Talking About the Tool Kit

Introduction

One of the great pleasure of living in a DVD world is that home entertainment always comes now with "bonus features". This book certainly does. - two kinds of bonus features at least. Here you will find, organized on a chapter-by-chapter basis to parallel the book, a guide to sources and further reading. You will also find an update on the politics of each chapter's central issue. The idea is to put at your disposal both a full route to your own examination of the arguments developed in A LIBERAL TOOL KIT, and the very latest information on how those arguments are playing out in policy-making circles in Washington DC. This blog-site exists to enhance the value of the book, by acting as a gateway for its readers to the rich scholarship available on each and every major policy issue now in contention, and by linking the arguments surveyed in the book to the latest political developments at the national level.

The updating will come first, the discussion of original source material second. I hope it helps.

UPDATING SOURCES AND ISSUES (June 1 to November 5, 2008)

This is the last of two updates to the original sources and issues used in A Liberal Tool Kit. The other, bringing the data and sources up to June 2008, can be read by scrolling down the blog. The original sources are also listed at the very end of the blog.

Successful progressive politics is always a matter of stages. Stage 1 is to persuade enough people to vote for progressive politicians and policies as to shift leadership from conservative to liberal hands. Stage 2 is to use that power, once gained, to make progressive thought once more the common sense of the age and progressive policies the agenda of modern politics.

When A Liberal Tool Kit was initially drafted, both stages seemed well out of reach: but no longer. The fusion of a remarkable political campaign, an unprecedented financial crisis and a prolonged and unpopular war propelled Barack Obama into the Presidency in November 2008. The election of the first African-American President was significant enough. The fact that the election marked a rejection of Republican conservatism merely makes his elevation all the sweeter. Across virtually the entirety of this country, electors turned to the Democratic Party, a party led – as we were regularly told by his opponents – by the Senate’s most liberal member. Stage 1, therefore, is well and truly behind us.

The politics of Stage 2 now await us. For when the normal honeymoon period for an incoming President is over, the clash of progressive and conservative ideas will begin again – and perhaps even with greater ferocity, given that this time the conservative think tanks, radio hosts and bloggers have no administration to defend. Indeed to some degree the clash has already begun, with right-wing commentators and conservative think tanks already urging the incoming President to think small and to act slowly. It will not be long before the failures of the previous administration are laid firmly at Obama’s door. It will not be long before Americans hear again the full gambit of conservative positions on taxes and public spending, health care reform and welfare cut backs, liberal judges and immigration walls. The Obama space for progressive space for progressive politics will need to be argued for and defended. Backsliding by an overburdened administration will need to be resisted; and the wilder nonsenses of right-wing radio hosts will need to be punctured again.

A second edition of A Liberal Tool Kit is planned for 2009, precisely to play its own small role in that vital defense of the progressive cause. With the second edition will come a new blog-site. What follows here simply brings the issues and the sources up to date to the end of the Bush Presidency. Transition issues will occupy Washington for the next 75 days: but that transition will now begin against the background of a financial crisis that, for the moment at least, entirely discredited the case for trickle down economics, market deregulation and the privatization of social security and health care.

Chapter 1: A Call to Arms

Among the latest books making the general liberal/progressive case, see in particular John Podesta, The Power of Progress (Crown 2008); Eric Alterman, Why We’re Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America; and Daniel Kurtzman, How To Win A Fight With A Conservative (Sourcebooks Inc, 2007). There is also an intriguing book on framing issues, focused on famous Presidential speeches: Jeffrey Feldman, Framing the Debate (IG Publishing, 2007).

Chapter 2: Clearing the Decks

The big problem that the Republican base and its media acolytes had in the second half of 2008 was that the standard-bearer of the Republican Party was someone whose candidacy they had systematically opposed in the first half of the year. “Will Conservatives Sit Out -08” was Rush Limbaugh’s question for his radio audience on January 8. Possibly – Rush Limbaugh certainly saw the choice facing the Republicans in 2008 as a search for the candidate who they disliked least: and for Limbaugh that was not John McCain. In his view, a McCain or a Huckabee victory would “destroy the Republican Party…change it forever…a lot of people aren’t going to vote” (January 15 2008). There were even conservative voices anticipating as early as January 8 the possibility of a McCain candidacy and a McCain defeat: and seeing in that defeat a cleansing moment for the Republican Party – the end of big-government conservatism (John Samples, writing in The Baltimore Sun). Rush Limbaugh was equally pessimistic: “if nominated, McCain will lose” (January 17).

McCain was nominated, of course, and eventually the Republican base embraced him, if reluctantly. What they greeted with greater pleasure was his selection of Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. That brought James Dobson on board. It brought Limbaugh fully on board too – and now with enthusiasm. Limbaugh saw in her – and in the mysterious Joe Plumber who briefly surfaced during the campaign as the authentic voice of conservative America – someone genuinely worth campaigning for: her experience, her values, her anti-corruption stance, her maverick status, her debating skills, even her ordinariness. He also famously liked her legs.

It was not enough, of course. The McCain-Palin ticket went down to defeat: but in the campaign’s last days Rush Limbaugh found themes that now frame his commentary on the incoming Obama administration. The bailout of the financial system was now labeled as socialism; and the recession created on George bush’s watch was redefined as “Obama’s recession”. FDR was not hailed as America’s inter-war savior. He was redefined as a president who turned recession into Depression – an amazing claim – one designed to sustain an argument that tax cuts and government spending limits are the keys to recovery. The housing crisis was laid at the door of the politically-driven Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac, occasionally amplified by the new pressures on the housing stock linked to illegal immigration. Obama was variously labeled by conservative commentators during the campaign as a Marxist, a Muslim, even a terrorist: or if not that, then at least someone who, in Sarah Palin’s much quoted phrase, ‘palled around’ with terrorists. There were even times when he stood condemned both for his Christian pastor 9Jeremiah Wright) and for his secret Muslim faith! His plan to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay was labeled “a terrorist bail out”; and Obama himself often referred to by Rush Limbaugh as either “Barry” or ‘the Messiah”.

For the conservative right, an Obama victory means that the inmates are now taking over the asylum. When Republican moderates endorsed him – as Colin Powell did – they were dismissed as poor conservatives: good riddance to them. (Limbaugh, October 24 2008). For “conservatism did not lose last night”, Limbaugh told his listeners on November 5^th. “Conservatism was not on the ballot.” To his mind, the conservative movement was still alive and well, with Rush Limbaugh as its self-appointed leader. This was Rush a month earlier, in a segment of its radio program ironically titled ‘America in 2008: Socialism Saves Us”

‘So here we are in America in 2008. We have mostly free prescription drugs for the elderly. We have nationalized a big chunk of local and public education. We are probably and eventually going to grant 12 to 20 million illegal immigrants full citizenship. Now we are in the process of nationalizing the financial and housing markets in ways that we cannot even know right now – and all of this, we are told (laughing) will save America (laughing). Folks, you just have to laugh out there.”

Genuinely, for him, a world turned upside down.

Chapter 3: The Wonders of “Trickle Down” Economics

The third quarter of 2008 (i.e. before the financial meltdown) the dominant questions being discussed in economic circles were the impact of the stimulus package and the likely tax consequences of the programs being proposed by John McCain and Barack Obama. On the first, the evidence seemed clear that the trickle-up stimulus had worked: helping the US economy grow by 1.9% in the second quarter, but that it was now threatened by the exploding price of oil and food: especially oil. On the second, the general view seemed to be that ironically it was John McCain who was likely to add most to the federal deficit, because of his commitment to the retention of the Bush tax cuts. Conservative commentators remained highly critical throughout the campaign about both the viability and desirability of Obama’s promise to cut taxes for 95% of American workers. (See, for example, Rea S. Hederman and Patrick Tyrrell, European Levels of Taxation: Barack Obama’s Tax Plan, Heritage Foundation Webmemo 1973, June 26 2008; Peter Ferrera, “Obama’s New Tax Welfare”, http://national review.com, October 21 2008; or William Beach et al, The Obama and McCain Tax Plans: How do they compare Heritage Foundation Report, October 15 2008). Liberal commentators saw in the Obama plan a clear rejection of trickle-down economics. See, for example, Robert Reich, “The Real Economic Choice,” The American Prospect, September 2008, p.52

From September on, of course, public discussion largely focused on the financial crisis (on which, more below), overshadowing the publication of a number of valuable reports on longer term trends in income distribution and stability. See for example, the upbeat report on labor market trends from the Heritage Foundation: James Sherk, A Good Job Is Not So Hard To Find (June 17, 2008); or by contrast the EPI publication by Christian Weller and Amanda Logan, America’s Middle Class Still Losing Ground (July 2008); or Jacob Hacker and Elisabeth Jacobs, The Rising Instability of American Family Incomes 1969-2004 (May 29 2008). The claims of each need to be set against the unemployment figures: 1.2 million jobs lost in 2008, and a 14 year high unemployment rate of 6.5%. Real earnings for full-time working men rose from 2006-7 by 3.8% and for women by 5.0% - reversing years of decline but still leaving median income below its 2001 level.

For an overview of inequality during the Bush years, see John Cavanagh and Chuck Collins, The New Inequality: the Rich and the Rest of Us (The Nation, June 30 2008).

The Obama-Biden web site had this to say on taxes and the economy

Obama’s Comprehensive Tax Policy Plan for America will:

• Cut taxes for 95 percent of workers and their families with a tax cut of $500 for workers or $1,000 for working couples.
• Provide generous tax cuts for low- and middle-income seniors, homeowners, the uninsured, and families sending a child to college or looking to save and accumulate wealth.
• Eliminate capital gains taxes for small businesses, cut corporate taxes for firms that invest and create jobs in the United States, and provide tax credits to reduce the cost of healthcare and to reward investments in innovation.
• Dramatically simplify taxes by consolidating existing tax credits, eliminating the need for millions of senior citizens to file tax forms, and enabling as many as 40 million middle-class Americans to do their own taxes in less than five minutes without an accountant.

Under the Obama Plan:

• Middle class families will see their taxes cut – and no family making less than $250,000 will see their taxes increase. The typical middle class family will receive well over $1,000 in tax relief under the Obama plan, and will pay tax rates that are 20% lower than they faced under President Reagan. According to the Tax Policy Center, the Obama plan provides three times as much tax relief for middle class families as the McCain plan.
• Families making more than $250,000 will pay either the same or lower tax rates than they paid in the 1990s. Obama will ask the wealthiest 2% of families to give back a portion of the tax cuts they have received over the past eight years to ensure we are restoring fairness and returning to fiscal responsibility. But no family will pay higher tax rates than they would have paid in the 1990s. In fact, dividend rates would be 39 percent lower than what President Bush proposed in his 2001 tax cut.
• Obama’s plan will cut taxes overall, reducing revenues to below the levels that prevailed under Ronald Reagan (less than 18.2 percent of GDP). The Obama tax plan is a net tax cut – his tax relief for middle class families is larger than the revenue raised by his tax changes for families over $250,000. Coupled with his commitment to cut unnecessary spending, Obama will pay for this tax relief while bringing down the budget deficit.

Chapter 4: Cutting “Welfare” to Help the Poor

The 2007 census data showed poverty up in America between 2000 and 2007: the rate up from 11.3& to 12.5%, the number up by 5.7 million – and that before the additional 1.2 million job losses and the financial meltdown of 2008. (The poverty rate rose 2001-4 and fell 2005-6). This, in a year (2007) in which the gap between a median CEO’s salary and that of the typical worker had widened to 194:1! (For the data, see pp. 220-223 of the latest EPI report, The State of Working America.) The data for 2008, when it comes, is likely to be even more somber on poverty: though maybe the financial meltdown may bring down average CEO salaries a tad.

The 2007 US Census Bureau report on Income, Earnings and Poverty data from the 2007 American community survey had US median family income in 2007 as $50,740. The median in white households was $55.096; in black households $34,001 and in Hispanic households $40,766. The 2006 figure for US median household income had been $49,807: so a rise in money terms of 3.7% in a year when the official inflation rate was 2.8%. The EPI issued a report in October 2008, What We Need To Get By. They reckoned that on average we needed $48,778 for a basic standard of living for a family of four; and that one-third of all families lacked that purchasing capacity. Certainly the economic gains made by African-American families in the 1990s were entirely reversed 2000-2007 (this, in a report of that title, prepared for the EPI by Algernon Austin, published September 18 2008). Similarly pessimistic reports on wealth levels and wealth retention are evident in the report prepared for the Center for American Progress by Dalton Conley and Rebecca Gauber, Wealth Mobility and Volatility in Black and White, July 2008).

The Brookings Institute made a strong push to increase the Earned Income Tax Credit, as part of their program on urban renewal. See for example their May 2008 paper (by Alan Berube and colleagues), Metro Raise: Boosting the Earned Income Tax Credit to Help Metropolitan Workers and their Families. Even the conservative National Center for Policy Analysis got into the act, with a paper on the high rates of marginal tax paid by people leaving welfare to work: Laurence Kotlikoff and David Rapson, Does It Pay to Work More? (NCPA Policy Report 310). This well-known ‘welfare trap’ problem, and its differential impact on different ethnic groups within the US welfare-poor, was also carefully analyzed – for Florida – in an importance article by Sanford Schram and colleagues, “Neo-liberal poverty governance: race, place and the punitive turn in US welfare policy”, Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, volume 1(1) April 2008. For the argument that minimum wages are not the best policy weapon in an anti-poverty program, see David Neumark and William L. Wascher, Minimum Wages (UMI, 2008). For the argument that investment in education and training is, see James J. Heckman and Alan B. Krueger, Inequality in America: What Role for Human Capital Policies (Trilateral, 2005)

The Obama-Biden website had a lot to say about how they intend to reduce poverty. This

Barack Obama and Joe Biden's Plan

Expand Access to Jobs

• Help Americans Grab a Hold of and Climb the Job Ladder: Obama and Biden will invest $1 billion over five years in transitional jobs and career pathway programs that implement proven methods of helping low-income Americans succeed in the workforce.
• Create a Green Jobs Corps: Obama and Biden will create a program to directly engage disadvantaged youth in energy efficiency opportunities to strengthen their communities, while also providing them with practical skills in this important high-growth career field.
• Improve Transportation Access to Jobs: As president, Obama will work to ensure that low-income Americans have transportation access to jobs. Obama will double funding for the federal Jobs Access and Reverse Commute program to ensure that additional federal public transportation dollars flow to the highest-need communities and that urban planning initiatives take this aspect of transportation policy into account.
• Reduce Crime Recidivism by Providing Ex-Offender Supports: Obama and Biden will work to ensure that ex-offenders have access to job training, substance abuse and mental health counseling, and employment opportunities. Obama and Biden will also create a prison-to-work incentive program and reduce barriers to employment.

Make Work Pay for All Americans

• Expand the Earned Income Tax Credit: Obama and Biden will increase the number of working parents eligible for EITC benefits, increase the benefits available to parents who support their children through child support payments, increase benefits for families with three or more children, and reduce the EITC marriage penalty, which hurts low-income families.
• Raise the Minimum Wage to $9.50 an Hour by 2011: Barack Obama and Joe Biden believe that people who work full time should not live in poverty. Even though the minimum wage will rise to $7.25 an hour by 2009, the minimum wage's real purchasing power will still be below what it was in 1968. As president, Obama will further raise the minimum wage to $9.50 an hour by 2011, index it to inflation and increase the Earned Income Tax Credit to make sure that full-time workers can earn a living wage that allows them to raise their families and pay for basic needs such as food, transportation, and housing - things so many people take for granted.
• Provide Tax Relief: Obama and Biden will provide all low and middle-income workers a $500 Making Work Pay tax credit to offset the payroll tax those workers pay in every paycheck. Obama and Biden will also eliminate taxes for seniors making under $50,000 per year.

Strengthen Families

• Promote Responsible Fatherhood: Obama will sign into law his Responsible Fatherhood and Healthy Families Act to remove some of the government penalties on married families, crack down on men avoiding child support payments, and ensure that payments go to families instead of state bureaucracies.
• Support Parents with Young Children: Obama and Biden will expand the highly-successful Nurse-Family Partnership to all 570,000 low-income, first-time mothers each year. The Nurse-Family Partnership provides home visits by trained registered nurses to low-income expectant mothers and their families.
• Expand Paid Sick Days: Today, three-out-of-four low-wage workers have no paid sick days. Obama and Biden support guaranteeing workers seven paid sick days per year.

