The Budget Enforcement Act in 1991: Isometric Budgeting

The immediate effect of the Budget Enforcement Act (BEA) of 1990 was to cancel a pending $110 billion sequester and to change the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings deficit targets. These and other changes allowed Congress and the administration to escape responsibility for increases in the deficit if discretionary spending was kept within the caps and no new entitlement programs or revenue enhancements were added. This assumption and others relating to the empowerment of the Appropriations Committees and the new authority of the OMB are explored in this article.     

Attributional style,depressive features,and self-esteem: Adult children of alcoholic and nonalcoholic parents

Undergraduate adult children of alcoholics (ACOAs; N=57) were compared to children of nonalcoholic parents (CONAs; N=100) on measures of the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), selfesteem, and attributional style. ACOA status was determined using the Children of Alcoholics Screening Test (Jones, 1981). ACOAs were found to have significantly higher scores on the BDI and to have significantly lower self-esteem, as measured by the Index of Self-Esteem, than CONAs. ACOAs were also more likely to have a depressive attributional style, in that they perceived failure as more internal, stable, and global than CONAs. Further, females had significantly higher BDI scores than males.Received B.A. from West Virginia University. Research interests: adult children of alcoholics and human sexual behavior.Received Ph.D. from West Virginia University. Research interests: the impact of popular culture on adolescents and the impact of parental conflict on children.Received Ph.D. from University of Massachusetts. Research interests: adolescent suicide risk.     

Credit enhancement of municipal debt

Abstract: The municipal bond bank (mbb) innovation began in Canada in 1956 and in the United States in 1970. This paper concentrates on why mbbs exist, their characteristics, where they work best, and how they compare with other municipal debt credit enhancement techniques. It concludes with a discussion of the future role these organizations will have in providing long-term capital funding to municipalities in Canada and the United States. Sommaire: Le principe de la Banque d'obligations municipales (BOM) fut introduit en 1956, au Canada et, en 1970, aux États-Unis. Cet article explore la raison d'être des BOMS, leurs caractéristiques, leurs conditions de succés maximum et les compare à d'autres techniques pour rehausser le crédit de la dette municipale. L'article se termine par une discussion sur le rôle que ces organisations auront à l'avenir dam le financement capital à long terme des municipalités au Canada et aux États-Unis.     

Power,throne, and rank

Richard Hoggart has spent all his working life teaching English literature and involved in different ways with cultural studies. He is the author of the seminal book The Uses of Literacyand most recently of Townscape with Figures: Farnham—reviewed in this issue of SOCIETY.     

The measurability of budget related rent-seeking

It has been suggested that the extent of rent-seeking expenditures arising from attempts to influence budget allocations should be estimated by the absolute magnitude of the observed changes in allocation. Instead, we argue that it is the extent of theex ante prospective changes that determine the level of rent-seeking, and that in the presence of countervailing activity these may be quite unrelated to the ex post observed values. We further argue that the traditional rent-seeking model of competition for a pre-specified rent is inappropriate in this context.