Balanced Budgets and American Politics - Softcover

Savage, James D.

9780801496219: Balanced Budgets and American Politics

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801496217 ISBN 13: 9780801496219

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 1990

Winner of the Harold D. Lasswell Award from the American Political Science Association. A Choice Outstanding Academic Book for 1988-89

"The ideology of a balanced federal budget has maintained a remarkable hold over American politics. No generation has been free from pitched battles over national debt. In this lively and well-written book, James D. Savage contends that the federal deficit must be understood as a primarily political, not an economic, phenomenon whose symbolism has shaped more than two hundred years of American economic policy."---Journal of Politics

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Review:

"Substantive and fascinating."
---Susan J. Tolchin, New York Times Book Review

"Questions of budget deficits, constitutional amendments for a balanced budget...and reliance on huge continuing resolutions...This book provides an excellent context and historical backdrop for these battles."
---American Political Science Review

"A terrific, and desperately needed, historical framework for the debate over balanced budgets."
---Lawrence J. Haas, National Journal

"A remarkable blend of historical, economic, and political analysis, this book is destined to become a classic. Savage demonstrates that budget deficits have, since the establishment of the nation, been far more than instruments of economic policy...[The book's] interweaving of history and analysis [makes it] an indispensable guide to the development of political ideas about economic issues."
---Choice

From Library Journal:

Savage presents an account of the politics, economics, and history of U.S. fiscal policy, with an emphasis on the balanced federal budget as a political symbol. His chapters focusing on the politics of the budget, especially during the Reagan administration, are excellent, but the rest is much less satisfactory. He argues that recent federal budget deficits are not responsible for inflation, high interest rates, or lack of private investment, but does this by selectively surveying the economics literature and ignoring any studies that contradict his notion. Assuming that deficits are benign, he then reinterprets U.S. fiscal history. Although the argument is polemical and strained, appropriate for research libraries.William J. Hausman, Coll. of William & Mary, Williamsburg, Va.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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