Increase the Supply of Affordable Housing

• Supports Affordable Housing Trust Fund: Obama has supported efforts to create an Affordable Housing Trust Fund to develop affordable housing in mixed-income neighborhoods.
• Fully Fund the Community Development Block Grant: Obama and Biden will fully fund the Community Development Block Grant program and engage with urban leaders across the country to increase resources to the highest-need Americans.

Tackle Concentrated Poverty

• Establish 20 Promise Neighborhoods: Obama and Biden will create 20 Promise Neighborhoods in areas that have high levels of poverty and crime and low levels of student academic achievement in cities across the nation. The Promise Neighborhoods will be modeled after the Harlem Children's Zone, which provides a full network of services, including early childhood education, youth violence prevention efforts and after-school activities, to an entire neighborhood from birth to college.
• Ensure Community-Based Investment Resources in Every Urban Community: Obama and Biden will work with community and business leaders to identify and address the unique economic development barriers of every major metropolitan area. Obama and Biden will provide additional resources to the federal Community Development Financial Institution Fund, the Small Business Administration and other federal agencies, especially to their local branch offices, to address community needs.
• Invest in Rural Areas: Obama and Biden will invest in rural small businesses and fight to expand high-speed Internet access. They will improve rural schools and attract more doctors to rural areas. And they will implement a bold climate change and energy independence plan that will revitalize rural America through new investments in renewable energy production, including wind, solar and biofuel investments.

Chapter 5: Reforming Social Security

The case for privatizing Social Security took a huge hit, along with so much else, during the financial crisis that broke in September 2008. It was private savings schemes – 401Ks – whose value was decimated by the collapse in stock prices. The true casino-like nature of stock market investment was there for all to see; and certainly John McCain made little or no mention of Social Security as an issue as the presidential race began in earnest after the party conventions in late August.

But ahead of the September crash, and of course with all of us entirely unaware of its impending arrival, all the main conservative think-tanks continued to press for the partial privatization of the Social Security System. Conservative commentators continued to collapse together pension and health programs to argue that we face an entitlement crisis. The Heritage Foundation’s Alison Acosta Fraser called it “an entitlement tsunami’ in evidence to the House Budget Committee in June 2008. Michael Tanner wrote an op-ed in The Indianapolis Star on September 4^th, arguing that Social Security reform should “take advantage of private accounts’ high return rate” (the title of the piece); and his Cato colleague Richard Rahn was still advocating the Chilean privatization program to readers of the Washington Times as late as August 2008. Republican Congressman Paul Ryan issued a “road map for America’s future’ in May, a road map that included a proposal for personal savings accounts from 2011, to be financed by redirecting up to 5.1% of payroll taxes to that purpose; and David John from the Heritage Foundation presented evidence in June 2008 to a Subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee, advocating automatic IRAs for workers in small businesses who had no employer-provided pension cover.

The “reform/privatization” agenda has not been simply a monopoly of conservative think tanks. On the contrary, Heritage and the Brookings Institution actually issued a joint statement in March 2008, entitled Taking Back Our Fiscal Future that proposed automatic caps on spending on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. (For a powerful rebuttal, see Robert Kuttner, “Obama versus the Fiscal Fear-Mongers”, The American Prospect, September 2008). Under the auspices of The Hamilton Project, pension specialists from Heritage and Brookings combined in June 2008 to advocate the greater purchase of lifetime income plans; and in July 2008 Brookings called for “a combination of revenue increases and benefit reductions…relatively small changes will do the trick” in their Next President and Congress: Tackle Social Security First. Brookings followed that up in August with a call for a new inter-generational contract: tightening the flow of funds to older generations by reining in Social Security and redirecting those flows to the young. (See Isabel Sawhill and Emily Monea, ‘Old News”, Democracyjournal.org, Summer 2008).

The most powerful counter-argument to all this currently available is Teresa Ghilarducci’s very important When I’m Sixty-Four: The Plot Against Pensions and the Plan to Save Them. The Ghilarducci plan would give every worker a $600 annual inflation-adjusted subsidy but require them to invest 5% of salary into a guaranteed retirement account administered by the SSA, invested in bonds paying 3% after inflation. It would also eliminate tax breaks on 401(k)s: so effectively increasing taxation of incomes over $75,000. The sweetener: a one-off switch out of 401k’s to this new guaranteed retirement account, at pre-September levels. As 401k values collapsed in September, the sweetener may yet prove attractive as the new administration ponders what, if anything, immediately to do.

Fortunately, the Obama campaign has not thus far gone in the Heritage/Brookings direction. The Senator proposed meeting any financial shortfall on Social Security by taxing incomes in excess of $250,000. (That would leave a dough-hole between the current threshold for payroll tax - $102,000 – and the proposed $250,000 restart point. The Senator opposes raising the age of retirement.) He also proposed allowing employees to raid their 401(K) accounts without tax penalty as part of his emergency package in response to the September crisis.

The Obama-Biden website went into the November election saying this.

Protect Social Security

Obama and Biden are committed to ensuring Social Security is solvent and viable for the American people, now and in the future. Obama and Biden will be honest with the American people about the long-term solvency of Social Security and the ways we can address the shortfall. Obama and Biden will protect Social Security benefits for current and future beneficiaries alike. And they do not believe it is necessary or fair to hardworking seniors to raise the retirement age. Obama and Biden are strongly opposed to privatizing Social Security. As part of a bipartisan plan that would be phased in over many years, they will ask those making over $250,000 to contribute a bit more to Social Security to keep it sound.

Obama does not support uncapping the full payroll tax of 12.4 percent rate. Instead, he and Joe Biden are considering plans that would ask those making over $250,000 to pay in the range of 2 to 4 percent more in total (combined employer and employee).

Strengthen Retirement Savings

• Reform Corporate Bankruptcy Laws to Protect Workers and Retirees: Current bankruptcy laws protect banks before workers. Obama and Biden will protect pensions by putting promises to workers higher on the list of debts that companies cannot shed; ensuring that the bankruptcy courts do not demand more sacrifice from workers than executives; telling companies that they cannot issue executive bonuses while cutting worker pensions; increasing the amount of unpaid wages and benefits workers can claim in court; and limiting the circumstances under which retiree benefits can be reduced.
• Require Full Disclosure of Company Pension Investments: Obama and Biden will ensure that all employees who have company pensions receive detailed annual disclosures about their pension fund's investments. This will provide retirees important resources to make their pension fund more secure.
• Eliminate Income Taxes for Seniors Making Less Than $50,000: Obama and Biden will eliminate all income taxation of seniors making less than $50,000 per year. This will provide an immediate tax cut averaging $1,400 to 7 million seniors and relieve millions from the burden of filing tax returns.
• Create Automatic Workplace Pensions: The Obama-Biden retirement security plan will automatically enroll workers in a workplace pension plan. Under their plan, employers who do not currently offer a retirement plan, will be required to enroll their employees in a direct-deposit IRA account that is compatible to existing direct-deposit payroll systems. Employees may opt-out if they choose. Experts estimate that this program will increase the savings participation rate for low and middle-income workers from its current 15 percent level to around 80 percent.
• Expand Retirement Savings Incentives for Working Families: Obama and Biden will ensure savings incentives are fair to all workers by creating a generous savings match for low and middle-income Americans. Their plan will match 50 percent of the first $1,000 of savings for families that earn less than $75,000. The savings match will be automatically deposited into designated personal accounts. Over 80 percent of these savings incentives will go to new savers.
• Prevent Age Discrimination: Obama and Biden will fight job discrimination for aging employees by strengthening the Age Discrimination in Employment Act and empowering the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to prevent all forms of discrimination.

Finally this: it is worth comparing President Bush’s enthusiasm for partial privatization (in his State of the Union Address in 2005 with his statement on the financial crisis (September 24 2008). Faith in deregulated markets, so evident in 2005, was far more muted three years later.

2005

As we fix Social Security, we also have the responsibility to make the system a better deal for younger workers. And the best way to reach that goal is through voluntary personal retirement accounts. Here is how the idea works. Right now, a set portion of the money you earn is taken out of your paycheck to pay for the Social Security benefits of today's retirees. If you're a younger worker, I believe you should be able to set aside part of that money in your own retirement account, so you can build a nest egg for your own future. Here's why the personal accounts are a better deal. Your money will grow, over time, at a greater rate than anything the current system can deliver -- and your account will provide money for retirement over and above the check you will receive from Social Security. In addition, you'll be able to pass along the money that accumulates in your personal account, if you wish, to your children and -- or grandchildren. And best of all, the money in the account is yours, and the government can never take it away.

2008

This is an extraordinary period for America's economy. Over the past few weeks, many Americans have felt anxiety about their finances and their future. I understand their worry and their frustration. We've seen triple-digit swings in the stock market. Major financial institutions have teetered on the edge of collapse, and some have failed. As uncertainty has grown, many banks have restricted lending. Credit markets have frozen. And families and businesses have found it harder to borrow money. We're in the midst of a serious financial crisis, and the federal government is responding with decisive action.…. I'm a strong believer in free enterprise. So my natural instinct is to oppose government intervention. I believe companies that make bad decisions should be allowed to go out of business. Under normal circumstances, I would have followed this course. But these are not normal circumstances. The market is not functioning properly. There's been a widespread loss of confidence. And major sectors of America's financial system are at risk of shutting down.

Chapter 6: Bringing Health to the Health Care System

The state of the US health care system was a major issue in the 2008 Presidential campaign: hardly surprising, given the new data on the number of under-insured as well as uninsured Americans. The number of under-insured jumped 60% between 2003 and 2007 (from 16 million to 25 million). Add to those the numbers without insurance – 45.7 million in 2007, according to the Census Bureau - and 70-75 million people – 42% of all US adults – were either uninsured or under-insured in 2008 (figures from a survey by the Commonwealth Fund, widely commented on in the quality press June10-12 2008). The Financial Times reported (July 1 2008, p.4) that health premiums had risen 91% on average since 2000, while wages had risen just 24%! Researchers at the University of Michigan found that only 17% of emergency room visits were made by people without insurance – another “myth” blown by careful research. (New York Times, October 30 2008)

The Democratic Party platform committed an incoming US President to “provide every American access to affordable, comprehensive health care”, by allowing people to choice: keeping their own plan, picking from a set of private insurers, or joining a publicly-funded plan. John McCain offered instead a refundable tax credit of $5000 per family to enable people to buy a plan from a private insurance company, paid in part by taxing health benefits provided by employers. Meanwhile in Massachusetts, universal health care came that bit closer in 2008, in a scheme that required everyone to take out insurance of at least a minimal kind, with subsidized coverage for the low paid. By June 2008, 350,000 of the estimated 650,000 uninsured in the state when the scheme began in 2006 had already registered, with two-thirds of those signing up opting for subsidized coverage. Predictably, the Heritage Foundation preferred the McCain plan to the Obama one: (see Backgrounder 2197 &2198, October 15 2008). Equally predictably, the New York Times (editorial, October 28) did not.

The research data on the current health of the system continued to accumulate during 2008. The Commonwealth Fund produced a series of reports (Issue Briefs), on the widening health care gap between high and low-wage workers (May): on the young uninsured (April & May); on who pays for health care when workers are uninsured (May); on US variations in child health care by states (May); and on the expansion of Medicaid and SCHIP as key elements in the moves towards comprehensive health coverage (June). The Kaiser Family Foundation issued two valuable reports on SCHIP in April and July 2008; sand in June the Bipartisan Policy Center issued a very comprehensive and clear guide to policy options: its Financing the US Health System: Issues and Options for Change (Meena Shehamani, Jeanne Lambrew and Joseph Antos. Antos was from the AEI, Lambrew from the Center for American Progress).

The Obama-Biden website said this on health care.

On health care reform, the American people are too often offered two extremes - government-run health care with higher taxes or letting the insurance companies operate without rules. Barack Obama and Joe Biden believe both of these extremes are wrong, and that’s why they’ve proposed a plan that strengthens employer coverage, makes insurance companies accountable and ensures patient choice of doctor and care without government interference.

The Obama-Biden plan provides affordable, accessible health care for all Americans, builds on the existing health care system, and uses existing providers, doctors and plans to implement the plan. Under the Obama-Biden plan, patients will be able to make health care decisions with their doctors, instead of being blocked by insurance company bureaucrats.

Under the plan, if you like your current health insurance, nothing changes, except your costs will go down by as much as $2,500 per year.

If you don’t have health insurance, you will have a choice of new, affordable health insurance options.

Make Health Insurance Work for People and Businesses - Not Just Insurance and Drug Companies.

• Require insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions so all Americans regardless of their health status or history can get comprehensive benefits at fair and stable premiums.
• Create a new Small Business Health Tax Credit to help small businesses provide affordable health insurance to their employees.
• Lower costs for businesses by covering a portion of the catastrophic health costs they pay in return for lower premiums for employees.
• Prevent insurers from overcharging doctors for their malpractice insurance and invest in proven strategies to reduce preventable medical errors.
• Make employer contributions more fair by requiring large employers that do not offer coverage or make a meaningful contribution to the cost of quality health coverage for their employees to contribute a percentage of payroll toward the costs of their employees health care.
• Establish a National Health Insurance Exchange with a range of private insurance options as well as a new public plan based on benefits available to members of Congress that will allow individuals and small businesses to buy affordable health coverage.
• Ensure everyone who needs it will receive a tax credit for their premiums.

Reduce Costs and Save a Typical American Family up to $2,500 as reforms phase in:

• Lower drug costs by allowing the importation of safe medicines from other developed countries, increasing the use of generic drugs in public programs and taking on drug companies that block cheaper generic medicines from the market
• Require hospitals to collect and report health care cost and quality data
• Reduce the costs of catastrophic illnesses for employers and their employees.
• Reform the insurance market to increase competition by taking on anticompetitive activity that drives up prices without improving quality of care.

The Obama-Biden plan will promote public health. It will require coverage of preventive services, including cancer screenings, and increase state and local preparedness for terrorist attacks and natural disasters.

A Commitment to Fiscal Responsibility: Barack Obama will pay for his $50 - $65 billion health care reform effort by rolling back the Bush tax cuts for Americans earning more than $250,000 per year and retaining the estate tax at its 2009 level.

Chapter 7: Immigration Control in a Land of Immigrants

Immigration as an issue largely vanished from the political debate. John McCain relabeled it on his website as a question of “border security” to appease his own base: while continuing to advocate, after border security had been achieved, the same package of measures 9including a route to legality for those already here without papers) of the kind that Barack Obama advocates and the republican base so strenuously oppose.

Meanwhile, the position of illegal immigrants in the US steadily worsened in the last six months of 2008. The downturn in the economy, particularly the collapse of the housing sector, hit Latino illegal immigrants hard, given their concentration in that industry. There was a lot of unemployment around in the last six months of 2008: indirectly visible through the drying up of funds flowing back to Mexico, and a diminution in the flow of new undocumented workers crossing the US-Mexico border. Dollar flows to Mexico were $668.28 million lower in the first 5 months of 2008 than in the equivalent period in 2007 – and that before the full impact of the financial crisis struck. (See Economic Policy Institute Economic Snapshots, July 9 2008). The Washington-based Center for Immigration studies, no friend of illegal immigration, reported an estimated fall in the number of illegal immigrants of possibly 1.3 million 2007-8. (See The New York Times, July 31 2008). All this, on top of increased ICE raids on homes and workplaces, and deportations of illegal immigrants straight from hospitals (report in The New York Times August 3 2008).

