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The enormous scale of the COVID-19 crisis has launched new debates over investment in unemployment insurance and infrastructure, rising national debt, and more. Who better than Jonathan Gruber to guide students through the particulars? In the new edition of his best-selling text, Gruber covers the fundamentals of public finance with an emphasis on responses to Covid-19, highlighting the variety of decisions that the government had to make and the controversies they engendered. Other new and expanded coverage includes political expediencies and positioning on energy policy, political polarization and policymaking, the ACA and the future of the U.S. healthcare system, Universal Basic Income, the impact of recent tax reforms on labor supply, and efforts to tax wealth.
List of contents
PART I Introduction and Background1 Why Study Public Finance?
2 Theoretical Tools of Public Finance
3 Empirical Tools of Public Finance
4 Budget Analysis and Deficit Financing
PART II Externalities and Public Goods5 Externalities: Problems and Solutions
6 Externalities in Action: Environmental and Health Externalities
7 Public Goods
8 Cost-Benefit Analysis
9 Political Economy
10 State and Local Government Expenditures
11 Education
PART III Social Insurance and Redistribution12 Social Insurance: The New Function of Government
13 Social Security
14 Unemployment Insurance, Disability Insurance, and Workers' Compensation
15 Health Insurance I: Health Economics and Private Health Insurance
16 Health Insurance II: Medicare, Medicaid, and Health Care Reform
17 Income Distribution and Welfare Programs
PART IV Taxation in Theory and Practice18 Taxation: How It Works and What It Means
19 The Equity Implications of Taxation: Tax Incidence
20 Tax Inefficiencies and Their Implications for Optimal Taxation
21 Taxes on Labor Supply
22 Taxes on Savings
23 Taxes on Risk Taking and Wealth
24 Taxation of Business Income
25 Fundamental Tax Reform and Consumption Taxation
Glossary G-1
References R-1
Index I-1
