Dead men ruling
Subtitle: how to restore fiscal freedom and rescue our future
By: C. Eugene Steuerle
Contributors: Century Foundation; Urban Institute
Publisher: Century Foundation Press
Published: 2014
Place of publication: New York, New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 197
ISBN-13: 9780870785382
Subjects: Public Debts; Public investments; Budget deficits; Government spending policy
Description: The news coming out of Washington, D.C., and reverberating around the nation increasingly sounds like a broken record: low or zero growth in employment, inadequate funds to pay future Social Security and Medicare obligations, declining rates of investment, cuts in funding for education and children's programs, arbitrary sequesters or cutbacks in good and bad programs alike, underfunded pensions, bankrupt cities, threats not to pay our nation's growing debts, rancorous partisanship, and political parties with no real vision for twenty-first-century government.

In Dead Men Ruling, C. Eugene Steuerle argues that these seemingly separable economic and political problems are actually symptoms of a common disease, one unique to our time. Unless that disease and the history of how it spread over time is understood, Steuerle says, it is easy for politicians and voters alike to fall prey to believing in simple but ineffective nostrums, hoping that a cure lies merely in switching political parties or reducing the deficit or protecting and expanding our favorite program.

Despite the despairing claims of many, Steuerle points out that we no more live in an age of austerity than did Americans at the turn into the twentieth century with the demise of the frontier. Conditions are ripe to advance opportunity in ways never before possible, including doing for children and the young in this century what the twentieth did for senior citizens, yet without abandoning those earlier gains. Recognizing this extraordinary but checked potential is also the secret to breaking the political logjam that as Steuerle points out was created largely by now dead (or retired) men.
Notes: "A project of the Urban Institute and the Century Foundation."

Includes bibliographical references (pages 163-182) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction : the challenge at hand; title: At a fiscal turning point; title: From whence it came; title: Postwar fiscal policy : the gradual demise of fiscal democracy; title: From controlling the present to controlling the future; title: The four deadly economic consequences; title: The three deadly political consequences; title: The counter-revolution; title: Envisioning a better future; title: Restoring fiscal freedom : another shot at greatness.