Legal immigration also slowed in 2007-8. The Census Bureau reported 500,000 new immigrants in 2007, as against 1.8 million in 2006. No political progress was made during the campaign season in either raising the quota for legal immigrants or in addressing how best to deal with those here without papers. The Bush Administration’s attempt – Operation Scheduled Departure – which asked people to turn themselves in and gave them 90 days then to put their affairs in order before leaving: it attracted just 8 customers in its first three weeks, and was abandoned! (The New York Times, August 25 2008)

The Heritage Foundation continued to press for employment verification, enforcement and border protection to stop the flow of illegal immigrants. It continued to advocate a shift to immigration based on skills. On this see Robert Rector’s Backgrounder article published as paper no. 2192 by the Heritage Foundation, October 7 2008; and James Sherk, H-IB Workers: Highly Skilled, Highly Needed (Webmemo 1916, Heritage Foundation, May 6 2008). The case for skilled immigrants was also made by Vivek Wadhwa in ‘America’s Other Immigration Crisis”, The American, July/August 2008. For views skeptical of the Hi-B claim, see John Miano, H-I B Visa Numbers: No Relationship to Economic Need (Backgrounder, June 2008). For views skeptical of guest workers programs, see David Sirota, “Dilberts of the World United”, The Nation, June 23 008. The full range of views – and the evidence against which to assess them – is forthcoming (May 2009) in

David Coates and Peter Siavelis (editors), Getting Immigration Right: What Every American Needs to Know (Potomac Books)

The Obama-Biden website says this on immigration. (For a commentary, see the first op- ed accessible from this site: just click on Answering Back in the top right-hand corner of the site)

Plan for Immigration

The Problem

Undocumented population is exploding: The number of undocumented immigrants in the country has increased more than 40 percent since 2000. Every year, more than a half-million people come illegally or illegally overstay their visas.

Immigration bureaucracy is broken: The immigration bureaucracy is broken and overwhelmed, forcing legal immigrants to wait years for applications.

Immigration raids are ineffective: Despite a sevenfold increase in recent years, immigration raids only netted 3,600 arrests in 2006 and have placed all the burdens of a broken system onto immigrant families.

Barack Obama and Joe Biden's Plan

Create Secure Borders

Obama and Biden want to preserve the integrity of our borders. He supports additional personnel, infrastructure and technology on the border and at our ports of entry.

Improve Our Immigration System

Obama and Biden believe we must fix the dysfunctional immigration bureaucracy and increase the number of legal immigrants to keep families together and meet the demand for jobs that employers cannot fill.

Remove Incentives to Enter Illegally

Obama and Biden will remove incentives to enter the country illegally by cracking down on employers who hire undocumented immigrants.

Bring People Out of the Shadows

Obama and Biden support a system that allows undocumented immigrants who are in good standing to pay a fine, learn English, and go to the back of the line for the opportunity to become citizens.

Work with Mexico

Obama and Biden believe we need to do more to promote economic development in Mexico to decrease illegal immigration.

Chapter 8: Is God Necessarily Conservative

The capacity of the Religious Right to keep social questions at the top of the political agenda weakened significantly in the last half of 2008, as economic difficulties pushed more material concerns to the forefront of political debate. As early as June 12, Pew Research Center polling showed a rising minority of Americans supporting gay marriage: 38% in 2008 as against 32% in 2004. Now just fractionally under half the US population opposed gay marriage (49% as against 56% in 2004). For those opposed to gay marriage, and for their Pro-Life equivalents, john McCain, not Barack Obama, became their candidate of choice: a choice which moved from the reluctant to the enthusiastic when Sarah Palin joined the McCain ticket. The re-energizing of the Republican base by that choice was the Christian-right success story from August to November.

The main conservative religious think tanks continued to press the case against gay marriage and abortion steadily through the campaign. Their more liberal opponents were equally active. For the conservative program, see Christian Coalition for America, Our Legislative Agenda, issued on their website July 30 2008. For the latest data on abortion in the US, see Abortion in the US: Utilization, Financing and Access, The Kaiser Family Foundation website, June 2008. For the latest liberal evangelical positions, see the Evangelical Manifesto Steering Committee’s An Evangelical Manifesto, published May 7 2008 in Washington DC.

The general election failed to give the Christian Right their Vice-President of choice, but they did win ballot fights banning gay marriage in California (Prop8, passed 52-48% after a campaign funded largely by Mormon money), Arizona, Florida and Arkansas (banning adoption by unmarried couples). The conservative vote was heavily reinforced in California by African-American and Hispanic support – showing a division within the civil rights movement between race-based rights and rights based on sexual orientation. Conservatives did not prevail in ballots in South Dakota, Colorado and Michigan (the ballot there was directed against stem cell research).

To its end, the Bush Administration continued to develop regulations allowing health service employees to opt-out of procedures they found unethical: regulations which allowed opt-outs for birth control procedures as well as abortions (on this, see The New York Times, September 19 2008. Among recent publications, see Dagmar Herzog, Sex in Crisis (Basic Books, 2008) and Michael Sean Winters, Left at the Altar (also Basic Books, 2008). The Obama-Biden website says simply this.

In June of 2006, Senator Obama delivered what was called the most important speech on religion and politics in 40 years. Speaking before an evangelical audience, Senator Obama candidly discussed his own religious conversion and doubts, and the need for a deeper, more substantive discussion about the role of faith in American life. Senator Obama also laid down principles for how to discuss faith in a pluralistic society, including the need for religious people to translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values during public debate. In December, 2006, Senator Obama discussed the importance of faith in the global battle against AIDS.

Chapter 9: The Wisdom of the War in Iraq

The changing character of the war in Iraq was a huge issue in the 2008 Presidential campaign. John McCain continued to assert that the surge was working and that the war was winnable: that under him US troops would return victorious – and that setting a timeline for withdrawal would only embolden the enemy. Certainly by July 2008 the US death toll in Iraq was down to 12 a month. At its peak it had been over 120 a month. The Bush administration by contrast came round in 2008 to the idea of a timeline for withdrawal; and negotiated all through the fall with the Iraqi Government for a renewed UN mandate from January 1 2009 that would have all combat troops out of Iraq by the end of 2011. Commanders on the ground in Iraq reported progress, but insisted on its fragility (General Odierno, replacing General Petraeus, was explicit on this in the handover ceremony in September); while commanders in the ground on Afghanistan reported the return of militants there, and an intensified ground struggle with the Taliban.

The Center for American progress issued a report on Changing Rationales: A Timeline of Bush Administration Quotes on Iraq (May 2008); a report on How to Close Guantanemo (June 2008); and a report on the deteriorating military position in Afghanistan, Forgotten No Longer (July 18 2008).

The Obama-Biden website said this on Iraq.

Plan for Ending the War in Iraq

The Problem

Inadequate Security and Political Progress in Iraq: Since the surge began, more than 1,000 American troops have died, and despite the improved security situation, the Iraqi government has not stepped forward to lead the Iraqi people and to reach the genuine political accommodation that was the stated purpose of the surge. Our troops have heroically helped reduce civilian casualties in Iraq to early 2006 levels. This is a testament to our military’s hard work, improved counterinsurgency tactics, and enormous sacrifice by our troops and military families. It is also a consequence of the decision of many Sunnis to turn against al Qaeda in Iraq, and a lull in Shia militia activity. But the absence of genuine political accommodation in Iraq is a direct result of President Bush’s failure to hold the Iraqi government accountable.

Strains on the Military: More than 1.75 million servicemen and women have served in Iraq or Afghanistan; more than 620,000 troops have completed multiple deployments. Military members have endured multiple deployments taxing both them and their families. Additionally, military equipment is wearing out at nine times the normal rate after years of constant use in Iraq’s harsh environment. As Army Chief of Staff General George Casey said in March, “Today’s Army is out of balance. The current demand for our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan exceeds the sustainable supply and limits our ability to provide ready forces for other contingencies.”

Resurgent Al Qaeda in Afghanistan: The decision to invade Iraq diverted resources from the war in Afghanistan, making it harder for us to kill or capture Osama Bin Laden and others involved in the 9/11 attacks. Nearly seven years later, the Taliban has reemerged in southern Afghanistan while Al Qaeda has used the space provided by the Iraq war to regroup, train and plan for another attack on the United States. 2007 was the most violent year in Afghanistan since the invasion in 2001. The scale of our deployments in Iraq continues to set back our ability to finish the fight in Afghanistan, producing unacceptable strategic risks.

A New Strategy Needed: The Iraq war has lasted longer than World War I, World War II, and the Civil War. More than 4,000 Americans have died. More than 60,000 have been injured and wounded. The United States may spend $2.7 trillion on this war and its aftermath, yet we are less safe around the globe and more divided at home. With determined ingenuity and at great personal cost, American troops have found the right tactics to contain the violence in Iraq, but we still have the wrong strategy to press Iraqis to take responsibility at home, and restore America’s security and standing in the world.

Barack Obama and Joe Biden's Plan

Judgment You Can Trust

In 2002, as the conventional thinking in Washington lined up with President Bush for war, Obama had the judgment and courage to speak out against going to war, and to warn of “an occupation of undetermined length, with undetermined costs, and undetermined consequences.” He and Joe Biden are fully committed to ending the war in Iraq as president.

A Responsible, Phased Withdrawal

Barack Obama and Joe Biden believe we must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in. Immediately upon taking office, Obama will give his Secretary of Defense and military commanders a new mission in Iraq: ending the war. The removal of our troops will be responsible and phased, directed by military commanders on the ground and done in consultation with the Iraqi government. Military experts believe we can safely redeploy combat brigades from Iraq at a pace of 1 to 2 brigades a month that would remove them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010 – more than 7 years after the war began.

Under the Obama-Biden plan, a residual force will remain in Iraq and in the region to conduct targeted counter-terrorism missions against al Qaeda in Iraq and to protect American diplomatic and civilian personnel. They will not build permanent bases in Iraq, but will continue efforts to train and support the Iraqi security forces as long as Iraqi leaders move toward political reconciliation and away from sectarianism.

Encouraging Political Accommodation

Barack Obama and Joe Biden believe that the U.S. must apply pressure on the Iraqi government to work toward real political accommodation. There is no military solution to Iraq’s political differences, but the Bush Administration’s blank check approach has failed to press Iraq’s leaders to take responsibility for their future or to substantially spend their oil revenues on their own reconstruction.

Obama and Biden's plan offers the best prospect for lasting stability in Iraq. A phased withdrawal will encourage Iraqis to take the lead in securing their own country and making political compromises, while the responsible pace of redeployment called for by the Obama-Biden plan offers more than enough time for Iraqi leaders to get their own house in order. As our forces redeploy, Obama and Biden will make sure we engage representatives from all levels of Iraqi society—in and out of government—to forge compromises on oil revenue sharing, the equitable provision of services, federalism, the status of disputed territories, new elections, aid to displaced Iraqis, and the reform of Iraqi security forces.

Surging Diplomacy

Barack Obama and Joe Biden will launch an aggressive diplomatic effort to reach a comprehensive compact on the stability of Iraq and the region. This effort will include all of Iraq’s neighbors—including Iran and Syria, as suggested by the bi-partisan The Iraq Study Group Report. This compact will aim to secure Iraq’s borders; keep neighboring countries from meddling inside Iraq; isolate al Qaeda; support reconciliation among Iraq’s sectarian groups; and provide financial support for Iraq’s reconstruction and development.

Preventing Humanitarian Crisis

Barack Obama and Joe Biden believe that America has both a moral obligation and a responsibility for security that demands we confront Iraq’s humanitarian crisis—more than five million Iraqis are refugees or are displaced inside their own country. Obama and Biden will form an international working group to address this crisis. He will provide at least $2 billion to expand services to Iraqi refugees in neighboring countries, and ensure that Iraqis inside their own country can find sanctuary. Obama and Biden will also work with Iraqi authorities and the international community to hold the perpetrators of potential war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide accountable. They will reserve the right to intervene militarily, with our international partners, to suppress potential genocidal violence within Iraq.

The Status-of-Forces-Agreement

Obama and Biden believe any Status of Forces Agreement, or any strategic framework agreement, should be negotiated in the context of a broader commitment by the U.S. to begin withdrawing its troops and forswearing permanent bases. Obama and Biden also believe that any security accord must be subject to Congressional approval. It is unacceptable that the Iraqi government will present the agreement to the Iraqi parliament for approval—yet the Bush administration will not do the same with the U.S. Congress. The Bush administration must submit the agreement to Congress or allow the next administration to negotiate an agreement that has bipartisan support here at home and makes absolutely clear that the U.S. will not maintain permanent bases in Iraq.

Chapter 10: Is Prosperity Safest in Republican Hands?

Visibly not, after the financial meltdown in September 2008: the case for deregulating financial markets in particular, and markets in general, suddenly fell out of favor. That didn’t stop the Bush Administration slipping in a final round of regulation easing: particularly on the environment. Nor did it stop the US business community lining up to fight any easing of trade union rights by the incoming Obama Administration. Nor also did it prevent the Cato Institute and the Economic policy Institute continuing their long-running disagreement about free trade. On this last, see Daniel Ikenson, While Doha Sleeps. Securing Economic Growth through Trade Facilitation (Cato Institute, June 17, 2008); Robert Kohl, Trade, Protectionism and the US Economy: Examining the Evidence (Cato Institute, September 16 2008); Robert E. Scott, The China Trade Toll: Widespread wage suppression, 2 million jobs lost in the US (EPI, July 30 2008); or his Non-oil trade deficit costs jobs in every state (EPI Snapshot, October 2 2008).

For a telling survey of the scale of Republican corporate largesse, see Stephen Slivenski, The Corporate Welfare State: How The Federal Government Subsidizes US Businesses, Cato Institute Policy Analysis, 592, May 14 2007

But the big story, of course, was the crisis on Wall Street, and the degree to which it did or did not show the fundamental flaws in a deregulatory economic policy. The conservative response has so far largely taken three forms: to deny that the financial sector was seriously deregulated; to put the blame squarely on Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac, and through them on the Democratic Party’s insistence on easy loans for housing for the poor; or to argue that any bailout involving tax payers’ money was a step in the direction of socialism. We have also seen a rearguard defense of high CEO pay and generous pension/redundancy packages, and in opposition to any capital gains/dividend taxation. All these responses are challenged in op-eds 2-5, accessible from this blog site (go to Answering Back in the top right-hand corner of the site.)

On whether the origin of the crisis does lie in Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac, see: Kevin Hassett, How the Democrats Created the Financial Crisis (Bloomberg.com, September 22 2008); Wayne Barrett, Andrew Cuomo and Fannie and Freddie, Village Voice.com, August 2 2008); and Michael S. Barr & Gene Sperling, “Poor Homeowners, Good Loans”, New York Times, October 18 2008. My own view, reproduced below from the relevant op-ed, is that pointing the finger at the way housing finance was organized is important but not enough.

This financial crisis is like a layered cake. Each layer is part of the problem

• This crisis has been allowed to fester ever since the sub-prime loan difficulties began to emerge in 2007: Henry Paulson has done too little, too late.

• The sub-prime loan process was visible before it created problems; Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac, among others, could have stopped it, and they didn’t. They actively encouraged the practice, under pressure from both the Clinton and Bush administrations.
• The easing of regulations of the entire financial system during the Greenspan years did open the way to speculative banking based on mortgage-backed securities: a tougher regulatory framework could and should have prevented that.

But there is a deeper issue here, one not yet being widely recognized or discussed.

Twice since the war the US has known prolonged periods of economic growth: from 1948-73 and again from 1992 (with a brief dip in 2002) to now.

• In the first of those economic booms, the internal deal underpinning growth was a union-negotiated productivity-wages pact – rising productivity and rising wages went together in a social contract that gave the long post-war boom a strong internal base.
• The second time round the internal deal was different. It was one imposed by an over-confident business class on a seriously weakened labor movement, one combining rising productivity with rising income inequality.

For the vast majority of working Americans, wages stagnated during this second boom – rising only briefly in the late 1990s before stagnating again. Since 1992 growth has rested on a Faustian contract between Main Street and Wall Street. Wall Street has been awash with money, and keen to lend. Main Street, by contrast, has been financially pressed, and was keen to borrow. The second post-war boom rested not on rising wages but on credit, on money borrowed from Wall Street by US consumers, and borrowed by Wall Street in significant measure from financial sources abroad. Houses built on sand invariably in the end fall over.

The immediate credit crisis clearly requires a regulatory fix of some kind. But equally clearly, the long-term weakness of the US economy requires a resetting of the underlying social contract. Currently we are debt soaked. We have never been so debt soaked; and we will have periodic credit crises until we dry out. We need to return to a world in which rising productivity and rising wages go together, so that people buy commodities today out of wages they earn today, not out of wages they might earn tomorrow and which they bring forward only by borrowing at high rates of interest. The underlying requirement now is one of reconfiguring investment in the United States so that good jobs return to America, and of reconfiguring the tax code so that good wages return to the middle class. We need a new deal as well as a new Treasury Secretary.

