Mehrotra, Ajay K.

English

Indiana University Bloomington Maurer School of Law

Maurer School of Law: Indiana UniversityDigital Repository @ Maurer LawArticles by Maurer Faculty Faculty Scholarship2014Book Review. Deficits, Debt, and the New Politicsof Tax Policy by Dennis S. IppolitoAjay K. MehrotraIndiana University Maurer School of LawFollow this and additional works at: http://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/facpubPart of the Economic Policy Commons, and the Taxation-Federal CommonsThis Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the FacultyScholarship at Digital Repository @ Maurer Law. It has been accepted forinclusion in Articles by Maurer Faculty by an authorized administrator ofDigital Repository @ Maurer Law. For more information, please contactwattn@indiana.edu.Recommended CitationMehrotra, Ajay K., "Book Review. Deficits, Debt, and the New Politics of Tax Policy by Dennis S. Ippolito" (2014). Articles by MaurerFaculty. 2536.http://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/facpub/25361293Book Reviewsthe legalization of wiretapping in 1968; the 1971 break-in at the Federal Bureau of  In-vestigation (fbi)’s residence agency in Media, Pennsylvania; the Supreme Court’s ruling in United States v. United States District Court (1972); and the enactment of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978. These challenges to the “national security state,” she concludes, did not fundamentally transform how federal intelligence operations were con-ducted but, nonetheless, “had a lasting impact on the nation’s most powerful institutions and shaped American political culture well into the twenty-first century” (p. 2).Scott’s thoughtful monograph, however, fails to adequately survey all of the important policy developments of the era. First, her ac-count of the controversy surrounding the le-galization of wiretapping in 1968 misses an important provision of that initiative: the war-rant requirement would not limit a president’s constitutional powers in the area of foreign intelligence. In addition, Scott fails to discuss earlier secret executive directives authorizing fbi wiretapping and bugging operations pol-icy and the concurrent but unsuccessful pres-idential efforts between 1941 and 1962 to convince Congress to legalize “national secu-rity” wiretaps. This background is important for an understanding of both the Supreme Court’s ruling in United States v. United States District Court and of Congress’s revisiting of this matter when enacting the Foreign Intelli-gence Surveillance Act. Second, in her discus-sion of Congress’s post-1975 failure to enact legislative charters to govern the operations of the U.S. intelligence agencies, Scott cursorily describes both the debate over the 1978 bill S. 2525 (on national intelligence reorganiza-tion and reform) and the 2007 S. 1612 (to amend the penalty provision in the Interna-tional Emergency Economic Powers Act) and the domestic security guidelines issued by At-torneys General Edward H. Levi (in 1976) and William French Smith (in 1983). Final-ly, she avoids any discussion of President Jim-my Carter’s 1978 executive order no. 12036, which tightened the standards governing for-eign intelligence operations instituted under President Gerald Ford’s 1976 executive order no. 11095, and she also does not discuss the relaxation of those standards in 1981 under President Ronald Reagan’s executive order no. 12333.Athan TheoharisMarquette UniversityMilwaukee, Wisconsindoi: 10.1093/jahist/jau144Deficits, Debt, and the New Politics of Tax Pol-icy. By Dennis S. Ippolito. (New York: Cam-bridge University Press, 2012. xviii, 282 pp. Cloth, $85.00. Paper, $28.99.)The United States is currently on an unsus-tainable fiscal path. Because of programmatic and demographic pressures on entitlement spending and the present political commit-ment to maintaining historically low levels of taxation, long-term deficit and debt levels are projected to reach unparalleled heights. This impending fiscal crisis, Dennis S. Ippolito ar-gues in his new book, is rooted in the “parti-san disconnect between spending and revenue policy that has taken hold over the past several decades and remains firmly in place despite the unprecedented deficit and debt problems the nation now faces” (p. xii). The decoupling of tax and spending policies, Ippolito persua-sively contends, is less a result of inexorable economic or demographic forces than of criti-cal choices made by political elites in the last thirty years of the twentieth century.Ippolito begins his narrative with a brief his-tory of federal taxation from the colonial era to the start of World War II. Although this open-ing chapter is mainly a synthesis of secondary sources and historical statistics, it serves as a useful prologue to Ippolito’s central focus: the post-1940 development of budgetary policies and politics. Nearly four-fifths of the book is devoted to exploring the changing conceptions of national fiscal policies from the 1940s to the present. Ippolito’s goal is to contrast what he refers to as the “stable era” of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations—when budgets