The Age of Austerity - How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics

Zusatztext 77503059 Informationen zum Autor Thomas Edsall is an American journalist and academic, best known for his 25 years covering politics for the Washington Post .  He holds the Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Professorship in Public Affairs Journalism at Columbia University, and writes an online 2012 election column for the New York Times . In addition, he is a correspondent for The New Republic , and the author of Chain Reaction , a Pulitzer Prize finalist (1992), The New Politics of Equality (1984), and Building Red America (2006), among other works.  Edsall is also the winner of the Carey McWilliams Award of the American Political Science Association.  Mr. Edsall lives in New York and Washington, D.C. with his wife, Mary. Klappentext One of our most prescient political observers provides a sobering account of how pitched battles over scarce resources will increasingly define American politics in the coming years-and how we might avoid, or at least mitigate, the damage from these ideological and economic battles. In a matter of just three years, a bitter struggle over limited resources has enveloped political discourse at every level in the United States. Fights between haves and have-nots over health care, unemployment benefits, funding for mortgage write-downs, economic stimulus legislation-and, at the local level, over cuts in police protection, garbage collection, and in the number of teachers-have dominated the debate. Elected officials are being forced to make zero-sum choices-or worse, choices with no winners. Resource competition between Democrats and Republicans has left each side determined to protect what it has at the expense of the other. The major issues of the next few years-long-term deficit reduction; entitlement reform, notably of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid; major cuts in defense spending; and difficulty in financing a continuation of American international involvement-suggest that your-gain-is-my-loss politics will inevitably intensify. Chapter One Austerity In a matter of just three years a bitter struggle over limited resources has enveloped political discourse at every level in the United States. Pitched battles between haves and have-nots over health care, taxes, union rights, and unemployment benefits—as well as, at a local level, cuts in police protection, garbage collection, and the numbers of teachers—have dominated public debate. A stagnant economy, ballooning deficits, and the mushrooming strength of antigovernment forces are producing a set of wedge issues centered on fiscal conflict and budget shortages to create a new politics of scarcity. The ranks of the disadvantaged have exploded. A total of 28.9 million American men and women in July 2011 were either out of work or underemployed, including 13.9 million unemployed actively looking for work, 8.4 million classified as “involuntary part-time workers,” and 6.6 million who wanted a job but had given up looking, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The severity of joblessness and the prospects for finding work have only minimally abated: in June 2011 there were 4.01 million men and women who had been out of work for at least a year, and nine unemployed job seekers for every two job openings, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Resource competition between Democrats and Republicans now leaves each side determined to protect what it has at the expense of the other. Worklessness and an underfunded safety net are forcing elected officials to make zero-sum choices—or worse, to enter negative-sum negotiations in which gains and losses add up to less than zero. There are additional measures of distress. Financial pressures on the working and middle classes have escalated, forcing survival strategies that leave no room for sharing with...

Product details

• Authors: Thomas Byrne Edsall
• Publisher: Anchor Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 04.09.2012
• EAN: 9780307946454
• ISBN: 978-0-307-94645-4
• No. of pages: 272
• Dimensions: 132 mm x 203 mm x 20 mm
• Subject: Social sciences, law, business > Political science > Political science and political education