American Welfare State Research Articles

Who will win from the trade war? Analysis of the US–China trade war from a micro perspective

ABSTRACT Over the past two years, China and the US are going on a trade war imposing tariffs on one another’s goods and this is hurting each other’s businesses. The focus of the present paper is to analyse the costs and benefits of tariff policy changes by the two economies. A partial equilibrium model approach based on highly disaggregated data shows that when China and the US are moving rapidly towards tariff imposition, it is largely deleterious from both the economy’s perspective in terms of trade and welfare. If we compare both the economies, the losses would be considerably higher for the US than China. However, trade liberalization is clearly associated with improved trade flows in the US and additional welfare gains in China. China would gain particularly in consumer goods, industrial goods and agricultural goods whereas the US would be better off opening its consumer goods and industrial goods.

The U.S.–China trade war: Tariff data and general equilibrium analysis

The current trade war between the United States and China is unprecedented in modern history. This study introduces a database of tariff increases resulting from the trade war and quantifies the impacts using the canonical GTAPinGAMS model calibrated to the recently released GTAP version 10 accounts. We find that the remaining tariff increases as of March 2020 after the phase one trade deal decrease welfare in China by 1.7% and welfare in the United States by 0.2%. Impacts on sectoral revenue are reported for both countries. China's exports to and imports from the United States are reduced by 52.3% and 49.3%. The trade flow between the United States and China will be diverted to their major trade partners resulting in higher welfare in those countries, including many Asian countries. The estimated impacts are robust to using alternative trade elasticities and are amplified in the absence of the phase one tariff reductions.

The effect of paid maternity leave on low‐income families' welfare use in the US

AbstractDespite the critical role that paid maternity leave can assume in the economic lives of low‐income families, research to date has paid insufficient attention to whether paid maternity leave reduces welfare use for low‐income families. Using the Current Population Survey (CPS) March Supplement 2007–2014 with the difference‐in‐difference (DiD) technique, this study finds a significant policy effect of paid maternity leave on reducing the probability of using Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), TANF benefit amounts and TANF participation length. This study confirms that paid maternity leave is likely to prevent low‐income families from using welfare during job interruptions stemming from the birth of a child. Given that TANF is often associated with negative political and social connotations, paid maternity leave can be used as an important social policy to improve economic security as well as offer empowerment in overall social standing for low‐income mothers. The discussion focuses on the implications of the findings in a broader context of American welfare states.

The Politics of Personal Responsibility, Credit, and the American Welfare State

Personal responsibility is a prominent theme in the politics of the American welfare state. We argue that in a context of easy access to credit, political rhetoric around personal responsibility is coded racial language that resonates with Americans who perceive themselves as no longer needing government support, shifting their support from public to private, credit-based funding of social goods. We support our argument empirically in two ways. First, state-level observational data shows that in states where voters hold stronger personal responsibility norms, easier borrowing conditions are associated with more conservative economic policies. In states with more liberal economic norms, changes in borrowing constraints do not influence policy liberalism. Second, we draw on an original survey to document that beliefs in personal responsibility are tied to racial resentment and interact with perceptions of easy credit access to strengthen support for private instead of public spending on education and unemployment insurance.

Entitlements in the crosshairs: how sovereign credit ratings judge the welfare state in advanced market economies

How do credit rating agencies (CRAs) judge welfare policies in advanced market economies (AMEs)? Scholars worry that market pressures constrain AMEs’ ability to retain their welfare arrangements, but the role of ratings in generating such pressures remains unstudied, despite their well-known influence on governments’ funding costs. CRAs’ communications indicate that CRAs assign lower ratings to countries with large spending commitments that are difficult to promptly change in response to adverse economic shocks, as insurance against drastic negative corrections (‘rating failures’). Therefore, we hypothesize that famously inflexible entitlement programs trigger rating penalties, but welfare spending that is easier to adjust does not. Our panel analysis of ratings from Standard&Poor’s, Moody’s and Fitch awarded to 23 AMEs between 1995 and 2014 demonstrates that entitlement spending systematically incurs lower ratings, but discretionary spending on public employment and social services does not. In contrast, bond-spreads are not affected by entitlement spending, once the effect of ratings is controlled for. We conclude that CRAs’ desire to avoid ‘rating failures’ is an important factor in generating negative market reactions against entitlements.

