poor, with few families in the middle. In this book, MIT economist Peter Temin offers an illuminating way to look at the vanishing middle class. Temin argues that American history and politics, particularly slavery and its aftermath, play an important part in the widening gap between rich and poor. Te...

As the US wrestles with its growing fiscal crisis, Northern Light examines what lessons Americans and their political leaders might draw from how Canada in the 1990s slew its deficit dragon, balanced the budget, fixed public pensions and social welfare and in so doing helped forge a national consensus in favour of responsible public finances that endures to this day.

A concise introduction to the ways in which the world's federations manage their finances. Topics covered include the distribution of taxation powers among different levels of government; regional equalization schemes; authority over natural resource revenues; and the impact of federal systems of government on pension, welfare, and income assistance programs. The book targets second-, third-, and fourth-year courses in Federalism and Comparative Politics at the university level, and will also...

A passionate, articulate argument detailing how the United States political system has failed to adapt to the economic challenges of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.The American economy is in peril. It has fallen hostage to a casino of financial speculation, creating instability as well as inequality. Tens of millions of workers are vulnerable to layoffs and outsourcing, health care and retirement burdens are increasingly being shifted from employers to individuals. Here Kut...