Anticipating future congressional action: Designing a new retirement income system

After federal workers were covered by the social security system for the first time in 1983, the Congressional Research Service began working with congressional committees, particularly the House Committee on Post Office and Civil Service, on the design of a new federal retirement system made necessary by this coverage. Over a two-year period, the CRS prepared a study that became, in effect, the analytical framework used by the majority and minority of both houses of Congress as they enacted a new system. The analytical tools created by the CRS in doing this study were used during congressional deliberations to analyze specific options developed by committees and members, and to assist with assessment of the implications of compromises necessary to pass the bill and have it signed by the President.     

Retention and retirement: The case of the U.S. military

The military retirement system provides an immediate, lifetime, inflation-protected annuity to personnel who complete 20 or more years of service. The cost of this system has risen substantially in the past 15 years, and the system's actuarial costs now comprise almost one-third of total military manpower costs. Because of its importance in the total military compensation system, the military retirement system exerts a significant influence on the age structure of the force and on personnel turnover patterns. This article evaluates the relative efficiency of the current retirement system by comparing it with two recently proposed alternatives, one by a presidential commission and one by the Department of Defense. It estimates the impact of these proposed alternatives on the military personnel force structure and on manpower costs. It is concluded that these alternatives would provide a force as capable as today's force at significantly lower cost.Order of authorship determined alphabetically. This paper presents results of analysis conducted while Enns and Nelson were associated with the Department of Defense and Warner was on the staff at the Center for Naval Analyses. The views presented herein are those of the authors.     

Unintended consequences: Regulating the quality of subsidized day care

Advocates for the poor frequently support uniform, high federal standards for subsidized social services. While such standards may improve the quality of services for those who qualify, they can also have unintended but important side effects. Stringent regulations may actually curtail the supply of services, promote segregation, and expand the role of large subsidized for-profit firms. All these possibilities are illustrated by the history of federal regulation in subsidizing child day care. The federal government's retreat from regulation in 1980 and 1981 may have had results that—even if unintended—were in many ways salutary.     

Unintended Consequences: Implications of the 2014 Australian Defence Force Pay Deal

The Workplace Remuneration Arrangement agreed between the Australian Government and the Australian Defence Force (ADF) provides for a 4.5% pay over 3 years for ADF personnel. This article makes use of the concept of the psychological contract to argue that this pay deal represents a breach of the Australian Government's obligations towards ADF personnel that is likely to have unintended consequences for their long‐term commitment to their ADF careers.     

From ‘There is No Alternative’ to ‘Maybe There are Alternatives’: five Challenges to Economic Orthodoxy after the Crash

Prior to the 2008 financial crisis, politicians famously told the public and themselves that ‘there is no alternative’ to a neoliberal economic paradigm. Fast‐forward to 2019 and there is, instead, the sense that ‘maybe there are alternatives’. However, when many observers and commentators look back to the 2008 crisis, they see a general continuity with what went before. In order to gain a better understanding of this ‘interregnum’, we map five sets of ideas and practices that challenge the policies, ideas, and conventions of pre‐crash orthodoxy. In doing so, we argue that there has been a fundamental transformation in legitimate public discourse about the economy since 2008: ideas and practices that were previously unimaginable or illegitimate in mainstream economic debate are now commonplace. Although this does not represent a ‘paradigm shift’, it represents significant political change that is important to understand and interrogate on its own terms.     

The right to vote no: revising the voting system and resuscitating the F-Y voter

This paper explores the possibility of revising the voting system in order to provide the citizen with the alternative of voting for none of the candidates on the ballot as opposed to selecting a specific candidate or not voting at all. We describe in general terms the nature and implications of such a proposal and leave the formal development of the model for a subsequent paper. In addition, preliminary evidence is presented as to the potential effect of this alternative on the electoral system.     

Availability of retired persons for work: findings from the retirement history study

The increase in the proportion of retirees in the population has given rise to concern that the financial burden on workers could become onerous. Consequently, considerable interest has developed in encouraging workers to delay retirement until age 65 and beyond. The effectiveness of programs to accomplish this objective would be enahnced by knowledge of the reasons for early retirement and the characteristics of those who have retired. On the basis of three waves of longitudinal data from the Retirement History Study, an availability measure has been constructed to provide estimates of how many recent retirees would be likely, given the opportunity, to return to work. Incorporating information on perceived income adequacy and work attitudes, the measure is applied in this article to men and women aged 62 to 67 in 1973 who had retired since 1969. An initial screening to determine those with work limitations removed half the retirees from consideration, and the measure indicates that relatively few of those remaining would have been readily available to return to work.     