Comparison of Crude Oil Supply Cost Between Ship Rental and Single Point Mooring

Today, the need for fuel oil and gas are increasing. Fuel oil and gas is the energy needed by the public to support daily activities. To meet the people needs for fuel oil and gas, the company is not only focused on the Indonesian people needs. Production principle carried out is make to stock, so the company makes direct purchase of imported and domestic crude oil and through government entitlement. Currently this fuel oil company has a problem that is quite urgent because the currency value is related to the crude oil procurement. This causes the profit obtained by the company is not optimal. So it needs to be evaluated relates to crude oil procurement policies in the company. As a result, the total costs spent by GP ship rental policy is $ 53.572.938, but by using the SPM (Single Point Mooring) method will save around $ 114.300.205 for 4 years scale or $ 28.575.051 in a year.

Perceptions of Prominent Animal Welfare and Veterinary Care Organizations in the United States.

Simple SummaryPublic perception of animal well-being, and pet animal well-being in particular, remains a significant point of contention. This study ranks prominent animal welfare and veterinary care organizations’ perceived impact on pet animal well-being and health care based on U.S. residents’ perceptions, while explicitly accounting for variation between pet-owning and non-pet-owning households. Results suggest that the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) is perceived as the most impactful organization followed by the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). The American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) and the American Humane Association (AHA) were tied for third most impactful. The American Animal Hospital Association (AAHA) and the American Pet Products Association (APPA) were tied for fourth most impactful while Banfield was perceived as the least impactful.U.S. residents’ perceptions of the impact of prominent animal welfare and veterinary care organizations on pet animal well-being and health care may not be linked to the organization’s stated mission and effectiveness in advancing it, but to the level of recognition people have for the groups. An online survey of 1000 U.S. residents was used to understand the perceived impact of organizations with self-stated dedication to pet animal well-being. Using a Likert-scale, respondents ranked 13 prominent organizations as having a low to high impact on pet animal well-being and health care. The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) had the highest perceived average impact, while People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) had the lowest. A best–worst scaling (BWS) choice experiment was conducted with 7 of the initial 13 organizations to elicit relative rankings by forcing tradeoffs by respondents. Consistent with the Likert-scale results, the ASPCA was ranked as the most impactful organization. The ASPCA’s perceived impact on pet animal well-being and health care may be linked to their high level of recognition among respondents, as this was the organization that respondents most frequently reported having seen/heard stories related to animal well-being and health care.

Student Listening Preferences and the Use of Storytelling to Teach About Community Resources

BackgroundRehabilitation Counseling programs often require that the curriculum include education about basic community resource and entitlement programs for people with disabilities. The fact-based nature of this content can make it challenging for students to engage with in a meaningful way, especially in the online learning environment. Storytelling holds promise as a means to bring this content to life in online courses; however, little is known about how students interact with digital storytelling assignments.ObjectivePodcasts may be a more convenient way to deliver the audio to the students, as use of the technology as well as overall smartphone usage has exploded in recent years.MethodsThis article examines the results a survey of 44 students who reported their listening preferences for a weekly storytelling assignment.FindingsResults confirm previous findings in the literature about how students interact with academic podcasts.ConclusionsDespite their proliferation, students appear to approach podcast assignments similarly to how they would any other online learning task.

Representing the American Welfare State

Representing the American Welfare State

The Political Economy of Debt and Entitlements

Abstract This article presents a dynamic political-economic model of total government obligations. Its focus is on the interplay between debt and entitlements. In our model, both are tools by which temporarily powerful groups can extract resources from groups that will be powerful in the future: debt transfers resources across periods; entitlements directly target the future allocation of resources. We prove the following results. First, the presence of endogenous entitlements dampens the incentives of politically powerful groups to accumulate debt, but it leads to an increase in total government obligations. Second, fiscal rules can have perverse effects: if entitlements are unconstrained, and there are capital market frictions, debt limits lead to an increase in total government obligations and to worse outcomes for all groups. Analogous results hold for entitlement limits. Third, our model sheds some lights on the influence of capital market frictions on the incentives of governments to adopt fiscal rules, and implement entitlement programs. Finally, we identify preference polarization as a possible explanation for the joint growth of debt and entitlements.

