True Security: Rethinking American Social Insurance (The Institution for Social and Policy St)

Americans value freedom, say authors Michael J. Graetz and Jerry L. Mashaw, but they also want security--the sense that someone or something will take care of them if times turn tough. And although the United States has established an elaborate system of social welfare, much could be improved. "For reasons of history, politics, inertia, and simple error, we have constructed a social insurance regime that is riddled with gaps, overlaps, inefficiencies, and inequities," write the two Yale Law School professors in True Security. Social insurance--meaning the network of Social Security, child welfare, health insurance, unemployment insurance, disability benefits, and so on--has become "simultaneously inadequate and unaffordable." What's more, they write, much of it "is badly designed." Graetz and Mashaw approach the problem not as dismantlers but reformers ("We come to praise social insurance, not disparage it," they say in a prologue). They examine the state of social insurance today in technocratic detail and then propose a series of solutions to the problems they identify. They would, for instance, offer vouchers for housing and health insurance, plus link disability insurance and workers' compensation. They would modernize Social Security, keeping it a defined-benefits system but also mandating individual retirement savings accounts and broad participation in capital markets. The result is a neoliberal tract that will appeal to New Democrats and other advocates of the heralded "third way" between the failures of socialism and the excesses of capitalism. --John J. Miller