American Public Policy, How Policy Gets Made, Welfare & Crime and Law Enforcement
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Overview
The term public policy covers the whole range of government actions designed to improve life in the United States. How much we pay in sales tax or into social security, whether the Clean Air Act is enforced, how many food stamps a family can receive, how best to patrol the borders, and even whether children need to pass a test before graduating from high school are all matters of domestic policy. Because domestic policy covers so much, people have widely divergent opinions about what constitutes the “right” policy. People also disagree about how best to create and implement such policies.
How Policy Gets Made
Public policy is any rule, plan, or action pertaining to issues of domestic national importance. Public policy solves internal problems, such as how to protect citizens from toxic waste or how to ensure that all children get equal access to education. In order to be made official, public policy legislation goes through five steps:
- The national agenda
- Formulation
- Adoption
- Implementation
- Evaluation
Incrementalism
Changes in American domestic policy occur slowly. Many interest groups will fight against making radical changes, and many lawmakers are reluctant to change things too quickly. Political scientists call this phenomenon incrementalism because policy gets tweaked slightly over time rather than dramatically altered all at once.
The National Agenda
When something becomes a concern for a significant number of people, that concern becomes part of the national agenda, the list of things that the public wants the government to address. An issue becomes part of the national agenda for any of the following reasons:
- As part of a larger trend: Some trends, like the rise in violent crime in the 1980s and early 1990s, lead people to demand government action, especially for stronger federal law enforcement.
- After a major event: Sometimes, a single event forces an issue onto the agenda. The September 11th attacks, for example, led many Americans to demand an increase in national security. Likewise, the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 prompted many to call for environmental protection.
- Through an interest group: An interest group or members of a social movement work to raise public awareness of an issue. If enough people get involved, the issue can get put on the national agenda.
- Speeches: Prominent politicians attempt to put an issue on the agenda through speeches. The president is particularly able to do this due to the amount of media coverage of the White House.
After an issue gets put on the national agenda, people will begin petitioning the government to take action.
Formulation
Policy formulation determines how the government will respond to problems on the national agenda. Although people may agree that a particular problem exists, they might strongly disagree about how to remedy it. Members of Congress, executive branch officials, and interest groups may all propose solutions, which then prompt intense debate in the media and in Congress.
Example: The budget surplus was one of the key issues in the election of 2000. In the last few years of the Clinton Administration, the federal government ran a surplus for the first time in years, and many people had ideas about what to do with the extra money. Republican candidate George W. Bush pledged to return money to the public in the form of tax cuts, whereas Democrat Al Gore advocated using the money for some social programs, demonstrating how different people can offer radically different solutions to issues on the national agenda.
Adoption
After debating the issue and proposals, the federal government chooses one policy solution and then passes new laws to adopt the new policy.
Example: After winning the 2000 presidential election, George W. Bush worked with the Republican-controlled Congress to enact the tax cuts he had promised.
Implementation
After a policy gets adopted, it must be implemented. The federal agencies charged with implementing the policy must determine exactly how they will carry it out. The federal bureaucracy promulgates the laws passed by Congress into specific policy, drawing up the rules and guidelines for putting the law into practice.
Example: The Federal Election Commission (FEC) was charged with enforcing the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act after it was passed in 2002. To do so, the FEC had to determine the nuts and bolts of how the law worked and had to create rules governing the enforcement of the new law.
Evaluation
People begin judging and evaluating a policy once it has been put into effect. Feedback might come from the people whom the policy serves, bureaucrats who monitor the implementation, and pundits and reporters who care about the issue.
Example: Many different public interest groups and think tanks, including the powerful Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation, evaluate government policies.
Welfare
Welfare policies help those in economic need. These programs are also known as public assistance. The basic method of distributing public assistance funds is via income transfer: The government takes money from wealthier citizens through taxes, then gives some of that money to citizens with low or no income. Because funds are redistributed from the rich to the poor, we call such policies redistributive policies.
Poverty in America
The U.S. government established a standard for dealing with income inequality during President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty in the 1960s. This standard, known as the poverty line, determined that those families that earn less than three times their annual budget for food would be considered poor and in need of public assistance.
Example: In January 2009, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services determined the national poverty line to be approximately $22,000 for a family of four.
