The Divided Welfare State: The Battle over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States
Hacker (political science, Yale) tries to explain why "the  United States devotes much less of its economy to government  social spending than do other Western nations" by meticulously  tracing the history of New Deal and Great Society legislation  and programs and by showing that social programs in this country  have attempted to balance the values of equity and freedom.  Analyzing pensions, health insurance, and private and public  benefits in separate sections, he focuses on how the deeply  ingrained history of employer-sponsored pensions and health  insurance has swung the pendulum toward utilizing private  initiatives rather than enhanced federal programs to provide  Americans with social benefits. In his final chapter, Hacker  discusses the future of what he calls the American welfare  regime, insisting that we need to understand the connectivity  and tradeoffs between public support of social programs and the  increasing willingness of the federal government to entertain  privatization. Written in a scholarly style, with plenty of  jargon, statistical tables, charts, and graphs, and references  to primary and secondary sources cited in the extensive,  annotated endnotes, this is a measured analysis of an important  political issue affecting all Americans. For large public  libraries, most university libraries, and some four-year college  libraries.Jack Forman, San Diego Mesa Coll. Lib., CACopyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.