Chapter 11: Steps to a Better Future

No shortage of offers, of course, on how now to go forward. The steady proposal from liberal quarters seems to be to Barack Obama: use FDR as your model, not Bill Clinton and certainly not Jimmy Carter. Even before the financial meltdown, The Nation magazine devoted an entire issue to Why the New Deal Matters (April 7 2008); and The American Prospect had its own series: Robert Kuttner’s “Can the Democrats Think Big?” (March 2008); Damon Silver’s “How we Got Into this Mess” (May 2008); and Rick Perlstein’s “A Liberal Shock Doctrine” (September 2008). The Center for American Progress published its first stimulus plan in January 2008; the Brookings Institution published Retooling for Growth in April 2008: and Robert Kuttner published his Obama’s Challenge in October. Add to that John Podesta’s already cited The Power of Progress and there is clearly much new thinking to read. The important difference from the past is that now we had an administration that might do more than read. It might actually listen!

UPDATING SOURCES AND ISSUES (to June 2008)

Chapter 1: A Call to Arms

The last half of 2007 saw the publication of a series of important calls for progressive politics. These included Paul Krugman’s very fine The Conscience of a Liberal (New York, W. W. Norton); Robert Kuttner’s equally splendid The Squandering of America (New York, Alfred A. Knopf); and Robert Reich’s call for the democratic re-regulation of business – Supercapitalism: The transformation of Business, Democracy and Everyday Life (New York, Alfred A. Knopf). To that list we should also add Paul Starr’s The True Force of Liberalism (New York, Basic Books).

If you want a counterweight to all this liberalism, why not try Mark W. Smith, The Official Handbook of the Vast Right-wing Conspiracy: the arguments you need to defeat the Loony Left this election year (Washington DC, Regnery 2008); or Greg Jackson’s Conservative Comebacks to Liberal Lies (Boston, Jaj Publishing 2006). Be ready too for arguments that privilege emotion over reason, and therefore image over issues, in the electoral process. That’s always another way of dismissing the importance of rational discourse – a conservative tactic often played whenever the credibility conservative arguments is being eroded, as now, by the reality of conservative policies in action. David Brooks toys with this idea in Stop Making Sense, his August 26 2007 column in The New York Times reviewing Drew Westen’s book The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation (Public Affairs). To his credit, Brooks does not fully buy the notion: but others might!

Chapter 2: Clearing the Decks

The single most important conservative publication since the book went to press is Michael Tanner's Leviathan on the Right: How Big-Government Conservatism Brought Down the Republican Revolution (Washington, DC, The Cato Institute, 2007). It's an important guide to how the libertarian wing of the Republican coalition think they lost out to neo-conservatives, the Christian Right and the national-greatness conservatives. It also pulls into one place many of the arguments made by Michael Tanner to which A Liberal Tool Kit has had to respond in the various chapters. Essential reading for all of us, conservatives and progressives alike.

Less valuable by far, but much hyped, have been Anne Coulter’s If Democrats had any brains, they’d be Republicans (New York, Crown Forum) and Lou Dobbs’ A New America: Awakening the National Spirit (New York, Viking). Pat Buchanan’s conservative critique of George W. Bush’s foreign military and economic policy can be found in his Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology and Greed Are Tearing America Apart (New York, St. Martin’s Press). We also have two new studies of how the conservative renaissance in US politics actually occurred: Mark A. Smith’s The Right Talk (Princeton, Princeton University Press); and Jonathan Chait’s The Big Con: the True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economists (New York, Houghton Mifflin). For a counterweight to Ann Coulter, try Joe Maguire, Brainless: the lies and lunacy of Ann Coulter (New York, Harper Collins);

Chapter 3: The Wonders of Trickle-Down Economics

Congress eventually (in May 2007) increased the minimum wage - raising it in stages to $7.25 by 2009 - in legislation that, among other things, also gave tax breaks to small businesses, so offsetting the extra burden on them. For a fascinating study of how minimum wage and Earned Income Tax Credits can combine to boost employment and earnings for minority women, but not apparently for minority men, see National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 12915, by David Neumark and William Wascher. For what the new minimum wage means across the US, see Liana Fox, What a new federal minimum wage means for the states, Economic Policy Institute website, May 25 2007.The Employment Policy Institute continued to argue (in regular press releases) that the increase will actually hurt the working poor, by putting more of them out of work. More liberal commentators focused instead on the scale of poverty persisting in the US, and the numbers of people on food stamps (for details, see the update in Chapter 4) and on their vulnerability in the housing market. The first half of 2007 certainly saw a crisis of payments for many who had taken out 'sub-prime' loans to buy their way into private housing. The second half of the year saw that sub-prime loan crisis rock the entire US (and by association, global) financial system, bringing a genuine threat of recession to the US economy as 2008 began.

Meanwhile, CEO pay in the US continued to rise rapidly in 2007, triggering legislation in the House to rein it in. Spectacular salaries and severence packages awarded in 2007 - by Home Depot and Office Depot to mention but two - kept the issue alive in the quality press, sustained by new evidence from the Congressional Budget Office in January that "families earning more than $1 million a year saw their federal tax rates drop more sharply than any group in the country as a result of President Bush's tax cuts" (Washington Post, January 7 2007). IRS data suggests that the 300,000 Americans who made up the top 1% of income earners in the US in 2005 received as much income as the 150 million Americans who make up the bottom 50% of income earners; and yet the Cato Institute still felt able in January 2007 to issue a Policy Analysis piece by Alan Reynolds, asking Has US Income Inequality Really Increased? He didn't think so. The Atlantic, by contrast, had a fine essay in its June 2007 edition, questioning levels of social mobility in the contemporary US: Clive Crook's Rags to Rags, Riches to Riches. In November the Brookings Institution reinforced that view by publishing three reports by Julia B. Isaacs on economic mobility: of men and women; of families across generations; and of black and white families. (The Reports, and related executive summaries, can be found at www.brookings.edu/papers/2007)

An MIT study reported in The Financial Times, June 5 2007 - found that "earnings of the average US worker with an undergraduate degree have not kept pace with gains in productivity in recent decades" - all evidence that middle, as well as lower, class America has been losing out to the huge salary takes of the top 300,000 US rich. The top 1% of US earners now take a larger share of total income in the US than at any time since the 1920s! (for this, see Christopher Shea, in The Boston Globe, April 15 2007). The Economic Policy Institute's Snapshot for October 3 2007 reported national median wage growth of only 0.2% per annum 2001-6, prompting Paul Krugman to ask 'Where's my Trickle' in an op-ed piece in The New York Times September 10. For a counter-view: that wages are at long last rising, and that the income of the poorest fifth of the US population has experienced the fastest percentage growth since 1991, see David Brook's op-ed piece, "A Reality-Based Economy" in the same paper, July 24 2007. Brook's optimism was seriously challenged by the EPI Issue Brief #239 (December 13, 2007) by Jared Bernstein, headed: Updated CBO data reveal unprecedented increase in inequality. On his figures, the post-tax income of the top 1% of income earners - which had been eight times higher than that of middle-income families in 1979 - was now 21 times higher. The gap between the top 1% and the bottom 5th had gone from 23 times higher to 70 times higher in the same period: as he said, "a vast increase in the distance between income classes".

The other big issue in debate and dispute in the first half of 2007 were the budget proposals of the new Democratic-controlled Congress and the Bush White House. Conservative commentators continued to push for a flat tax. The Hamilton Project continued to push for tax simplification and reform. On the former, see the National Review March 19 & April 17, 2007: and an earlier powerful rebuttal by Larry Elliott, "Flat tax does not mean a level playing field", The Guardian (London), October 10 2005. For Hamilton, see The Brookings Institution website for June 11 2007.

The first half of 2008 was, of course, entirely taken up with primaries: especially that in the Democratic Party. As Obama and Clinton clashed, conservatives sharpened their attacks on the costs of Democratic programs – attacks that will doubtless multiply in the fall. For a characteristic example, see Michael D. Tanner, Barack by the Issues, Cato Institute website, February 29 2008. Both parties campaigned against the background of a deepening recession, one met with a stimulus package of $168 billion, passed by Congress in February – the centerpiece of which was a tax rebate ($600 per adult, %300 per child, on incomes of less than $75,000, phased down to nothing for those whose income exceeded $150,000). The adequacy of that stimulus package was widely discussed. Economists at the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute dismissed it as short-term gimmick, advocating instead a longer-term solution of more permanent tax cuts. (For an example, see Brian Riedl, Why Tax Cut Reductions are More Stimulative than Rebates: Lessons from 2001 and 2003, Heritage Foundation, Webmemo 1776, January 18 2008.) More progressive economists found them inadequate because not targeted – less effective because not directly primarily to the poor and unemployed. (For an example, see Ross Eisenbery, Be Wary of Half-a-Loaf Economic Stimulus, Economic Policy Institute, February 20 2008.) The EPI continued to document through the first half of 2008 the rising numbers of the American unemployed, the stagnant and falling wages of those still in employment, and the need for a strategy to rebound the economy that could stimulate infrastructure investment and manufacturing employment again. (See, for example, Robert E Scott, The Importance of Manufacturing, EPI Briefing Paper 211, February 13 2008.)

For more reflective and fully researched pieces, see Joseph Stiglitz, “The Economic Consequences of Mr. Bush”, Vanity Fair, December 2007; Jared Bernstein, Crunch: Why Do I Feel Squeezed, XXXX, 2008); Steven Greenhouse, The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker (Alfred Knopf, 2008); and Robert J. Gordon and Ian Dew-Baker’s important NBER Working Paper (no. 13982, April 2008), Controversies About the Rise of American Inequality: A Survey. For a critique of current tax policy, see David Cay Johnston, Free Lunch: How the Rich Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and stick you with the bill) (Portfolio, 2008). For evidence that tax cutting does not restrain government spending, see NBER Working Paper 13548, October 2007: Christina D. Romer & David H. Romer, Do Tax Cuts Starve the Beast: The Effect of Tax Changes on Government Spending.

Chapter 4: Cutting "welfare" to Help the Poor.

The data on the scale of poverty in the United States continues to shock. Data released in April 2007 showed infant mortality rising again in the south: this, in the most affluent country on earth! New figures from the National Academy of Sciences put the 2005 poverty numbers up to 41.3 million (or 14.1% of all Americans), with at least 35 million Americans - about one-third of them children - living in households unable consistently to buy enough to eat. In August the Census Bureau reported a drop in the percentage of families in poverty in 2006: down from 12.6% in 2005 to 12.3%. That still left 36.5 million Americans living in poverty - 5 million more than in 200o, when the poverty rate was 11.3%. The 2006 improvement was limited to the over-65s and to Hispanic Americans: no other age or ethnic group experienced any improvement in their poverty rate. The Center for American Progress issued a report in January 2007, counting the economic cost of that childhood poverty. The report totalled those costs at $500 billion a year - or 4% of GDP. (See Harry Holzer et al, The Economic Costs of Poverty in the United States). EPI economists also documented the persistence and widening of income inequality on a state-by-state basis.(See Jared Bernstein, Elizabeth McNichol and Andrew Nicholas, Pulling Apart: A State-by-State Analysis of Income Trends, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 2008.) Tumbling house prices and a flat stock market also left total household wealth down in the first half of 2008 – the first call in 5 years (Financial Times, March 7 2008, p.1).See also Bernard Wasow, Apologists' Last Stand? (The Century Foundation, 2/29/2008) for an update on growing income inequality in the US. The Center for American Progress followed their 2007 report with its own 12-point strategy document, published in April 2007, From Poverty to Prosperity: A National Strategy to Cut Poverty in Half - essential reading for all of us.

The clash of views on the role of welfare in creating/abating US poverty continues. For the argument that it still represents a huge resource transfer from skilled tax-payers to unskilled ones, see Robert Rector, Christine Kim and Shanea Watkins, The Fiscal Cost of Low-Skill Households to the US Taxpayer, The Heritage Foundation, Special Report 2, 2007. For the argument that welfare reform is coded language for programs designed to take resources from African-Americans, see Deborah Ward, The White Welfare State: The Racialization of US Welfare Policy, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2005.


Chapter 5: "Reforming" Social Security

It's been relatively quiet on the Social Security front lately, though the new chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, did talk in January of a looming fiscal crisis which he linked to Medicare and Social Security together - so the issue has not gone away. Peter Ferrera has continued to argue for privatization - in the columns of NRO Financial (see February 1 & 22) - and the Century Foundation has continued to argue that it might be coming: see their website January 12 2007 for a piece entitled 'Watch Out for a New Attack on Social Security". Cato's contribution lately has come from David John, arguing "Raising the Wage Cap No Painless Solution to Social Security's Fiscal Woes". (Webmemo 1319, January 2007). As part of their defense strategy, the Century Foundation published later in 2007 Peter Orzag, Mark Iwry and William Gale's Aging Gracefully, which contains what they call four common-sense reforms to protect middle- and lower-income household pensions. The four include automating 401(k) plans, and creating an "automatic IRA" for workers not offered a 401(k) plan.

In the second half of 2007, as the early stages of the long Presidential election got under way, social security reform returned to the national political agenda. Republican candidates in particular cited it as a necessary area of action, should they be elected: Fred Thompson, for one, making it the center piece of his campaign. Where other Republican candidates for the Presidency were vague on detail, Thompson was not. He proposed to index benefits to inflation rather than wage growth, and to create a system of voluntary savings accounts to which employees could pay 2% of their wages (with a matching contribution from the government). On the Democratic side, Barak Obama and John Edwards would both increase taxes on higher earners to offset any looming deficit. Hilary Clinton, less specific, simply proposed the creation of a bipartisan commission to explore the issue. Not surprisingly this did not satisfy the Cato Institute. Chris Edwards told the Financial Times in December that “it is important to have a president who is a better salesman for reforms than the current president”. Paul Krugman, by contrast, criticized Obama in November for accepting too blithely the Cato Institute-type argument that Social Security reform was necessary. His November 16 2007 op-ed piece in The New York Times carried the title “Played for a Sucker”. Likelwise, The American Prospect reminded its readers in December 2007 that “Social Security does not face an urgent crisis. It will be solvent through 2041 even under the dismal 1.8 percent economic growth rate assumed by the …actuaries”.


Chapter 6: Bringing health to the health care system

Health care form, by contrast, is everywhere these days. Each Democratic Presidential candidate has a reform of choice. Most are versions of the mixed systems developing in California and Massachusetts: schemes offering accessible coverage for all, while denying/discouraging - the more radical the program, the more they deny - the right of healthy young workers to opt out. The John Edwards' plan is currently the most radical.

2007 began with President Bush's proposal, in his State of the Union Address, to give tax breaks to help low-income earners (and those purchasing their wn cover) acquire health coverage, and tax increases for those whose plans are more than normally expensive - the so-called "gold plated" plans apparently too good for ordinary workers! The proposals were heavily criticized from the right and the left. Liberals pointed to their irrelevance to the majority of those without health coverage - who were also paying no/little tax: arguing a refundable tax credit would have helped them better. Liberals also criticized the subsequent Bush budget, which proposed to cut $77 billion out of Medicare and Medicaid over a 5 year period, and would have restricted the growth of federal funds to the State Children's Health Insurance program, a good vehicle for getting financial aid to children in families just wealthy enough not to qualify for Medicaid. (The Center for American Progress published a report by Meredith King on the ramifications of a SCHIP shortfall for minority children, March 2007: the full report is available on their website). More conservative voices, for their part, were generally more supportive - Michael Cannon, for example, broadly welcoming the Bush plan from the Cato Institute; but some conservatives still felt that the proposals might actually intensify the "adverse selection" dimension of private voluntary systems (see the Heritage Foundation's Webmemo 1332, January 30 2007), and so were again a missed opportunity at most extensive privatization.

Opinion polls continue to show that most Americans support reforms to make health care universally available and affordable, and realize that the reforms have to be extensive and fundamental (see, for example, the 90% who thought that, in the CNN/NYT survey, February 2007). Politically, that level of concern brought responses at both state and federal level, and from both parties. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed a universal coverage plan for California in January, following similar initiatives in Maine, Vermont and Massachusetts. John Edwards produced a stronger one for the US as a whole in February. Barak Obama followed suit in May. Hilary Clinton proposed expanding SCHIP by cutting off Medicare subsidies to private insurers - the Medicare Advantage Plans - in April. And to underscore their importance, the Commonwealth Fund in May issued a comparative report on health care performance: and found the US system the poorest of the 6 it studied (behind Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand and Britain). Leif Wellington Haase gave the Edwards Health Care Plan "two cheers" (see The Century Foundation website, February 9 2007); Paul Krugman hailed it "Edwards Gets it Right", in the New York Times the same day.