Mitigating Risk Selection in Health Care Entitlement Programs: A Patient-Level Competitive Bidding Approach

Health care entitlement programs in the U.S. represent a large and growing financial outlay for taxpayers. In the pursuit of operational efficiencies, program administrators often contract with private managed care organizations (MCOs) to procure insurance for beneficiaries. This, however, encourages MCOs to attract the healthiest beneficiaries and avoid the sickest; a phenomenon known as risk selection. This leaves the sickest patients to potentially seek care in safety net facilities or emergency rooms. A mechanism that improves beneficiaries’ access to care without increasing costs would be invaluable to managers and policymakers. This paper investigates whether risk selection can be mitigated with a mechanism where MCOs bid to enroll individual beneficiaries. Although procurement auctions have been studied extensively in the literature, extant research has rarely discussed individual-level bidding. Using game theory, we model an entitlement program under three payment mechanisms: risk-adjustment, bidding, and a mix of prospective payment and bidding. Analytical results show that traditional risk-adjustment cannot optimally be used to eliminate risk selection, while either bidding mechanism eliminates it entirely. Mixed bidding eliminates risk selection at a strictly lower cost than pure bidding. The proposed mixed bidding approach is a new type of mechanism with pre-auction offers that strictly dominates the second-price auction without requiring additional assumptions. Numerical analysis shows bidding dominates risk adjustment in 73.1 percent of simulated parameter sets. Compared to risk adjustment, bidding enrolls 12.1 percent more beneficiaries at 12.7 percent lower cost. Sensitivity analysis reveals that the proposed bidding mechanism dominates in scenarios that more closely resemble real-world health care entitlement environments. More remarkably, bidding would likely generate more cost savings in jurisdictions with a large population of higher risk beneficiaries. These results show that individual-level auctions are a promising mechanism for achieving the dual aim of financial sustainability and expanded access to care for the most vulnerable.

Personal Bankruptcy and Race: When the Public-Private Welfare State is Predatory

This article argues that personal bankruptcy is part of a “dual state,” that simultaneously provides welfare to some while being predatory to others. Viewed from within the tradition of the revisionist welfare state literature, which argues that the American welfare state is larger than it initially appears because of hidden, submerged, delegated, and public-private components, personal bankruptcy matches the definition of a public-private welfare state institution. Scholars argue that personal bankruptcy provides social insurance by forcing private creditors to become “insurers of last resort,” for unfortunate debtors and the outcomes surrounding personal bankruptcy conform to the predictions of revisionist welfare state literature. These outcomes, however, raise questions about whether personal bankruptcy should legitimately be considered as part of the welfare state. Applying critical race theory helps us to see that the social contract underlying the public side of personal bankruptcy is a racial contract and that capitalism, underlying the private side, is racial capitalism. For race-class subjugated populations, personal bankruptcy is part of a predatory credit regulatory regime in which the state is clearly implicated.

Veterans as a Social Movement: The American Legion, the First Hoover Commission, and the Making of the American Welfare State

ABSTRACTThis article challenges the conventional view of veterans’ politics in the United States as an “iron triangle” or a “subgovernment,” terms that connote a low-profile field dominated by a small number of elite actors operating consensually behind closed doors. It shows instead that veterans’ affairs were at the center of a heated national debate to which both grassroots activists and national leaders contributed as part of a larger social movement, as demonstrated by the controversy over the First Hoover Commission. Created by Congress in 1947 to find ways to make the executive branch more efficient, the commission’s proposals to reform veterans’ affairs were all defeated by the countercampaign of the largest and most influential veterans’ group of the era, the American Legion. Former soldiers were not alone (they benefited from the assistance of key state actors such as the heads of the Veterans Administration and of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs) but their mobilization proved decisive. This episode shows that even veterans of World War II, traditionally seen as the most deserving cohort of former soldiers in US history (the “Greatest Generation”), had to organize to defend their benefits against attacks. The privileged position of veterans in the US welfare state is therefore less the result of their exalted cultural status (as is often presumed) than of their ability to mobilize politically and to override the preferences of significant numbers of public and private actors—just like any other group making claims on the state.

W. E. B. Du Bois’s Socialism

W. E. B. Du Bois’s socialism has provoked debate for decades. His democratic theory and critique of political economy champions democratic socialism. In this article, I offer a philosophical reconstruction of the normative foundation of his democratic socialism in three steps. First, I argue that his philosophy of the modern democratic state supports the people’s advance of the principle of free and equal citizenship or civic equality. Next, I present his critique of the modern American welfare state, which asserts the fair value of political liberty and democratic control over productive activities. Finally, I introduce the method of the excluded groups from Darkwater as an ideal procedure for guiding democratic deliberation in a profoundly nonideal public sphere. The method foregrounds the voices of excluded groups to correct asymmetrical relations of practical power and to infuse democratic reason with practical intelligence, namely, new content and values that can lead to the development of a democratic socialist state.