Voting when the economy goes bad,everyone is in charge,and no one is to blame: The case of the 2009 German election

The economy was a major issue in Germany’s 2009 election. The global economic crisis did not spare Germany, whose economy is tightly integrated into the global economy. So when the German economy experienced a historical shock, did voters connect their views of the economy with their vote choice? Or did they, as some research has suggested, recognize Germany’s dependence on global markets and cut the government slack, especially when the government consists of the country’s two major parties? Using pre- and post-election panel surveys from the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES), we investigate the weight that voters gave to the economy, relative to other considerations, when casting their ballot and whether governing parties were disproportionately judged based on the state of the economy.     

Divorced women at retirement: projections of economic well-being in the near future.

The Modeling Income in the Near Term (MINT) data system projects retirement income for persons retiring in the 1990s through 2020. Using those data, we examine the economic well-being of divorced women at retirement. The MINT data system improves upon previous estimates of Social Security benefits by: Measuring and projecting years of marriage to determine if the 10-year requirement has been met, Projecting lifetime earnings until retirement and eligibility for Social Security retirement benefits, and Estimating lifetime earnings of former spouses. MINT also makes independent projections of each retiree's income from pensions, assets, and earnings (for working beneficiaries). As a result of changes in marital patterns, MINT projects that the proportion of women who are divorced will increase. At the same time, the proportion of those women who are eligible for auxiliary benefits is projected to decrease, for two main reasons. First, changes in women's earnings and work patterns result in more women receiving retired-worker benefits based on their own earnings. Second, an increased number of divorced women will not meet the 10-year marriage requirement for auxiliary benefits. Despite the projected decrease over time in eligibility rates for auxiliary benefits, the level of Social Security benefits is projected to change little between the older and younger birth cohorts of divorced women entering retirement. According to the MINT data, the most vulnerable of divorced women will be those who have not met the 10-year marriage requirement. Poverty rates will be higher for them than for all other divorced women. This group of divorced women is projected to grow as more and more women divorce from shorter marriages. With more women divorcing and with fewer divorced women meeting the 10-year marriage requirement, the proportion of economically vulnerable aged women will increase when the baby boom retires. Further research is warranted on this long neglected subject. Analyses of divorced women's economic well-being by major socioeconomic characteristics such as race and ethnicity and education are of particular interest. Such analyses can be supported by the MINT data system.     

The evaluation of economic development conflict is present: Projects where military investing in health care in el salvador

Increasingly, U.S. policymakers have proposed development projects in areas of the world undergoing rapid, disruptive, and often violent challenges to existing political regimes. The U.S. government typically requires that these projects undergo an economic evaluation before they can be implemented. While benefit-cost theory and practice have made substantial gains over the last 20 years, they are more easily and aptly applied to stable economic and political conditions. This paper raises several issues concerning the theory and practice of benefit-analysis in an environment where there is political instability and military conflict. The discussion is illustrated by reference a proposed health care project in El Salvador. I t concludes summarizing the options available to policy analysts who conduct evaluations in such situations.     

Local effects of the new land rush: How capital inflows transformed rural Russia

Rising global prices for agricultural commodities have led to the inflow of capital to rural economies and to transfers of land ownership to new agricultural operators (NAOs) in developing and post‐Soviet countries. How capital inflows affect rural communities is often explained with the variable of institutional strength, an explanation aligned with the good governance approach to economic development: Capital inflows have positive developmental effects, if strong domestic institutions vet land deals and regulate NAOs. Contra the focus on institutional parameters as exogenous variables, this article highlights the role of political projects in shaping local outcomes and driving institutional change. Evolving political priorities are important to understand domestic rural transformations because they lead to interventions that privilege some actors as agents of change, while others are sidelined—hence transforming local economies. This theoretical suggestion is based on a study of Russia's rural transformation that followed a significant influx of capital.     