The second half of 2007 was dominated by the fight over SCHIP against the background of continuing under-insurance and un-insurance for health care by significant proportions of the population. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention released data in June 2007, reporting 43.6 million Americans (14.8% of the population) without any health insurance in 2006, and 54.5 million 9or 18.6% of the population) as uninsured for part of the year. Those figure included 9.3% of children under 18. The main case for expanding S-CHIP can be found in Karen Davenport, Child Health Care Benefits, Center for American Progress, June 2007, and in Monique Morrissey, Why SCHIP Matters, Economic Policy Institute Policy Memorandum #121, September 28 2007. The case against expanding the program can be found in a string of web-memos from the Heritage Foundation, including Nina Owcharenko and Stuart Butler’s, SCHIP: Crafting a Better Compromise to Cover Kids , No. 1635, September 24 2007.

The first half of 2008 saw a number of new reports all demonstrating the need for major reform in the US health care system. The Commonwealth Fund issued a report in January on the ability of health systems to stop preventable deaths. The US placed last in leading economies on these measures (see the website of The Century Foundation, 1/10/2008 for a summary report.) In February NPR & the Kaiser Family Foundation ran a poll showing overwhelming popular concern with the state of the US health care system and support for radical reform. In March Reuters reported a survey of US doctors in which more than half those surveyed favored the introduction of a national health care plan.The Economic Policy Institute issued a briefing paper in April 2008 – no 209, written by Jared Bernstein & Heidi Sherhotz – on A Decade of Decline: The Erosion of Employer-Provided Health Care in the US and California 1995-2006.

The flood of research data then triggered the normal partisan think-tank debate. Cato issued a briefing paper (February 28 2008) challenging the WHO’s ranking of health care systems – the one placing the US 37^th out of 191. (See Glen Whitman, WHO’s fooling Who? The world Health Organization’s Problematic Ranking of Health Care Systems); and a month later Cato’s Michael Tanner issued his own critique of health care systems globally (See Michael Tanner, The Glass Is Not Always Greener: A Look at National Health Care Systems Around the World, Cato Policy Analysis 613, March 18 2008.) In April the Heritage Foundation issued a new defense of consumer-based health care reform: Edmund Haislmaier, Health Care Reform: Design Principles for a Patient-Centered, Consumer-Based Market, Heritage Backgrounder No. 2128, April 23, 2008). A strong critique of such market based systems came from the Center for American Progress the same month: Denise Fraga et al, Consumer-driven Health Plans May Preempt, Not Promote, Prevention (C.A.P. website April 28 2008); and The American Prospect published its own “The Path to Universal Health Care” in the May 2008 edition of the magazine.

And as befits so active an area of policy dispute and decision, there's lots of new academic literature to read too, coming from the usual sources. See, for example, Alvin Rivlin and Joseph Antos, Restoring Fiscal Sanity 2007: The Health Spending Challenge published by Brookings Institution Press; or Arnold Relman, A Second Opinion: Rescuing America's Health Care (The Century Foundation, 2007); or the Century Foundation's own National Health Insurance: Lessons From Abroad; or the Hamilton Project Discussion Paper Mending the Medicare Prescription Benefit by Frank and Newhouse, published on the Brookings Institution website, May 2007. The case for fundamental health care reform, guaranteeing universal coverage, was well-put by Paul Krugman in his The Conscience of a Liberal. The case for more moderate reform came again in Arthur Garson Jr. and Carolyn Englehard’s Health Care Half Truths: Too Many Myths, Not Enough Reality (Rowman and Littlefield 2007). My own favorite piece, from February 2003, is actually British: the incoming Prime Minister (then Chancellor of the Exchequer) Gordon Brown's speech to the Social Market Foundation, in which he discusses at length the role and limits of markets in health care provision. The lecture is still available on the UK Treasury website, and is well worth the read:at
http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/
newsroom_and_speeches/press/2003/press_12_03.cfm

Finally, this: Meredith King's powerful short report on Immigrants in the US Health Care System, published by the Center for American Progress in June 2007. The report dispels the five most prevalent myths about immigration and health care: that immigrants overburden the health care system, free-ride on it, and only come to the US to use it; and that public health systems are overburdened by immigrants, and can restrict access by immigrants without it hurting all of us. It's hard to think of a more important report right now - it should be essential reading for us all.

Chapter 7: Immigration controls in a land of immigrants

The first 6 months of 2007 were dominated by the ultimately unsuccessful attempt to introduce a comprehensive immigration reform bill into the Senate – a bill similar to the one that had died in committee in 2006. Bi-partisan support for such a measure in the end eroded in the face of conservative opposition to any element of amnesty for illegal immigrants already here; and of liberal unease with the guest worker program included in the original package. Migrant advocacy groups struggled too with the shift in priorities proposed, away from family membership towards a skills-based points system for entry; and sections of the business community came away from the bill precisely because it didn’t privilege skills enough, and eroded their capacity to petition for sufficient green cards for the skilled workers of which they were short.

The bulk of the conservative opposition was Republican – leading Republican presidential candidates found their freedom of maneuver constrained by the intensity of feeling on this issue among the party rank and file, and backed off accordingly. But the Democratic Party too found itself saddled with a new breed of populist representatives, who were equally preoccupied with the question of border security and equally hostile to amnesty. The AFL-CIO ultimately opposed the legislation, though major service-industry unions did not. Repeated attempts by the bill’s sponsors to appease conservative concerns only alienated liberal support further, until in late June the whole exercise stalled. This in spite of regular opinion polling, that showed 80+% of ordinary Americans in favor of earned paths to citizenship. (See, for example, polling published in The New York Times May 25 2007.)

Though a generous immigration bill did not pass in June 2007, a generous farm bill did. In late July, The House passed a package of subsidies costing $286 billion over 5 years. When the Senate turned to it in September, the cost grew to $288 billion, and attracted the threat of a Presidential veto. Immigration reform, by contrast, settled onto more a reactionary path. A ‘Dream Act', giving a path to citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants if they completed two years of college or military service, passed but stalled in the Senate in October, denied the 60 votes it needed by the force of White House opposition to it. Populist Democrats like Heath Shuler then sponsored SAVE and Sam Johnson sponsored the New Employment Verification Act - both designed to squeeze illegal immigrants out of the US by denying them work. At the state level, legislatures in Arizona and Oklahoma, among others, passed strict employment laws, penalizing those who employ illegal immigrants. The number of such laws introduced into state legislatures was running two-and-a-half times higher in mid 2007 than it had in 2006 (the data is gathered in Julia Preston, “Surge in Immigration Laws Around U.S.”, New York Times, August 6 2007).

Administration policy also hardened, with new moves to catch illegal immigrants and speed their deportation. These moves included the tightening of border security, increased pressure on employers to dismiss illegal immigrant workers, and more raids by ICE officers on factories and farms. The head of ICE told Congress in September 2007 that it would cost at least $94 billion to find, detain and remove all 12 million illegal immigrants from the United States. The cost in human terms of the raids on the individuals subject to them was not calculated by the ICE director, but widely reported as terrifying. The cost in human terms to illegal workers in the construction industry then deepened as 2007 ended, by the slump in house building triggered by the sub-prime loan crisis. That crisis generated significant hidden unemployment among undocumented workers, heavily concentrated as they are in that particular industry. Remittances back to Mexico plummeted in the last half of 2007. Remittances grew in volume by 26% in the first half of 2006, but only by 0.6% in the first half of 2007 (The Financial Times October 30 007).

In May 2008 a big federal push against illegal immigrants sent 270 illegal immigrants to jail in Iowa for the crime of working in a meatpacking plant without proper papers; and that same month Mississippi passed a law making illegal immigration a felony subject to five years in jail before deportation. It was particularly ironic that it should be a southern state which passed such a law, given the crucial role of illegal immigrants in the rebuilding of New Orleans after Katrina, and the widespread connivance then between state officials and local builders to attract and deploy much-needed illegal labor. Memories, it would appear, are very short in parts of the South. Not so short, however, in the Vatican. Pope Benedict XVI used his April 2008 visit to the US to call for the protection, not the persecution and division, of immigrant families - immigrant families that, according to a major new survey issued by the Manhatten Institute in May, have actually assimilated into mainstream US culture and society faster in the last 25 years than in generations passed. (See Jacob Vigdor, Measuring Immigrant Assimilation in the United States, Manhatten Institute for Policy Research, Civic Report 53, May 2008).

Immigration surfaced in the early presidential candidate debates, with Hillary Clinton struggling to answer whether she favored giving driving licenses to undocumented workers, and leading Republicans clashing on who would be the toughest on immigration control. Republican Party activists remained both adamant on this issue, and unrepresentative of US public opinion as a whole; but their dominance – particularly on conservative talk radio – kept the pressure up on Republican candidates to force illegal immigrants out of the US by denying them and their families basic welfare services. The Heritage Foundation in particular briefed regularly on the dangers of illegal immigration and the undesirability of the Dream Act. (see, for example, the Foundation’s Backgrounder paper 2069, September 13 2007). The lone voice in the Republican camp pushing for comprehensive immigration reform came from the Cato Institute. (see in particular Daniel Griswold’s The Fiscal Impact of Immigration Reform: The Real Story, Free Trade Bulletin No. 30, May 31 2007)

There’s been no shortage of new writings on immigration issues of late. Among the most valuable have been Doris Meissner et al, Immigration and America's Future: A New Chapter (MNI, September 2006); the Southern Poverty Law Center’s study of guest worker programs, Close To Slavery; and Ray Marshall’s Getting Immigration Reform Right (EPI Briefing Paper 186, March 15 2007). The case for an expanded guest worker program was put by, among others, Neil Ruiz and Jeffrey Manns, in their Rethinking the Revolving Door for ImmigrationSolving Our Immigration Problem (Latin American Outlook, AEI Online, April 10 2007). The case for green cards for skilled workers was made by Michele Wucker in her op-ed piece, Family Second in the New York times, February 28 2007 (and in her book, Lockout: Why America Keeps getting immigration Wrong when our prosperity Depends on Getting It Right.) There seems to be general agreement that the bill failed because it tried to do too many things simultaneously; and that the political space for major reform was unlikely to reappear until after the 2008 presidential election.

Two themes only briefly mentioned in the text need further treatment here.

One is the issue of the impact of immigration on the lives and options facing other groups within the American poor - particularly African Americans. For the latest US material on this, see the study by George Borjas and colleagues of the impact of immigration on African American employment, wages and incarceration rates: in a NBER Working Paper (No. 12518) published in September 2006. For an equivalent European take, see Rebecca Riley and Martin Weale, "Immigration and its effects", National Institute Economic Review (London, No 198, October 2006).

The other theme is the on-going saga of agricultural subsidies and NAFTA. The 2002 farm bill expires in 2007. the Bush Administration began the year proposing limits on subsidies/farmer of just $360,000 a year, and cuts in subsidies for farmers earning over $200,000 a year. That new farm bill is currently making its way through Congress. Its final terms, and their impact on small-scale farmers south of the border, deserve our full attention. The previous one - in a context of increasingly free trade in agricultural produce between Mexico and the United States - according to a 2003 Carnegie Endowment Report put 1.3 million Mexican farmers out if work, many of whom then came north in search of work.

Chapter 8: Is God Necessarily Conservative?

The change in political leadership in Washington after the mid-term elections put the Christian Right into a defensive mode. The Family Research Council, for example, produced a flood of e mail alerts warning of clauses being quietly slipped into pieces of otherwise innocuous legislation by socially-progressive Democrats, or introduced at state-level by like-minded governors. The Religious Right continued to treat court restrictions on anti-gay propaganda, and the ban on prayers in school, as punishing Christians for their beliefs, and as such hate crimes. “Liberal and homosexual extremists want to silence people of faith’, according to the head of the Traditional Values Coalition. Yet in truth the big ticket items on the social agenda in the first half of 2007 all went their way: a second Presidential veto on embryonic stem-cell research; a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling upholding the ban on partial birth abortions, regardless of the health of the mother; and a Presidential call for a constitutional amendment defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman. But Christian Conservatives do continue to have difficulty finding a new political champion – the Presidential candidates they favor lacked popular appeal, and the Republican front runners are too liberal for them on social issues – and in May they lost Jerry Falwell, one of their founding fathers.

Conservative Christians continued to be well placed, however, within the Bush Administration itself. Their disproportionate representation within the Justice Department came to light when the Attorney General was challenged over the dismissal of District Attorneys. So too did the shift in priorities in Justice Department policy that their presence has triggered: more intervention to challenge discrimination on religious grounds, less on grounds of race or national origin (for this, see International Herald Tribune, June 15 2007). A Congressionally mandated report by the Mathematica Policy Research firm, published in April 2007, surveying 2000 teenagers, found no differences in levels of sexual activity among pupils receiving abstinence instruction and those not; but this did not seem to dampen in any way the Conservative enthusiasm for abstinence education. Strange!

Christian Conservatives, so well placed with the Bush Administration, struggled mightily in the second half of 2007 to find a Republican Presidential candidate with whom they could identify. Senator Sam Brownback looked an early contender, but then withdrew. Mitt Romney's Mormon faith alienated many on the Christian Right, in spite of the Mormon Church's size (as the fourth largest in America). His changed position on abortion (from pro-choice to pro-life) also worried many. Rudi Guiliani was too liberal for most Christian conservatives.... In a surprise move in November, however, Pat Robertson endorsed Guilani, to a howl of protest from other Christian Conservatives and the threat from James Dobson to support a third-party candidate if Guilani were to win the nomination. At the October 'Values Voter Summit' in Washington in October, Mitt Romney (27.6%)narrowly defeated Mike Huckabee (27.1%) for delegate support, but with significant minority support for Ron Paul (15%)and Fred Thompson (9.8%). Rudi Guilani was second last (with 2%), ahead only of John McCain. Mitt Romney then gave his long awaited "JFK" speech in December - asserting a similar independence from his church but, unlike Kennedy, also reassuring Christian Conservatives of the central importance of religion to his politics. In the early primaries, however, it was Mike Huckabee, the former Baptist minister, and not Romney, who emerged as the candidate most likely to attract conservative Christian support among the Republican Party faithful.

Away from the hustings, other significant developments in the last half of 2007/early 2008 included (a) a letter to President Bush from 34 leading evangelicals, sent in July, saying that both Israelis and Palestinians had "legitimate rights stretching back for millennia to the lands of Israel/Palestine" and that "they support the creation of a Palestinian state that includes the vast majority of the West Bank". (details, The New York Times, July 29 2007). (b) data from the Census Bureau in September showing a decline in the divorce rate - down from 22.8 divorces per 1000 married couples in 1979 to 16.7 per 1000 in 2005; (c) data released in January 2008 showing the number of abortions dropped to 1.2 million in 2005, the lowest level since 1976 (this in a re[port published in the March edition of the journal Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health).

There were three potential huge developments on the social agenda in the first half of 2008.

· One was the emergence of new evangelical leaders rejecting the programs of the Religious Right. (You can read about them in Bob Moser’s “Who would Jesus vote for?’, The Nation, March 3 2008). That, alongside a major report by the pew Forum on Religion and Public Life showing great fluidity in religious affiliation among contemporary American adults – 44% of whom had changed their faith since childhood, many opting for no faith at all. (US Religious Landscape Survey, February 2008).

· The second was clear evidence from the Census Bureau of the continuing strength of the heterosexual US family, same-sex marriages notwithstanding. According to the Census data for 2004, 70% of all American children live in two-parent homes and the vast majority of those (90%) live with both of their biological parents. The conventional nuclear family is particularly strong among Asian Americans (80.5% of Asian children live with their married biological parents). The proportion for white children is 65.9%, Hispanic 57.1% but for African Americans only 28.2%.

· The third was the legalization of same-sex marriages by the California Supreme Court (May 2008) and the move by New York Governor David Paterson to have same-sex marriages legalized elsewhere recognized as marriages in the state of New York. Needless to say, the FRC, among others, was incensed, and mobilized for action.