were regularly balanced and debt levels were declining—with the destabilization of federal budget policies that began to emerge in the wake of the Great Society (p. 40). at Indiana University Libraries Technical Services/Serials Acquisitions on April 12, 2016http://jah.oxfordjournals.org/Downloaded from 1294 The Journal of American History March 2014Beginning in the late 1960s, lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle began to move away from the traditional commitment to bal-anced budgets. Democrats, eager to expand the Great Society’s domestic spending initia-tives amid increased military spending for the Vietnam War, believed they could provide both “guns and butter.” Republicans, mean-while, attempted to restrain the growth of the American welfare state, even as they contin-ued to support increased defense spending. By the 1980s they began to exacerbate the budgetary disconnect by focusing on tax cuts as the primary engine of economic growth. Desipite episodic and fleeting moments of fiscal self-control, particularly during the 1990s, the last fifty years have witnessed a fundamental transformation in American fiscal policies. The historical adherence to a balanced-budget rule “has been modified to accommodate economic stimulus strategies, partisan spending priorities, and the electoral interests of increasingly competitive national parties” (p. xiii).Historians interested in a new interpre-tation of post–World War II American fis-cal history may be disappointed with Ippoli-to’s study. Drawn exclusively from published sources—mainly government documents—Deficits, Debt, and the New Politics of Tax Pol-icy simply supplements the existing political historiography by detailing the give and take of high politics between presidential adminis-trations and Congress. In this sense, the book is more a compendium of useful facts, figures, and seminal events than a sustained historical argument about change over time. Ippolito does occasionally return to the main theme of exploring the causes and consequences of the political disconnect between tax and spending policies, but his central focus is on making a compelling empirical case—and at times a subtle, normative one—for why the United States has lost its fiscal discipline and why it ought to try to regain it.Ajay K. MehrotraIndiana UniversityBloomington, Indianadoi: 10.1093/jahist/jau145The Other Welfare: Supplemental Security In-come and U.S. Social Policy. By Edward D. Berkowitz and Larry DeWitt. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013. xii, 279 pp. $45.00.)Thanks to Martha Derthick’s Policymaking for Social Security (1979), there is a comprehen-sive legislative history of the old-age pension provisions of the Social Security Act of 1935. In The Other Welfare, the historian Edward D. Berkowitz and the Social Security Admin-istration (ssa) chief historian, Larry DeWitt, undertake a similar project for Supplemental Security Income (ssi), the 1972 program that emerged as a more limited and more conserva-tive alternative to Richard M. Nixon’s failed guaranteed-income proposal, the Family As-sistance Plan. ssi would unite and nationalize the scattershot relief programs for those blind, aged, and disabled people who were typically without the work histories that would have made them eligible for the disability program that had been added to the Social Security program in 1950 (Social Security Disability Income). Berkowitz and DeWitt offer an exception-ally fine history of ssi. They explain clearly and comprehensively how the program came to be; track the implementation of the new program, paying special attention to its rather disastrous launch (offering a timely reminder of the dif-ficulties inherent in implementing any large, new federal-state program, even when man-aged by an agency as generally competent as the ssa); show how the program came more and more to serve disabled, working-age adults (confounding expectations that most benefi-ciaries would be the elderly); describe efforts in the Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan eras to reduce the recipient rolls and cut costs; ac-count for the role ssi played in the 1990s wel-fare reform efforts (with welcome attention to the sloppy, hysterical reporting that helped raise opposition to the program and fear of rampant fraud within it); and conclude with reflections on the current state and potential vulnerability of the program. The book in-stantly becomes the central text about ssi—a program that has been neglected in the history of the American welfare state and in academic analysis of contemporary social policy.  at Indiana University Libraries Technical Services/Serials Acquisitions on April 12, 2016http://jah.oxfordjournals.org/Downloaded from 

Book Review. Deficits, Debt, and the New Politics of Tax Policy by Dennis S. Ippolito

bepress Legal Repository

https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3538&context=facpub

Book Review. Deficits, Debt, and the New Politics of Tax Policy by Dennis S. Ippolito

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Indiana University Bloomington Maurer School of Law

bepress Legal Repository