The erosion of retiree health benefits and retirement behavior: implications for the disability insurance program

The effects of retiree health insurance on the decision to retire have not been examined until recently. It is an area of increasing significance because of rising health care costs for retirees, the uncertain future of Medicare, and increased life expectancy. In general, studies suggest that individual retirement decisions are strongly responsive to the availability of retiree health insurance. Early retiree benefits and retirement behavior are also important because they may affect the Social Security Disability Insurance (DI) program. It is not apparent that if a person loses retiree health benefits, or if fewer people are eligible for retiree health benefits in general, claims for DI will increase. The potential 2-year loss of health benefits may be a deterrent to leaving the labor force and claiming DI, although persons who are unable to work would leave the labor force even without health benefits. In order to understand how the decline in retiree health benefits may affect enrollment in DI, analysts must at least incorporate the role of coverage under the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985 (COBRA). That act provides many people with access to health insurance during the 2-year gap between eligibility for DI and Medicare. In fact, persons with sufficient means to retire early could use the income from Disability Insurance to buy COBRA coverage during the first 2 years of DI coverage. Determining the effect of the erosion of retiree health benefits on DI must account properly for the role of other factors that affect DI eligibility and participation. The financial incentives of Social Security, pension plans, retirement savings programs, health status, the availability of health insurance, and other factors influencing retirement decisions must be taken fully into account in order to isolate the precise effect of retiree health benefits.     

Flexible responsiveness and military strategy: The case of the Israeli army

The mode of operation and military strategy of the Israeli army provide an example of an effective utilization of the potential military advantage of a relatively modernized society over a less modernized rival. The Israeli command communication and control system is characterized by a built in operational flexibility in attaining its objectives.Each component formation has the capacity for on the spot utilization of feedbacks in responding to emergent situations while coordination is ensured by optional headquarters control. The effect of superior flexible responsiveness is maximized by the adoption of military strategies which are likely to result in increasing the complexity and uncertainty of battlefield conditions such as blitzkrieg and indirect approach. The rationalle of such a strategic approach lies in the assumption that, given the approximately zero sum characteristics of warfare, the more flexible of two rival military command systems is likely to benefit from an extra pressure put on both.     

Amend the old or address the new: Broad-based legislation when proposing policies is costly

If each legislator wishes to encourage other legislators to address new problems in future periods, then a subgame perfect Nash equilibrium can exist with the following properties: (1) no legislator finds it worthwhile to make a narrow proposal that appeals to a minimum majority; (2) instead, legislators propose policies that appeal to all members, not for fear of retaliation, but rather to encourage other members to work on new problems in succeeding periods; (3) in succeeding periods no legislator amends the existing broad policy. We find an equilibrium with these properties in finite as well as infinite period games.     

Public responses to the presidential use of military force: A panel analysis

How do citizens respond to dramatic uses of military force? While we know a great deal about the conditions that driveaggregate changes in presidential popularity in response to a president's use of military force, we know surprisingly little about howindividuals respond to such events. What types of individuals operating under what types of conditions are more likely to support such actions? And to what extent does approval of the use of force affect subsequent changes, not only in presidential popularity, but also in more general foreign policy attitudes? We use panel survey data collected before and after the U.S. bombing of Libya in 1986 to investigate the individual-level dynamics of opinion change in response to this dramatic event. Because our study neatly brackets the Libyan air strikes, we are able to examine in some detail the antecedents and consequences of individuals' reactions to a president's use of military force. We find that watching President Reagan's dramatic televised speech had an unmistakable impact in moving respondents to support the bombing. We also find that support for the Libyan air strikes appeared to precipitate greater approval for a range of more “hard-line” military responses toward terrorism, thus creating opportunities for similar-or even broader—presidential initiatives in the future. Finally, because the bombing was the only significant event occurring between the waves of the panel, our quasi-experimental design ties approval of the bombing clearly to an upsurge in presidential approval. Implications for various perspectives on presidential leadership of public opinion in foreign affairs are discussed.     

腐败新时尚“:性贿赂”问题研究

":性贿赂"已成为破坏经济秩序,腐化国家工作人员的祸害之一,但现行刑法对其无能为力。"性贿赂"具有社会危害性、普遍性和多发性,但仅靠道德规范来调整"性贿赂"已显得软弱无力,这就需要归结出对"性贿赂"立法的现实法律依据,探索出对"性贿赂"进行定罪量刑的具有可操作性的立法建议。