For people who like liberal tool kits, I recommend Robin Morgan’s Fighting Words: a toolkit for Combating the Religious Right (New York, Nation Books, 2006). For the detail of the relationship between leading figures on the Religious Right and the state of Israel, see Zev Chafets, A Match Made in Heaven, (New York, HarperCollins, 2007). For the history of the rise of the Christian Right, try Damon Linker, The Theocons: Secular Ameria Under Siege (New York, Anchor Books, 2006/7). For the flavor of current extreme Conservative thinking on contemporary issues, try visiting the website of the Conservative book club Human Events. On their list are a series of volumes, newly published, on the dangers of, among others, Islam and Hilary Clinton. Human Events made Rush Limbaugh their 2007 Man of the Year, and endorsed Fred Thompson for President in January 2008.

Chapter 9: The wisdom of the war in Iraq?

The first half of 2007 was dominated by discussions on the wisdom/otherwise of President Bush’s decision to increase troop levels in Iraq – the so-called "surge". Initially the surge had considerable support in Republican circles, and the active backing of leading Presidential candidate John McCain. A Democratic Party move to block funding for the war was abandoned in May, after the President vetoed their original funding bill; but progressively support for the new initiative weakened even among Republicans. The most significant critic to emerge on the Republican side by mid summer was Senator Pete Domenici. His call for an immediate change in strategy, to bring combat operations to an end by the spring of 2008, echoed similar calls – with a variety of short time lines – from leading Democratic opponents of the war: Joe Biden, Barack Obama, John Edwards, even Hilary Clinton. President Bush also lost his main European ally in June, with the resignation of Tony Blair as UK prime minister. His successor, Gordon Brown, was a known critic of the term “war on terror” and an enthusiastic advocate of the construction of an economically-viable Palestinian state. Opinion polls in the US continued to show generalized disillusionment with the war and the Administration, as the US death toll mounted: over 3,500 military fatalities by June 2007. (See, for example, poll data in The New York Times, May 25 2007: 61% polled thinking that the US should have stayed out of Iraq; 76% thinking things are going badly there.)

The second half of the year saw Iraq diminish as a central political concern for the bulk of working Americans. Domestic issues increasingly took center-stage, though the war remained generally unpopular. Part of the force of the anti-war case was diminished by the apparent success of the surge - as casualty figures among both US soldiers and Iraqi civilians fell from the peaks of 2006. (The reliability of these figures has been challenged regularly - see, for example, Karen DeYoung, "What Defines a Killing as Sectarian" , The Washington Post September 25, 2007 - but the general downward trend in the numbers is no longer seriously contested.) The increase in troop strength was only one of the variables at play: the completion of ethnic cleansing in many areas of Iraq, significant cease fires between key private militias, and a revulsion against al Qaeda tactics in key Iraqi provinces, all played their part. But the 'surge', defended strongly by General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker before the Congress in September, was sufficiently potent to allow the President to talk of reducing troop levels in 2008, back to the pre-surge numbers. Democratic Presidential candidates then followed him along that path, advocating bigger numbers and a quicker timetable: with John Edwards holding to his commitment to ending combat missions in Iraq entirely and to withdrawing all US forces. Neither Barak Obama nor Hillary Clinton were willing to go quite that far, but all of them anticipated a rapid scaling down of US ground force numbers in Iraq in the first year of their Presidency. All of them also remained committed to the war in Afghanistan - reports from where indicated by year's end a significant Taliban resurgence in the South. The Administration committed more ground forces to Afghanistan in January 2008.

Public opposition to the cost of the war continued to be evident. An ABC poll published in The Washington Post in October showed 66% of all those polled wanting either a modest or a sharp reduction in war funding in the next budget round. That, just before the Congressional Budget Office issued its prediction that total expenditure on the 'war on terror' could reach $2400 billion over the next decade (with interest payments making up a quarter of that total). For details, see The Financial Times October 25, 2007. In November, staffers from the Congress's Joint Economic Committee leaked a figure of $1.5 trillion for spending already undertaken to finance military efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. This, as part of a continuing Democratic Congressional campaign to force a change in Iraq policy on the President: so far still to no avail.

More worrying perhaps than the failure of the Congressional Democrats to withhold funding for the war are the residual signs of belligerence coming from the administration towards Iran: a kind of carbon copy of the demonization of Iraq in 2002 that led to war a year later. Vice-President Cheney made one of many warnings to Iran about US opposition to any Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons – from the deck of a US aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, May 2007. An insider’s view of the original demonization can be found in George Tenet’s At the Center of the Storm, published in April. Visibly, the invasion of Iraq neither stabilized/freed that country . Nor did it free the world of al-Qaeda inspired acts of terror. London and Glasgow narrowly missed a repeat of the 2005 bombing in June 2007. If anyone is still in doubt about the inadequacy of the original justifications for the invasion, they should read Jeffrey Smith, ‘Hussein’s Prewar Ties to Al-Qaeda Discounted”, The Washington Post, April 6 2007, reporting a declassified report by the Inspector General confirming that “Hussein’s regime was not directly cooperating with al-Qaeda before the US invasion of Iraq”.

For a critique of the Iraq strategy by its previous commander, Ricardo Sanchez, see The Washington Post October 13 2007. For the current commander's recognition of the fragility of the gains made by the surge, see The Financial Times, December 7 2007. For the key National Intelligence Estimate that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003, see The New York Times December 4 2007. For the Cato Institute's continuing demand for full withdrawal from Iraq, see Ted Galen Carpenter's Don't Get Fooled Again, on the Cato Institute website, September 20 2007. For the Heritage Institute's continuing support of the Bush war strategy, see their webmemo #1602, Making Progress September 7 2007. For a Center-left perspective, see Lawrence Korb et al, How to Redeploy: Implementing a Responsible Drawdown of US Forces from Iraq (Center for American Progress, September 2007).

March 2008 marked the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Some pretty devastating data coincided with the anniversary

The official US military death toll crossed 4000 (March 24): that, plus over 28,000 US military wounded and as high as a million Iraqi civilian casualties. The first half of 2008 witnessed lots of fancy footwork to show sectarian deaths down (see ‘What defines a killing as sectarian’, New York Times, September 25 2007); and repeated claims that the surge in US troop levels was working. (It was only working enough to justify returning to pre-surge deployment levels, according to General Petraeus (this in Congressional briefings, April 2008) with attacks on US military personnel stuck at 60/day, down from their peak of 180/day in June 2007 (New York Times, March 12 2008)

At the same time

• The Pentagon quietly issued a report admitting – after a survey of 600,000 captured Iraqi documents – that no link existed between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda (see CNN, March 14 2008 for details of this quickly buried report)
• Even the Defense secretary Robert Gates admitted in February that the war in Iraq was hurting the effectiveness of the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, and that the US military was now stretched dangerously thin.
• By mid March CBS News was reporting surveys of US popular opinion in which 64% found the war in Iraq not worth the cost in US lives (29% still thought it was); and 66% explicitly opposing the war
• Joseph Stiglitz The Three Trillion Dollar War puts the cost of military intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq at 6 times the original Bush estimate, and at 3 trillion times the estimate of those (including Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz) who initially implied that the war would pay for itself (that Iraqis would bear the lion’s share of the cost). Of course in deaths they have: but not in money. For a full survey of costs, see The Financial Times, March 18 2008; or The Nation March 31 2008
• A string of key players wrote memoirs admitting that the White House deceived the American people in the run up to war: see Ricardo Sanchez, the 2003-4 commander of US forces in Iraq, in his Wiser in Battle: A Soldier’s Story; and then Scott McClellan, in his What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception
• And in early June, a long-delayed Senate committee report endorsed by all its Democratic Party members and by Republicans Chuck Hagel and Olympia Snowe concluded that - when building the case for war in 2002-3 - both the President and Vice President had exaggerated available intelligence and ignored disagreements and counter-views from within the intelligence establishment. The report stopped short of saying the President lied; but commentators (not least Richard Clarke) quickly drew that conclusion in interviews related to the report (this one on Countdown, MSNBC, June 5 2008). The minority report placed the blame squarely on faulty CIA intelligence
  

In the presidential primaries that held center-stage January-June 2008, both major Democratic Presidential candidates proposed steady but rapid withdrawal from Iraq under their presidency. The presumptive Republican Presidential nominee, John McCain, proposed staying in Iraq for as long as it took to secure victory there.

Also to be watched: (1) the Bush Administration's belated attempt to achieve a two-state settlement in Palestine, officially launched at Annapolis in late November 2007; (2) a growing tendency in Republican circles to use the evidence of the surge to build the case that it is (and will be) the democrats who lose the war in Iraq for the American people - the illusion that, had the surge gone on, the war could and would have been "won". For an early commentary on this coming "stab in the back" thesis, see the article with that title by Eric Alterman in October 15 2007 edition of The Nation.

Chapter 10: Is Prosperity Safest in Republican Hands?

The President spent the first half of 2007 talking up the economy, and the appropriateness of his policies for it. In fact, economic growth slowed in the first quarter of 2007, as did job growth; and both job and income insecurity remained major concerns of vast swathes of the US electorate. The Bush Administration has been a deregulating one, freeing business of public oversight and letting profits soar as a trigger to investment. But non-residential investment levels remain lower in the US economy in 2007 than it was in the late 1990s, and median worker earnings, when corrected for inflation, have failed to rise since 2001. Not surprisingly therefore, the state of the economy has moved center stage as the election cycle quickens.

Some aspects of any regeneration strategy are relatively easy for the Democrats. They have pushed for tougher enforcement of existing labor standards by OSHA. They have pressed for restoring worker rights and union membership, through the Employee Free Choice Act that came before the House in February and the Senate in June. (The President immediately promised to veto it!) They have also pressed for sanctions against Chinese imports made ultra-competitive by an undervalued Chinese currency – both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama signed up to that in July. They have signaled their concern with the growth and size of the US trade deficit – but what the Party cannot agree on is its attitude to free trade. The Party is no longer unambiguously free trade – we only have to compare the huge Democratic vote in favor of NAFTA in 1993 with the handful of Democratic votes for trade deals with the Dominican Republic (15) and Oman (22) in 2006 – there are too many voters in the North East and Mid-West threatened by global competition for that. But it also has a strong free trade wing, and is well aware that hard-pressed American workers need low import prices to cushion the impact of rising health costs on average living standards. By May 2007 indeed, Pelosi and Bush were striking deals on trade issues. The Democrats Congressional leadership appears to be seeking a middle ground: using trade agreements to raise labor and environmental standards globally, open new markets to US goods, and use government programs at home to cushion any local unemployment surges, especially policies on health care and retraining. Opinion polling by Ruy Teixeira among others would suggest widespread electoral support for just such a middle way (See his What the Public Really Wants on Globalization and Trade, Center for American Progress, January 18, 2006).

As the fear of recession deepened in the second half of 2007, in the wake of the sub-prime loan debacle, trade issues remained high on the political agenda. Low standards in toys imported from China kept the issue of Chinese trade center-stage, with John Edwards in particular leading the charge for fair/smart trade rather than free trade, for reform of NAFTA, and for penalties against currency manipulation. In August Edwards came out against the US trade agreement with Peru, saying it was bad for American workers. The Peru deal nonetheless cleared the House in November - supported (somewhat reluctantly) by Nancy Pelosi among others - and then the Senate in December. Rising protectionist tendencies then brought the inevitable counter-arguments on the dangers of managed trade. New York Mayor and putative presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg wrote a representative piece - "America must resist protectionism" - in The Financial Times, December 12 2007. A more liberal statement of the same case can be found on the editorial page of the New York Times December 23 2007.

For a guide to these dilemmas, read Paul Krugman, "Divided Over Trade" (New York Times, May 14 2007) and then his apparent change of heart, "Trouble with Trade", (same paper, December 28 2007). Then read two reports by Robert E. Scott for the Economic Policy Institute: Costly Trade With China (Briefing Paper 188, May 2, 2007); and The Wal-Mart Effect (Issue Brief 235, June 26 2007). Scott's view is that 'Wal-Mart's trade deficit with China alone eliminated nearly 200,000 US jobs" between 2001 and 2006. For a more centrist critique of the existing state of the US economy, from the architect of Clinton’s pro-trade economic policies in the 1990s, see Gene Sperling, Five Economic Challenges That Need More Policy Attention, (Center for American Progress, January 22 2007).

The issue of trade loomed large in the 2008 primary season, with both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton linking job loss in states like Pennsylvania to the adverse impact on the US manufacturing base of free trade agreements like NAFTA. That was quite a policy shift for Hillary Clinton: one strongly supported by a string of EPI reports and criticized with equal vigor by reports from the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute. But the free trade/fair trade fissure in 2008 ran largely within the Democratic Party, rather than between the Democrats and the Republicans: with the moderate Democratic Party position placing the blame of job and wage loss elsewhere – on such things as inadequate education and training, and blatant CEO greed. For the EPI position, see Robert E Scott, Pennsylvania stagnation: is NAFTA the culprit? (EPI Viewpoints, April 18 2008). A representative conservative piece is James Roberts, Want More Economic Stimulus? Pass The Pending Free Trade Agreements (Heritage, Webmemo 1830, February 27 2008). For more moderate Democratic positions, see Lawrence summers, ‘a strategy to promote healthy globalisation’, The Financial Times. May 5 2008).

It should be noted that 2008 opened with even the President conceding the possibility of difficult times ahead, and with calls for stimulus packages coming from both sides of the aisle. The evidence for recession was everywhere: bank losses of stupendous scale on bad loans to the housing sector, growing defaults on credit card payments, a slight rise in the rate of unemployment (much of that hidden by loss of work by undocumented workers in construction, agriculture and leisure), and a steadily weakening dollar. A Gallup Poll in January 2008 (published on the website of the Center for American Progress) reported 72% of all those polled describing economic conditions as either 'poor' or 'only fair'.

Chapter 11: Steps to a Better Future

In terms of US domestic policy, the first half of 2007 must count as a period of failure and frustration for the Democrats newly in charge of Congress. Their 6 commitments for their first 100 hours proved harder to deliver than to promise. The minimum wage was raised; but stem cell research fell to a presidential veto, and lower drug prices and reduced oil subsidies bogged down in the Senate. But as the politicians stalled, the designers of post 2008 policy did not. The Centre of American Progress’s Task Force on Poverty produced their From Poverty to Prosperity in April. The Economic Policy Institute produced a series of papers that collected constituted their Agenda for Shared Prosperity. James Galbraith used the columns of The Nation (March 5 2007) to begin a series of the editors on a new progressive economic policy. Dissent used its spring 2007 edition to explore Labor’s Agenda; and The American Prospect provided monthly documentation of the continued unpopularity of Republican policies and the need for a response more radical progressive response than that canvassed by Robert Rubin and the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party. Young Americans in particular appeared to be responding positively to all that. A New York Times/CBS News/MTV poll in late June found more than half of all Americans aged 17-29 prepared to vote for a Democratic presidential candidate in 2008, and more likely than the rest of the US electorate to favor universal health care, open-door policies on immigration and the legalization of gay marriage. (New York Times, June 27 2007). These are early days in a long election season: but so far at least the signs are good: American conservatism is currently in retreat, its credibility undermined by massive income inequality, job insecurity, rising health costs and an unpopular war. Turning that retreat into solid electoral support for progressive solutions to each of these key issues is the task of the age.

And progressive solutions now abound. See, in addition to those mentioned in the first paragrapgh of this chapter update, the Hamilton Projects If, When, How: A Primer on Fiscal Stimulus, published by the Brookings Institution, January 14 2008; David Madland and John Irons, Responsible Investment; A Budget and Fiscal Policy Plan for Progressive Growth, published by the Center for American Progress, January 2008; and Robert Kuttner, "Good Jobs in a Global economy", American Prospect, January/February 2008. The websites of the three leading Democratic Party candidates for President had economic and social programs on offer by the start of 2008: John Edwards committing the US to the national goal of ending poverty in 30 years; Barack Obama promising to strengthen the economy, fight poverty and create a bridge to the middle class; and Hilary Clinton promising to strengthen the middle class by, among other things, 'strengthening unions and ensuring our trade laws work for all Americans'.

(other updatings to follow)


ORIGINAL SOURCES FOR "A LIBERAL TOOL KIT"

The footnotes to each chapter should be a preliminary guide to the sources used, to each of which you are encouraged to go yourself. Sources are things that are "raided" in writing a book like this. They always have much more in them than can be used in any one book. So please, follow them up if you can. They are...for

Chapter 2: Clearing the Decks.

