Days 1-6 Flashcards
Understand the function of Social Welfare programs (26 cards)
Means-Tested
Based on income and assets; all welfare programs are means-tested income transfers
Entitlement
Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, Unemployment and Welfare Programs.
Entitlement programs are rights granted to citizens and certain non-citizens by federal law.
DEFINITION of POWER OF PROBLEM
A condition becomes a problem when recognized by a significant number of people or a number of significant people.
Successfully defining conditions as problems (smog, learning disabilities, global warming, etc.) is perhaps the most important single step in obtaining policy change.
PLURALISM
A core political science theory about how groups function in our political system
- adherents believe the political process is dominated by a number of autonomous groups that compete in an open political system
- professional organizations, trade unions, business and financial lobbies
- these various groups go about attempting to secure their policy preferences
- the result of this competition among groups produces observed policies
- pluralists hold that there is equality in political opportunity
ELITE THEORY
The term power elite was used to describe a relatively small, loosely knit group of people who tend to dominate American policymaking
bureaucratic, corporate, intellectual, military, and government elites who control the principal institutions in the U.S. and whose opinions and actions influence the decisions of policymakers
FEDERAL DECISION THAT GAVE RISE TO SUPER PACS
SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission:
A federal court found restrictions on individual contributions to organizations seeking to influence elections to be unconstitutional.
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission:
This U.S. Supreme court decision decided that limits on corporate and union spending to influence elections was unconstitutional
Homestead Act of 1862
The Homestead Act of 1862 signed into law by Abraham Lincoln turned over vast amounts of the public domain to private citizens.
270 million acres or 10% of the area of the United States was claimed and settled under this act there was a lot of corruption meant to stem land monopoly but actually facilitated due to the difficulty of farmers to
get to the auctions, raise the capital and successfully farm speculators often worked for wealthy land owners to outbid or lay claim to the land before others could
What can Super Pacs do to raise money.
•Super PACS can raise unlimited money from corporations, associations, individuals, unions and spend that money to advocate for candidates.
What are the categories of spending in the national budget?
Mandatory (63%) - $2.58 trillion
Discretionary (30%) - $1.21 trillion
Interest on Federal Debt (8%)- $316 billion
What was the policy to deal with 4 million newly freed slaves?
Freedman’s Bureau
Mired in conflict from inception
“There was no tradition of government responsibility for a huge refugee population and no bureaucracy to administer a large welfare, employment and land reform program.”
The Freedman’s Bureau was dismantled in 1872, just 7 years after its inception.
The Gilded Age
1865-1893
Period of rapid growth
Large industries developing monopolies
Scandals, politicians and industry
Extreme wealth for some and marked poverty and hardship for many, often described as the birth of modern capitalism spurred by laissez faire economic policy.
What was the school of thought prior to the stock market crash of 1929?
Americans subscribed to a “boom and bust” school of economics.
America’s political and economic system remained largely laissez-faire from the establishment of the country through the Great Depression, it was widely believed that the economy would grow and prosper if market forces were left to their own. Until the Great Depression, monetary policy in modern terms did not exist.
Who had the idea that individuals acting in their own self-interest, would lead to a stable system and assumes markets are inherently stable?
Adam Smith
How does Keynesian macroeconomic theory represents a sharp departure from classical economics?
It assumes market economies are inherently unstable and that there is no self-correcting property in the market to return a depressed economy to growth and full employment.
The Keynesian solution to the inherent instability of the market was?
Is for government to actively manage the economy through fiscal and monetary policy, government should intervene with fiscal and monetary policy to promote full employment, stable prices and economic growth
What is Fiscal policy?
Government taxing or spending to stimulate or slow the economy.
According to Keynesian economics, when the government changes the levels of taxation and government spending, it influences aggregate demand and the level of economic activity.
What is Monetary Policy?
The term “Monetary Policy” refers to what the Federal Reserve, the nation’s central bank influences the amount of money and credit in the U.S. economy.
What happens to money and credit affects interest rates (the cost of credit) and the performance of the U.S. economy.
What caused the rapid expansion of the federal government into social welfare?
New Deal and a collection of programs to deal with the many difficulties of the Great Depression.
New Deal as the beginning of the modern welfare state
the changing nature of the office of the president as a policy-making entity under FDR whether New Deal policies, or, more likely the massive spending needed for WW II build up, the country enjoyed a strong economy post-WWII
What were the marginal tax rates for 2016?
7 Brackets
10%, 15%, 25%, 28%, 33%, 35%, 39.6%
4 filing status, rates vary by these.
Based on taxable income not gross income
Taxable income = Gross income – deductions/exclusions
What kind of analyses matter?
Distributional: a common way of framing; benefits based on income quintile.
Secondary: How increased or decreased “after tax” dollars affect spending, differences by quintile
Macroeconomic: Assumptions are needed for these analysis; involves prediction about how various actors will behave under new tax conditions.
What can we know from what we observe?
We have implicit assumptions about why folks are in the predicament they are in.
- Policymakers implicit and explicit assumptions are expressed in policy so –
- It really matters what the origins of a problem are assumed to be.
What is the Human capital theory
Refers to the skills, education, health, and training of individuals.
•The term capital is used because these skills or education are an integral part of us that is long-lasting, and can be applied in the labor market.
How does this Human capital theory work?
If we theorize a labor market that works freely, the question of poverty is one of a lack of human capital skills.
We then think about job training, higher levels of education, technical training for growing segments of the economy, etc.
What does the data tell us?
This intuition about education increasing earnings is supported by looking at large national data.
Census data shows us that average earnings for those with less education is lower than those with more education.
