Böcker av Daniel Shaviro

Good news first? The good news is that Americans today are living longer, in part because of continual advances in healthcare. But the bad news is that with our aging population larger than ever before, nothing is being done to ensure that we can continue to afford the increasing costs of care. How Medicare--with the Bush administration's reforms and a slumping economy--will meet the needs of its recipients without adequate financing is among the most pressing issues facing this country today. Daniel N. Shaviro sees the future of our national healthcare system as hinging on the issue of funding. The author of books on the economic issues surrounding Social Security and budget deficits, Shaviro is a skilled guide for anyone seeking to understand the financial aspects of government programs. Who Should Pay for Medicare? offers an accessible overview of how Medicare operates as a fiscal system. Discussions of Medicare reform often focus on the expansion of program treatment choices but not on the question of who should pay for Medicare's services. Shaviro's book addresses this critical issue, examining the underanalyzed dynamics of the significant funding gap facing Medicare. He gives a balanced, nonpartisan evaluation of various reform alternatives--considering everything from the creation of new benefits in this fiscal crunch to tax cuts to the demographic pressures we face and the issues this will raise when future generations have to pay for the care of today's seniors. Who Should Pay for Medicare? speaks to seniors who feel entitled to expanded coverage, younger people who wonder what to expect from the government when they retire, and Washington policy makers who need an indispensable guidebook to Medicare's future.

How could American social solidarity have so collapsed that we cannot even cooperate in fighting a pandemic? One problem lies in how our values mutate and intersect in an era of runaway high-end inequality and evaporating upward mobility. Under such conditions, the American Dream's seeming to suggest, falsely, that those who succeed economically are "e;winners,"e; while the rest of us are "e;losers,"e; puts it in dire conflict with our traditions of democracy and egalitarianism. In Bonfires of the American Dream, through close cultural studies of classic novels and films - Atlas Shrugged, The Great Gatsby, It's a Wonderful Life, and The Wolf of Wall Street - Daniel Shaviro helps to provide a better understanding of what went wrong culturally in America.

This work makes a contribution to the public understanding of the issues involved in reforming Social Security. It describes the current system and the pressures that have been brought to bear upon it, before dissecting and evaluating the various reform proposals.