Debating the Standard
Many people argue that the federal poverty standard is inaccurate because it focuses so much on the cost of food and not enough on housing costs. These critics claim that because housing prices have risen faster than food prices, the poverty standard does not accurately measure how much money a family needs to survive. According to these critics, there are substantially more poor people in the United States than the current standard suggests.
Basic Welfare Programs
Welfare consists of a variety of policies with different goals:
- Supplemental Security Income (SSI): Offers aid to elderly and disabled people who do not qualify for social security benefits
- Food stamps: Gives low-income people coupons with which to purchase food
- Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC): Refunds some or all of a family’s social security taxes
- Public housing: Creates and subsidizes apartments and other dwellings for low-income families
- Rent vouchers: Provides grants to low-income individuals to help defray housing costs
- Medicaid: Provides low-cost medical care to those on welfare
Corporate Welfare
The federal government has many policies designed to stimulate the economy by assisting businesses. For instance, the government subsidizes some agricultural products and offers tax credits for various types of research. Critics of such programs accuse the government of promulgating “corporate welfare.”
Crime and Law Enforcement
The local, state, and federal governments in the United States all play an important role in fighting crime. Generally, the federal government sets the basic parameters of law enforcement and provides money and other aid to state and local agencies that then enforce the law.
The Politics of Crime
Some politicians campaign on a “law and order” platform, promising to crack down on crime and impose harsh sentences on those found guilty of committing crimes. Scholars debate the efficacy of government anticrime programs. During the 1990s, for example, violent crime fell dramatically. President Clinton and the Democrats claimed credit, citing the strong economy and the new crime bill passed in the early 1990s. Some critics, in contrast, point to other causes for the dip in crime, including demographics (the age groups most likely to commit violent crimes shrank) and the vast increase in the number of prisons. It is never easy to explain why the crime rate rises or falls.
Abortion and Crime
Perhaps the most controversial argument advanced to explain the drop in crime came from economist Steven Levitt (co-author of the best-selling Freakonomics [2005]). Levitt argued that the Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade in 1973 led to the drop in crime. He contended that unwanted children born into poverty are more likely to become criminals. But after Roe v. Wade, more women chose to have abortions rather than have unwanted babies, which had the additional effect of lowering the crime rate in the late 1980s and early 1990s, around the time these children would have been teenagers. Needless to say, this theory has generated intense controversy.
Gun Control
Gun control refers to policies aimed at regulating the ownership and use of firearms. Proponents of gun control argue that tighter restrictions will reduce the number of guns on the streets and consequently decrease the amount of violent crime in the United States. Critics of gun control argue that the Constitution prohibits the federal government from regulating firearms because the Second Amendment states that citizens have the right “to bear arms.” Many critics also believe that gun control disproportionately affects law-abiding citizens because gun control laws will not deter the people who are most likely to commit crimes.
The War on Drugs
The federal government has made its War on Drugs a national priority since the 1980s because high drug use presents a public health concern and increases the violent crime rate. As part of this war, the government has passed laws imposing harsh sentences on drug dealers, and it has also acted to stop the flow of illegal drugs into the country.
Despite all the money spent and all the federal government’s efforts, drug use has not declined, as illegal drugs continue to flow into the United States, prompting some people to argue that the U.S. anti-drug policy has failed. Some critics even argue that the War on Drugs has created more problems than it has solved.
Example: Critics contend that the mandatory minimums and harsh sentences imposed on people for possessing even small amounts of illegal substances have contributed to overcrowding in prisons. In turn, prison overcrowding increases relapse rates; inmates are now more likely to commit crimes again because prisons are unable to provide adequate job training and counseling to all the inmates.
Although the federal government has not substantively changed its drug policies in decades, some state and local governments are experimenting with other methods of punishing those caught breaking the law. Some states do not imprison first-time offenders, for example, or those caught with a small amount of drugs. Instead, the state sends them to rehabilitation programs. It is still too soon to know what effect these policies have had on drug use and crime.
Medical Marijuana
Some scientists believe that marijuana can alleviate symptoms of some diseases, such as improving eyesight in glaucoma patients and reducing the side effects of chemotherapy. As a result, some states—including Washington, California, Oregon, Arizona, Colorado, and Hawaii, among others—have legalized medical marijuana, allowing patients to legally obtain the drug with a doctor’s prescription. The federal government, however, has disagreed with these states, arguing that marijuana should always remain illegal.