Ann Coulter has her own website where her journalistic writing is archived: Welcome to AnnCoulter.com. So does Thomas Sowell at http://www.tsowell.com. You can reach
Pat Buchanan’s archive at
http://www.theamericancause.org/patarchives.htm;
Rush Limbaugh’s at http://www.rushlimbaugh.com;
and Bill O’Reilly at http://www.billoreilly.com.
The website for Sean Hannity’s television program is http://www.hannity.com.

For a representative sweep through what are now a huge number of similar books, see Ann Coulter Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (Crown Publishing, 2003); Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the war on Terror (Random House, 2003); How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must),(Three Rivers Press, 2004); and Godless: The Church of Liberalism (Crown Forum 2006). Bill O’Reilly’s case is put in his Culture Warrior (Broadway Books, 2006); Sean Hannity’s in Lett Freedom Ring (Harper Collins 2004); and Michael Savage’s in his The Enemy Within: Saving America from the liberal assault on our schools, faith and military (WND Books, 2003); and Liberalism is a Mental Disorder (Nelson Current, 2003). For more of the same, see Mark Levine, Men in Black: How the Supreme Court is Destroying America (Regnery Publishing Inc, 2005); David Horowitz, The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (Regnery Publishing Inc, 2006); Tammy Bruce, The Death of Right and Wrong (Three Rivers Press, 2003); Mark W. Smith, The Official Handbook of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (Regnery Publishing Inc, 2004); and Gregg Jackson, Conservative Comebacks to Liberal Lies (JAJ Publishing, 2007). The American Compass book club sells these and many similar books; and Regnery Publishing Inc. is an important outlet for writers of this very conservative disposition.

For the response, see Steven Rendell et al, The Way Things Aren’t: Rush Limbaugh’s Reign of Error (New Press, 1995); Alan Colmes, Red, White and Liberal: How Left is Right and Right is Wrong (Regan Books, 2003); Al Franken, The Truth: With Jokes (Dutton, 2005); Gerry Spence, Bloodthirsty Bitches and Pious Pimps of Power (St. Martin’s Press, 2006); Katrina vanden Huevel, Dictionary of Republicanism (Nation Books, 2005); the work of George Lakoff at the Rockridge Institute, including his Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Fame the Debate (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004); and Geoffrey Nunberg, Talking Right (Public Affairs, 2006). To begin the move into the academic scholarship on the use of language in politics, see Roderick Hart et al, Political Keywords: Using Language that Uses Us (Oxford University Press, 2005).

Chapter 3: The Wonders of Trickle-Down Economics

The key sources for the arguments for tax reduction come from the websites of the Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation, and from Americans for Tax Reform.

• A persistent voice from the Heritage Foundation has been Daniel Mitchell: see his ‘Taxes, Deficits and Economic Growth”, Heritage Lecture 565, May 14 1996; or his “State of the Union 2006: A Mixed Message on Tax Policy”, Webmemo 981, February 1 2006. From the same source, see Edwin Feulner, “Flat-Out Smart”, October 25 2005; or Ana Isabel Eiras, “The Fiscal Burden of Government is Undercutting US Competitiveness”, Backgrounder No. 1906, January 2006.
• From the Cato Institute see Chris Edwards, “Social Policy, Supply-Side and Fundamental Reform: Republican Tax Policy 1994-2004”, Tax Notes November 1 2004; or ‘The Simple Tax Life”, April 17 2006. Also Dean Stansel, “The Hidden Burden of Taxation”, Policy Analysis No. 302, April 15 1998; and chapters 10 and 11 of the Cato 2004 Handbook on Policy.
• The flat tax argument is laid out in detail in Steve Forbes, Flat Tax Revolution (Regnery Publishing Inc., 2005).
• The case against the National Minimum Wage appears regularly on the website of the Employment Policy Institute.

The challenges to these kinds of arguments are best found in Center-Left think tanks like the Brookings Institution, the Century Foundation and the Economic Policy Institute.

• From the Brookings Institution, see William G. Gale and Peter Orszag, “Should the President’s Tax Cuts Be Made Permanent”, Tax Notes, March 8 2004; or Michael O’Hanlon and Isabel Sawhill, ‘The Right Thing Is Not Permanent Tax Cuts”, June 5 2006.
• From the Century Foundation, see their Reality Check, ‘Why It’s Good to be Rich – And Getting Better All the Time”, (2004); their Issue Briefs Series, Bernard Wasow, “Eight Myths About the Estate Tax” (2002); or Bernard Wasow, “The Tax Cuts that Didn’t Trickle Down”, September 10 2004.
• The EPI position is always best gleaned from their absolutely vital annual report on The State of Working America.
• See also Chapter 6, "Tax Windfalls for the wealthy" in the eighth edition of Current Economic Issues (Dollars and Sense, 2004).
  

The most up-to-date information on wealth and income inequality is in Edward N. Wolff, Top Heavy: The increasing Inequality of Wealth in America and What Can Be Done About It (The New Press, 2002).

• Earlier data is in Paul Ryscavage, Income Inequality in America: An Analysis of Trends (M.E. Sharpe, 1999). Later data is in Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein and Sylvia Allegretto, The State of Working America. (Economic Policy Institute, 2005) pp. 39-105, 399-401, 403-4.
• The data on CEO salary-takes is in Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon, Where Did the Productivity Growth go? National Bureau of Economic Research working paper 11842, December 2005. The fight over the "death tax" is recounted in Michael J. Graetz and Ian Shapiro, Death by a Thousand Cuts (Princeton University Press, 2006)
  
• For the distribution of wealth by ethnic group, see Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas. M. Shapiro, Black Wealth, White Wealth (Routledge, 2006); and Lui Meizhu et al, Color of Wealth: The Story Behind the US Racial Wealth Divide ( The New Press, 2006)
  

The classic study of trickle down economics is Sheldon Danziger and Peter Gottschalk, “Do Rising Tides Left All Boats? The Impact of Secular and Cyclical Changes on Poverty”, AEA Papers and Proceedings, volume 76, number 2, May 1986, pp. 405-410. See also two working papers from the National Bureau of Economic Research: number 8155, February 2001 by Richard B Freeman, “The Rising Tide Lifts…?"; and number 8412, August 2001 by James R Hines, Hilary Hoynes and Alan B. Krueger, “Another Look at Whether a Rising Tide Lifts All Boats”. See also Seth W. Norton, "Economic Growth and Poverty: In Search of Trickle Down", Cato Journal, Fall 2002; and Rags to Riches: The American Dream is Less Common in the United States than Elsewhere, (Century Foundation, 2004).

For material on the minimum wage, begin with Francois Eyraud and Catherine Saget, The Fundamentals of Minimum Wage Fixing (International Labor Office, 2005). Then see Richard Burkhauser and T. A. Finegan, 'The Economics of Minimum Wage Legislation Revisited", Cato Journal vol. 13(1), 1993; the Employment Policy Institute Labor Day 2005 Press Release, Five reasons Not to increase The Minimum Wage; and the Economic Policy Institute's counter-arguments: their 2006 petition for an increase in the minimum wage signed by 650 leading economists, and Liana Fox, Minimum Wage Trends (Washington DC, EPI Briefing Paper, 2006). See also James K Galbraith, Created Unequal (The Free Press, 1998); Michael Horrigan and Ronald Mincy, “The Minimum Wage and Earnings and Income Inequality”, in Sheldon Danziger and Peter Gottschalk (editors), Uneven Tides: Rising Inequality in America ( The Russell Sage Foundation, 1994); and the CQ Researcher Report Minimum Wage (volume 15, number 44, December 16 2005). See too the Living Wage website www.livingwagecampaign.org

For material on social mobility, see Heather Bouchey and Christian Weller, "What the numbers tell us", in James Lardner and David Smith (editors), Inequality Matters (The Free Press, 2005); Bernard Wasow, "Myth 4: Over the course of their lifetimes, Americans are highly likely to enjoy upward economic mobility", Class Warfare Fact and Fiction (Century Foundation, 2004); and Rags to Riches: The American Dream is Less Common in the United States than Elsewhere (Century Foundation, 2004).

Chapter 4: Cutting "welfare" to Help the Poor.

The case for abolishing welfare altogether has been made by, among others, Charles Murray and Michael Tanner. See Murray’s Losing Ground (Basic Books, 1984) and In Our Hands (AEI Press, 2006); or Tanner’s The End of Welfare (Cato Institute: 1996) and The Poverty of Welfare (Cato Institute, 2003). The argument that welfare degrades those who receive it can be found in chapter 3 of Mona Charen’s Do-Gooders: How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim To Help (and the Rest of Us) (Sentinel, 2006).

The case for strengthening the 1996 Act, to reinforce is support of marriage, can be found in Robert Rector and Patrick Fagan, The Continuing Good News About Welfare ReformFathers, Marriage and the Next Phase of Welfare Reform (Acton Institute Policy Forum, Spring 2003). As we note in the chapter, advocacy for the Act’s renewal and extension is primarily a Heritage Foundation project. The Cato Institute wants a far more fundamental reform. For representation website presentations of these two cases, see Patrick Fagan, “Marriage and the Family” (chapter 2 of the Heritage Foundation’s, Issues 2006: The Candidate’s Briefing Book); and Michael Tanner, “Welfare Reform: Less Than Meets the Eye”, (Cato Institute Policy Analysis No. 473, April 1 2003). (Backgrounder, The Heritage Foundation, February 6 2003); and Wade Horn and Andrew Bush,

For the data/debate on the scale of poverty, see Robert Rector and Kirk Johnson, Understanding Poverty in America (Backgrounder 1713, The Heritage Foundation, January 5 2004); Lee Rainwater and Timothy Smeeding, Poor Kids in a Rich Country (Russell Sage Foundation, 2003); Century Foundation, The New American Economy: A Rising Tide That Lifts Only Yachts (2004) and Rags to Riches (2004); Bernard Wasow, Class Warfare Fact and Fiction (Century Foundation, 2004); and chapter 5 of Lawrence Mishel et al, The State of Working America (ILR Press, 2005)

For the data on the working poor, see Ruy Teixeira and Joel Rogers, America’s Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters (Basic Books, 2000); Michael Zweig, The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret (ILR Press, 2000); CQ Researcher Reports on Income Inequality (volume 8, number 15, April 17 1998), Child Poverty (volume 10, number 13, April 7 2000), and Welfare Reform (volume 11, number 27, August 3 2001); David Shipler, The Working Poor: Invisible in America (Alfred A. Knoff, 2004); John. Schwarz and Thomas Volgy, The Forgotten Americans; Thirty Million Working Poor in the Land of Opportunity (W. W. Norton, 1993); and Roberta Iversen and Annie Armstrong, Jobs Aren’t Enough (Temple University Press, 2006).

For the realty of life on welfare, see Jason DeParle, American Dream (Penguin, 2004); Sharon Hays, Flat Broke With Children , (Oxford University Press, 2003); Lynell Hancock, Hands to Work (Perennial, 2003); and William DiFazio, Ordinary Poverty; a little Food and Cold Storage (Temple University Press, 2006). See also William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged (University of Chicago Press, 1987); Joel Blau, The Visible Poor: Homelessness in the United States, (Oxford University Press, 1992); and Valerie Polakow, ‘The Shredded Net: The End of Welfare as We Knew It” and “Savage Distributions; Welfare Myths and Daily Lives”, in Lou Kushnick and James Jennings (editors), A New Introduction to Poverty, (NYU Press, 1999) pp. 167-84 & 241-62.

For the debate on welfare-to-work and its effectiveness, see Jamie Peck, Work-Place (The Guildford Press 1996) and Workfare States (The Guildford Press, 2001); Frances Fox Piven, “Welfare and Work”, in Gwendolyn Mink (editor), Whose Welfare? pp. 83-99; and Christopher Jencks et al, “Welfare Redux”, The American Prospect, March 2006.

For the debate on the underclass, see Michael Katz, The Underclass Debate: Views from History (Princeton University Press, 1993), and his “Reframing the Underclass Debate”, in Lou Kushnick and James Jennings (editors), A New Introduction to Poverty; Rickie Solinger, “Dependency and Choice: the Two Faces of Eve”, in Gwendolyn Mink (editor), Whose Welfare (Cornell University Press, 1999, pp. 7-35); Ronald Mincy, “The Underclass: Concept, Controversy and Evidence”, in Sheldon Danziger (editor), Confronting Poverty (Harvard University Press, 1994); and William Kelso, Poverty and the Underclass (New York University Press, 1994)

There is a very rich scholarly literature on the history of the US welfare state. Begin with Part 1 of Margaret Weir et al, The Politics of Social Policy in the United States (Princeton University Press, 1988); and chapters 4-5 of Theda. Skocpol’s Social Policy in the United States (Princeton University Press, 1995). Then read Jennifer Klein, For All These Rights: Business, Labor and the Shaping of America’s Public-Private Welfare State (Princeton University Press, 2006); and Ron Haskins, Work Over Welfare: The Inside Story of the 1996 Welfare Reform Law (Brookings Institution Press, 2006). For the longer view, see Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, Regulating the Poor (Pantheon Books, 1971)

On the degree to which US welfare provision is exceptional, and exceptionally parsimonious, see Theda Skocpol, ‘The origins of social policy in the United States: a policy-centered analysis’, and S. Steinmo, ‘Rethinking American Exceptionalism’, both in Laurence Dodd and Calvin Jillson (editorss), The Dynamics of American Politic (Westview Press 1994); chapter 2 of Gwendolyn Mink’s Welfare’s End; and Frank. Dobbin, ‘Is America becoming more exceptional?’, in Bo Rothstein and Sven Steinmo, Restructuring the Welfare State (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2002). The relatively incomplete nature of the US welfare system is discussed in an essay of that title by Theda Skocpol in Martin Rein, G. Esping-Andersen and Lee Rainwater, Stagnation and Renewal: The Rise and Fall of Social Policy Regimes (M.E.Sharpe, 1987). For a fascinating counter-view, see Christopher Howard’s The Welfare State Nobody Knows (Princeton University Press, 2006). The uniquely racialized nature of the US welfare state is well documented in the work of Jill Quadagno: including the brief summary by her, titled ‘Unfinished Democracy’ in L. Kushnick and J. Jennings (editors), A New Introduction to Poverty. See also Deborah Ward, The White Welfare State (University of Michigan Press, 2006)

For data on comparative welfare systems, begin with Gosta Esping-Andersen, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, (Princeton University Press, 1990); then read Paul Pierson (editor) The New Politics of the Welfare State, (Oxford University Press, 2001); Peter Hall and David Soskice, (editors.) Varieties of Capitalism (Oxford University Press (2000); Evelyn Huber and John Stephens, Development and Crisis of the Welfare State, (University of Chicago Press 2001); and Jonas Pontusson, Inequality and Prosperity: Social Europe versus Liberal America (Cornell University Press, 2005).

Chapter 5. "Reforming" Social Security

The case for the privatization of Social Security is best found on the website and in the publications of the Cato Institute: for example, in Peter Ferrara and Michael Tanner’s 1998 publication, by the Institute, of A New Deal for Social Security. The counter-case, that either the system needs only modest reform or no reform at all, can be found on the websites and linked publications of the Brookings Institution, the Economic Policy Institute and the Century Foundation, and in the work of Dean Baker. For major statements, see

· Henry J Aaron and Robert D Reischauer, Countdown to Reform: The Great Social Security Debate, (New York, The Century Foundation Press, 1998);
· Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot, Social Security: The Phony Crisis, (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999);
· Peter A Diamond and Peter R. Orszag, Saving Social Security, (Washington DC, Brookings Institution Press, 2005);
· Christan Weller and Edward N. Wolff, Retirement Income: the Crucial Role of Social Security (Economic Policy Institute, 2005);
· Peter Orzag, J. Mark Iwry and William G. Gale, Aging Gracefully (The Century Foundation, 2005)

See also Eric R. Kingson and James H. Schulz (editors), Social Security in the Twenty-First Century, (Oxford, Oxford University Press 1997); and the remarkable clear Century Foundation Press guides to the issues, Social Security Reform (New York, 2005); and Public Policy In An Older America (New York, 2006).

For up-to-date reports, arguing the various positions for reform, see the websites of the Heritage Foundation (its research section on retirement income and social security), of the Cato Institute (its section on Social Security’s Financial Crisis), of the Economic Policy Institute, and of the Social Security Network (at http://www.socsec.org). The Economic Policy Institute website regularly contains fine briefing documents on Social Security, plus memos on current issues in the battle for reform.