Administrative Easing: Rule Reduction and Medicaid Enrollment

AbstractAdministrative burden is widely recognized as a barrier to program enrollment, denying legal entitlements to many potentially eligible individuals. Building on recent research in behavioral public administration, this article examines the effect of voluntary state reductions in administrative burden (administrative easing) on Medicaid enrollment rates using differential implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Using a novel data set that includes state‐level data on simplified enrollment and renewal procedures for Medicaid from 2008 to 2017, the authors examine how change in Medicaid enrollment is conditioned by the adoption of rule‐reduction procedures. Findings show that reductions in the administrative burden required to sign up for Medicaid were associated with increased enrollments. Real‐time eligibility and reductions in enrollment burden were particularly impactful at increasing enrollment for both children and adults separate from increases in Medicaid income eligibility thresholds. The results suggest that efforts to ease the cognitive burden of enrolling in entitlement programs can improve take‐up.

Protecting and Expanding Control: A Philanthropy’s Negotiation of Welfare System Change during the War on Poverty

Macro-level policy changes in the US welfare system can shift the boundaries of existing organizational welfare service funding arrangements. This in-depth archival case study examines the organizational boundary work of philanthropic actors at the United Foundation of Detroit during the War on Poverty era (1964–74). The study finds that the United Foundation responded to social and welfare changes by protecting and expanding its power and authority in its welfare organizational ecosystem. It used specific mechanisms, including managerial tools and ideologies, to exert greater control over nonprofit funding and service provision in this ecosystem, which altered the power dynamics and relationships between funding and nonprofit service organizations. Applying a boundary work lens to this historical period can assist social workers in building more equitable relationships with funders in the dynamic, frequently market-driven welfare system of today.

The Economic Context for Reforming the Safety Net

As we wrestle with the future of our safety net and social insurance programs, it is important to understand not only the features and outcomes associated with individual programs but also the broader economic context. This reflection piece discusses several relevant aspects of the macroeconomy and of economic and financial conditions facing households: rising government debt, slower macroeconomic growth, limited tools to fight future recessions, greater income inequality, and the financial struggles of households. It goes on to draw lessons for how we should reform our system of entitlement programs.

Entitlements: Options for Reforming the Social Safety Net in the United States

A combination of demographic aging and diversification, volatile business cycle conditions, stagnant real wages, declining employment, and policy choices have increased the need to examine the adequacy of the U.S. social safety net. Is it accomplishing what it is designed to do? Can it weather a fiscal storm? Current “entitlement” programs are in almost all cases providing important assistance to U.S. families and are improving families’ well-being, but they face significant challenges that will require the attention of policy-makers around the country. Some programs may need a structural revamping, while others could do with incremental modifications. Because U.S. entitlement programs address complex social issues, they are themselves complex systems; it follows, then, that meaningful reform must be thoughtful and nuanced, eschewing political expediency. Further, federal support is needed for even more high-quality research that will provide evidence on the types of reforms that will achieve the goals of the programs.

The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program: Time for Improvements

The 1996 welfare reforms imposed major changes on the nation’s means-tested benefits, including a requirement that states place at least half of their cash welfare caseload in work or related activities. Congress also increased both cash and in-kind subsidies for low-income working families. Between the mid-1990s and 2000, work and wages among low-income women increased and poverty declined. The recessions of 2001 and 2007–2009 caused rising employment to falter, but after 2014, women’s employment rose again, and poverty declined. The impacts of welfare reform on these outcomes have been disputed, with many on the Left charging that states have used welfare funds inappropriately and many on the Right arguing that welfare reform played a major role in the improvements in work, wages, and poverty. We review reforms that have been proposed by one or both parties in recent years, including focusing spending on benefits and work. We conclude with lessons of these reform experiences for future reforms of entitlement programs.

Development and Validation of Broiler Welfare Assessment Methods for Research and On-farm Audits

ABSTRACT Required auditing of on-farm broiler welfare in the United States has increased; however, a lack of validated tools exists for assessment of enrichment. National Chicken Council (NCC) guidelines were used on a subset of 300 Ross 308 broilers out of 1200 to validate and adapt welfare measures. Half of the broilers were exposed to environmental enrichment, hence these measures were used to evaluate the enrichment within the context of behavior and welfare, although the nature of the enrichment is not described in detail here as the aim is to serve solely as a description and validation of methods using a subset of example data. Birds were recorded in repeated 4-min periods to quantify behavior and walking distance. Outcomes were categorized to improve auditing and make recommendations to producers and researchers. Bone mineral density, content, and breaking strength were successful in determining numerical differences. Quantifying lameness using an enclosed walkway and measuring footpad dermatitis weekly are recommended on-farm. We recommend including additional measures not required by the NCC: monitoring breast condition in the flock and including a behavior component with a scoring ethogram.