The Capacities and Challenges of Faith-Based Human Service Organizations

This essay addresses four questions by comparing the management capacities and challenges of congregations, faith‐based organizations, and secular organizations that provide human services: (1) What role, if any, do congregations and faith‐based organizations currently play in the social service delivery system? (2) Are congregations interested in changing their role in the social service delivery system? (3) Compared to faith‐based and secular organizations, do congregations have the capacity to adapt to new roles in the social service delivery system? Finally, (4) compared to faith‐based and secular organizations, do congregations have similar service capacities and management challenges? The findings indicate that although more than half of congregations already provide some type of health or human services, they provide a narrower range of services, consider these services a lower priority, and seem to encounter more extensive management challenges than faith‐based and secular organizations.     

Competitiveness and Democracy

After reviewing progress in Latin America's economic stabilization and international competitiveness in the last two decades, this essay discusses the current post‐Washington Consensus “social democratic convergence” agenda, which aims to sharpen market efficiency, improve the quality of democratic governance, and advance equity goals by attacking the social deficit. Two illustrative examples, at opposite ends of the development spectrum, are Nicaragua's pro‐CAFTA agenda and Chile's Chile Compete program. More generally, pluralistic democracy can hamper progress by giving veto powers to recalcitrant vested interests; but enlightened political leadership can make gains by combining carefully crafted coalitions, international support, popular pressures, and an attractive ideological message.     

Congress, the Deficit, and Budget Reconciliation

President Clinton's veto of the 1995 reconciliation bill, the largest and most ambitious such legislation ever passed by Congress, was the first time a reconciliation bill was ever rejected by a president. It was also the first reconciliation bill in two decades to include a tax reduction rather than a tax increase. The fate of this bill, and its scope and contents, suggest the need to assess the evolution of reconciliation within the congressional budget process. In the early 1980s, Congress altered budget reconciliation procedures, putting in place a powerful new capability for deficit reduction. Reconciliation became the primary means within the budget process of restraining entitlement spending and increasing taxes as part of congressional efforts to reduce the deficit. Gramm-Rudman-Hollings magnified certain problems Congress encountered in using reconciliation to control entitlements, producing increased pressure to cut discretionary spending. While the Budget Enforcement Act of 1990 included new authority to use reconciliation to restrain entitlements, congressional spending priorities combined with the Peace Dividend to maintain the relative sanctuary entitlement programs have enjoyed. The limits of reconciliation as a deficit reduction tool, both in terms of increasing revenues and curtailing entitlements, are detailed. The inherent procedural advantages accorded to entitlements are contrasted with the treatment of discretionary programs, explaining in part the widening gulf between these two categories of spending. Congress has attempted, without success, to find alternatives to reconciliation. The failure of the seven-year, deficit-eliminating reconciliation bill of 1995 may indicate that certain Limits on the use of reconciliation may have been reached.     

(Non)equivalence in a federalism: Dual tax shares, flypaper effects and Leviathan

Among the best-known theorems of fiscal federalism is the presumed allocative and distributive equivalence between a lump-sum grant to a collectivity and a set of lump sum grants to the members of a collectivity. Interestingly, the simple elegance of the theorem is at odds with observed behavior. Grants to governments produce greater public spending than does tax reduction. Explanations of this "flypaper effect" range from misspecified econometric modeling to presumed behavior based on fiscal illusion. In this paper we show that theoretical equivalence exists in a model that recognizes only one tax share, the citizen voter's local tax share. When the model is expanded to include voters' federal tax shares as well as local taxes, non-equivalence and the flypaper effect become the rule, not the exception.