There are also a number of very good histories of Social Security, and of the American welfare state of which it is so central a part. I would start with Theda Skocpol’s Social Policy in the United States (University of Princeton Press, 1995) and the earlier collection edited by Margaret Weir, Theda Skocpol and Ann Shola Orloff, The Politics of Social Policy in the United States (Princeton University Press, 1988). On the battle over Social Security, see D. Beland, Social Security: History and Politics from the New Deal to the Privatization Debate University of Kansas Press, 2005); and the quite wonderful study by Nancy Altman: The Battle for Social Security (John Wiley, 2006).

Comparative and general material is very important. The best general analysis currently available is that by John Myles: his joint essay with Paul Pierson, ‘The comparative political economy of welfare reform’ in Paul Pierson (editor), The New Politics of the Welfare State (Oxford University Press, 2000); and his ‘A New Social Contract for the Elderly’, in G. Esping-Andersen (editor), Why We Need a New Welfare State (Oxford University Press, 2002). The Wilson Quarterly for Spring 2006 had an excellent essay on reforms abroad by Sylvester J. Schieber; and the UK Stationery Office in 2004 and 2005 produced two reports from the Pension Commission chaired by Adair Turner that explored, not simply current UK current pensions, but a wider comparative agenda too. For an eleven country study of pension provision (including the US and the UK), see Jonathan Gruber and David Wise (editors), Social Security and Retirement around the World. (University of Chicago Press, 1999). For a sixteen country study, see Ellen M. Immergut, Karen M. Anderson and Isabelle Schilze, The Handbook of Western European Pension Politics pension issues, but a wider comparative agenda too.

Chapter 6: Bringing health to the health care system

The best general history of US medicine is still Paul Starr’s The Social Transformation of American Medicine (Basic Books, 1982). There are excellent studies of different moments or forces that can be consulted to supplement that: particularly Theda Skocpol’s Boomerang (Norton 1996) and Maria Gottschalk, The Shadow Welfare State, (ILR Press, 2000). The problems of the uninsured in the US are discussed in C. McLaughlin (editor), Health Policy and the Uninsured (Urban Institute Press, 2004), and in J. Quadnago One Nation, Uninsured (Oxford University Press, 2006). See also Marilyn Moon, Women and Medical Reform (Century Foundation, 2002); Jonathan Engel, Poor People's Medicine: Medicaid and American Charity since 1965 (Duke University Press, 2006); Jan Gregoire Coombs, The Rise and Fall of HMOS (University of Wisconsin Press, 2006).; and Jacky Law, Big Pharma (Carroll and Graf, 2006).

Begin with two important general essays: Susan Giaimo, “Who Pays for Health Care Reform?”, in Paul Pierson (editor), The New Politics of the Welfare State (Oxford University Press, 2001); and Mark Schlesinger, “The Danger of the Market Panacea”, in James Morone and Lawrence Jacobs (editors), Healthy, Wealthy and Fair: Health Care and the Good Society (Oxford University Press, 2005). Then consult, for the detailed issues, the appropriate sections of the websites of the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation for a range of conservative views, and those of the Brookings Institution for a more liberal perspective.

The fullest challenge to the view of markets in health care developed by Mark Schlesinger is in Richard Epstein’s Mortal Panic (Perseus Books, 1999). The general business case for a market-based health care system can be read in Regina Herzlinger’s Market-Driven Health Care (Perseus Books, 1997). The general case for market-based reform can be found in Michael Cannon and Michael Tanner’s Healthy Competition (Cato Institute, 2005). A more focused set of arguments of a similar kind can be read in Clark Havighurst, Health Care Choices (The AEI Press, 1995); and Mark Pauly and Bradley Herring Pooling Health Insurance Risks (The AEI Press, 1999). See also John Cogan, Glenn Hubbard and Daniel Kessler’s carefully argued Healthy, Wealthy and Wise (The AEI Press, 2006); and John Goodman, Gerard Musgrave and Devon Herrick, Lives at Risk: Single-Payer National Health Insurance Around the World (Rowen and Littlefield, 2004).

Criticisms of market-based health systems can be found in James Morone and Lawrence Jacobs (editors), Healthy, Wealthy and Fair: Health Care and the Good Society (Oxford University Press2005); Charles Morris, Too Much of a Good Thing (The Century Foundation, 2000); Charles Morris, Falling Apart at the Seams (The Century Foundation, 2006); and Leif Wellington Haase, A New Deal for Health (The Century Foundation, 2005). Paul Krugman’s essays in The New York Times are another invaluable source, as is his review essay: ‘The Health Care Crisis and What to Do About It”, New York Review of Books, Vol. 53(5), March 23 2006. See too Henry Aaron et al, Can We Say No: The Challenge of Rationing Health Care (The Brookings Institution Press, 2005) for an intriguing US-UK comparative study.

The comparative origins of post-war health care systems are documented in Jutte Klausen, War and Welfare (St Martin’s Press, 1998). The take off of health care systems, and their current characteristics and difficulties, are well documented for the US, UK and Germany in Michael Moran, Governing the Health Care System (Manchester University Press, 1999). There is also an excellent overview of a similar agenda in R. Freeman, The Politics of Health in Europe (Manchester University Press, 2000).

Chapter 7: Immigration controls in a land of immigrants

The best general introduction to global migration patterns is Stephen Castles and Mark Miller, The Age of Migration (Guildford Publications, 2003). See also Anthony M. Messina and Gallya Lahav (editors), The Migration Reader, (Lynne Reinner, 2006). There are excellent chapters on immigration and immigration policy in the US, Canada, Australia, Great Britain, France, Germany and Japan, in James Lynch and Rita. Simon, Immigration the World Over (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). This work also contains (chapter 8) a very valuable comparative chapter. For a more focused comparative study examining the US, UK and Germany, see Christian Joppke, Immigration and the Nation-State (Oxford University Press, 1999).

For the detail of the US immigration story, see Michele Wucker, Lockout, (Public Affairs, 2006) ; Gordon Hanson et al, ‘Immigration and the US economy”, part 2 of Tito Boeri, Gordon Hanson and Barry McCormick, Immigration Policy and the Welfare System (Oxford University Press, 2002); Bill Ong Hing, Defining America Through Immigration Policy (Temple University Press, 2004); Kevin Johnson, The "Huddled Masses" Myth (Temple University Press, 2004); and chapter 1 of James Lynch and Rita Simon, Immigration the World Over. See also Vernon. M. Briggs, Mass Migration and the National Interest (M. E. Sharpe, 1996); Nicholas Latham, Ronald Reagan and the Politics of Immigration Reform (Praeger, 2000); and Louis Desipio and Rodolfo De la Garza, Making Americans, Remaking America: Immigrants and Immigration Policy (Westview Press, 1998). For the associated patterns of immigration, see chapter 2 of John Isbister, The Immigration Debate: Remaking America (Kumarian Press, 1996); and James Lindsay and Aubrey Singer, Changing Faces: Immigrants and Diversity in the Twenty-First Century (Brookings Institution, 2003).

On the dispute on current numbers and their consequences, see Robert Rector, Amnesty and Continued Low-Skill Immigration Will Substantially Raise Welfare Costs and Poverty (The Heritage Foundation Backgrounder No. 1936, May 16 2006); Pew Hispanic Center, The Labor Force Status of Short-Term Unauthorized Workers, (Fact Sheet, April 13 2006); David A Jaeger, Replacing the Undocumented Work Force (Center for American Progress, March 2006); Lindsay Lovell and Roberto Suro, The Improving Educational Profile of Latino Immigrants, (Pew Hispanic Center, 2006); and William Frey, Diversity Spreads Out (The Brookings Institution, March 2006). For the dispute on economic impact, compare George Borjas, Heaven’s Gate: Immigration and the American Economy (Princeton University Press, 2001) and Julian Simon and Sanford Ungar, The Economic Consequences of Immigration with Alan B. Krueger, Two Labor Economic Issues for the Immigration Debate (Center for American Progress, April 4 2006). (University of Michigan Press, 1999)

On the various positions in the recent policy debate in the US see Peter Duignan and Lewis H. Gann, The Debate in the United States over Immigration (Hoover Institution Press, 1998), Nicholas Mills Arguing Immigration (Sagebrush, 1999), and John Isbister, The Immigration Debate: Remaking America. Individual positions hostile to immigration can be read in Roy Beck, The Case Against Immigration (W. W. Norton, 1996); Pat Buchanan, The Death of the West (Thomas Dunne Books, 2002); Pat Buchanan, State of Emergency (Thomas Dunne Books, 2006); J. D. Hayworth, Whatever It Takes: Illegal Immigration, Border Security and the War on Terror (Regnery Publishing Inc, 2006); Samuel Huntington’s Who Are We? The Challenge to America’s National Identity (Simon and Schuster, 2004); and Tom Tancredo, In Mortal Danger (WND Books, 2006). The counter-case is to be found in Luis Fraga and Gary Segura, “Culture Clash? Contesting Notions of American Identity and the Effects of Latin American Immigration”, and Richard Alba, “Mexican Americans and the American Dream”, both in APSR, Perspectives on Politics, vol. 4, no. 2, June 2006. See also James Lindsay and Aubrey Singer, Changing Faces: Immigrants and Diversity in the Twenty-First Century; and Gordon Hanson, Why Does Immigration Divide America? (NBER Paper, March 2005) and Illegal Immigration from Mexico (NBER paper, March 2006).

On the economic effects of immigration and NAFTA on Mexico, see Gordon Hanson, Emigration, Labor Supply, and Earnings in Mexico (NBER paper, April 2005); David Spener, "Mexican labor at the center of North American economic integration", Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, Summer 2000; and Alejandro Portes, NAFTA and Mexican Immigration (at http://borderbattles.ssrc.org) posted July 31 2006.

Chapter 8: Is God Necessarily Conservative?

The extensive writings of the Christian Right can be approaced through the sites listed on Nate Reister's accompanying blog site. For more liberal arguments, see Randall Blamer, Thy Kingdom Come, New York, Basic Books, 2006; Jim Wallis, God's Politics, New York, HarperCollins, 2006; and Jimmy Carter, Our Endangered Values, New York, Simon and Schuster, 2005. The politics of Christian Right are documented and critiqued in Dan Wakefield, The Hijacking of Jesus, New York, Nation Books, 2006; Bill Press, How The Republicans Stole Christmas, New York, DoubleDay, 2005;and in Clint Willis and Nate Hardcastle, Jesus is Not a Republican, New York, Thunder Mouth Press, 2005. A liberal Christian response to the Christian Right on gay marriage is in David G. Myers and Letha Dawson Scanzni, What God Has Put Together: The Christian Case for Gay Marriage, New York, HarperCollins, 2005. For a more conservative view equally favoring gay marriage, see Jonathan Raunch, Gay Marriage; Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America, New York, Henry Holt, 2004. The best place to start on the dangers of fundamentalism might be with Charles Kimball's When Religion Becomes Evil, San Francisco, HarperCollins, 2002); and on the complexities of fundamentalism in the US, with Andrew Greeley and Michael Hout's The Truth About Conservative Christians, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2006

Chapter 9: The wisdom of the war in Iraq?

The best way into the debate around the Iraq War is through the many official reports into its various phases produced in Washington and in London. At the Washington end, begin by dipping into Craig R. Whitney, The WMD Mirage (Public Affairs, 2005) for a set of extracts from speeches and documents. Then go to the 9/11 Commission Report, Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (W. W. Norton, 2005); Postwar Findings About Iraq’s WMD Programs And Links To Terrorism And How To Compare with Pre-war Assessments, Report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, September 2006. In London, try the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee ninth and tenth reports of Session 2002-3, on The Decision to go to War in Iraq, and Foreign Policy Aspects of the War against Terrorism; or the 2004 Report of a Committee of Privy Counsellors chaired by Lord Butler, Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction. The ebb and flow of white papers from the Government and of reports critical of those reports is followed closely in David Coates and Joel Krieger (with Rhiannon Vickers), Blair’s War, (Polity 2004).

For conservative arguments in the US for and against the war, see Gary Rosen, The Right WarExiting Iraq (Cato, 2004); and William Shawcross, Allies; The US, Britain, Europe and the War in Iraq (Public Affairs, 2004). For liberal arguments in support of the war, see Peter Berman, Terror and Liberalism, (W. W. Norton 2003) and Oliver Kamm, Anti-totalitarianism: the left-wing case for a neo-conservative foreign policy (Social Affairs Unit, 2005). For a liberal supporter who later recanted, see Peter Beinart, The Good Fight: Why Liberals – and Only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again (Harper Collins, 2006). For liberal critiques of the war, placing it in a longer context, see Roger Burbach and Jim Tarbell, Imperial Overstretch (Zed Books, 2004); Chalmers Johnson, Blowback, (Owl Books/Henry Holt, 2000) and The Sorrows of Empire (Owl Books/Henry Holt, 2004); Noam Chomsky, 9-11 (Seven Stories Press, 2001); and Amy Bartholemew’s Empire’s Law (Pluto, 2006).

For insider views from Washington, see Bob Woodward’s trilogy, Bush At War, Plan of Attack,State of Denial ( Simon and Schuster, 2004,5 & 6);Richard Clarke, Against All Enemies(The Free Press, 2004); and Paul O’Neill The Price of Loyalty(Simon and Schuster, 2004) For commentaries and argument around the war, see Francis Fukuyama, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power and the Neoconservative Legacy (Yale University Press, 2005); Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes, America Against The World (Times Books, 2005); Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq; Ken Roth, War in Iraq: Not a Humanitarian Intervention, Human Rights Watch, World Report 2004; David Runciman, The Politics of Good Intentions, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2005.

For insider views from London, see Robin Cook, The Point of Departure (Simon and Schuster 2003); Peter Stothard, 30 Days: A Month at the Heart of Blair’s War, (Harper Collins, 2003); BBC News, The Battle for Iraq (BBC, 2003); Randeep Ramesh, The War We Could Not Stop (Guardian/Faber and Faber, 2003); and Christopher Meyer, DC Confidential (Orion, 2006). On UK involvement in the war, see David Coates and Joel Krieger, Blair’s War; John Kampfner, Blair’s Wars (The Free Press, 2003); Peter Riddell, Hug Them Close (Politico’s, 2003); James Naughtie, The Accidental American (Public Affairs, 2004); Steven Kettell, Dirty Politics: New Labour, British Democracy and the Invasion of Iraq (Zed Books, 2006); and Paul Williams, British Foreign Policy Under New Labour 1997-2005 (Palgrave, 2006).

Chapter 10: Is Prosperity Safest in Republican Hands?

Many people currently argue that it's not.James Hacker's The Great Risk Shift, (New York, Oxford University Press, 2006) is a splendid place to start, particularly if combined with Senator Sherrod Brown's The Myths of Free Trade, New York, The New Press, 2004. For a more general critique of the American model of capitalism, and its vulnerabilities, see Jeremy Rifkin, The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream, London Penguin, 2005; or Will Hutton, A Declaration of Interdependence, New York, W.W. Norton, 2003 (previously published in London as The World We're In). The wider debate on capitalist modes, and the truly enormous literature it has attracted, in surveyed in David Coates, Models of Capitalism: Growth and Stagnation in the Modern Era, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2000.

Chapter 11: Steps to a Better Future

I take great comfort in reading regularly The Nation and The American Prospect, and feel indebted both to Katrina vanden Heuvel and to Robert Reich, among others. I take great comfort too – and much information – from the work produced by think tanks such as The Brookings Institution, The Economic Policy Institute, The Century Foundation and The Center for America Progress. The writings in The Washington Post of EJ Dionne, and in The New York Times of Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, Bill Herbert and Frank Rich are another important source of information and inspiration for me. As recently have been the following important books.

Douglas Massey, Return of the “L” Word, (Princeton University Press, 2000); Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas, (Henry Holt, 2004); Eric Alterman and Mark Green, The Book on Bush (Penguin, 2004); Stanley Aronowitz, Just Around the Corner (Temple University Press, 2005); James Carville and Paul Begala, Take It Back :A Battle Plan for Democratic Victory (Simon and Schuster, 2006); Matthew Kerbel (editor), Get This Party Started (Rowman and Littlefield, 2006); Jared Bernstein, Common Sense for a Fair Economy, (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2006); and Robert Reich, Reason: Why Liberals Will Win The Battle For America, (New York, 2004).