Next Social Contract: Latest Articles

The greatest challenge in politics is to understand when a political era is closing and the door to a new one is ready to be opened. Thirty years ago, a small band of conservatives understood that what they called the era of “tax and spend” -- in which government grew inexorably on a tide of invisible tax increases through Republican and Democratic administrations -- was ready to be challenged.

In 1977, Rep. Jack Kemp and Sen. Bill Roth introduced a bill… more

Democrats are in a bind when it comes to their domestic economic agenda. They have promised a number of new and costly initiatives such as fixing the Alternative Minimum Tax, providing middle-class tax relief, and increasing spending on homeland security and education. But they have also made a commitment to fiscal responsibility. So how can they deliver on their promises without opening themselves up to the old "tax and spend" label? Reforming tax entitlements -- a large, mostly under-the-radar part… more

In recent years, the idea of promoting widespread property ownership in the United States by means of public policy has enjoyed a renaissance across the political spectrum. George W. Bush and other American conservatives have borrowed the term "ownership society" from Margaret Thatcher's Britain and employed it to justify a range of proposals from the partial privatization of Social Security to individual health savings accounts. On the left, thinkers like Michael Sherraden and Bruce Ackerman, reviving a tradition that… more

Over the past generation, the economic risks American families face have increased substantially. Yet public programs have largely failed to adapt to these new and newly intensified risks, and private workplace benefits have eroded. As a result, Americans increasingly find themselves on an economic tightrope, without an adequate safety net if, as is ever more likely, they lose their footing. This tightrope both creates anxiety about the future and causes hardship when families do lose their balance.

Few social and economic crises are as predictable as those posed by rapidly aging populations in the industrialized nations.

The interaction of falling birth rates and increased longevity in western countries and Japan threatens a downward spiral of fiscal insolvency, labour shortages, economic stagnation, fraying social safety nets and generational warfare.

To escape this fate, the leading democracies of the world must rethink their approaches to aging, pensions, social welfare, labour markets and migration. What they must rethink, in short, is… more