Fixing A Broken System

The Unemployment Insurance (UI) system is a lasting piece of the Social Security Act which was enacted in 1935. But like most things that are over 80 years old, it occasionally needs maintenance to keep it operating smoothly while keeping up with the changing demands placed upon it. However, the UI system has been ignored by policymakers for decades and, say the authors, it is broken, out of date, and badly in need of repair. Stephen A. Wandner pulls together a group of UI researchers, each with decades of experience, who describe the weaknesses in the current system and propose policy reforms that they say would modernize the system and prepare us for the next recession.

Like mass incarceration and slavery, financial exclusion, discrimination, and predation serve the interests of the few at the expense of their direct victims and overall economic efficiency. Yet those banes persist, evolve, and even thrive because governments often foster them with one hand while ineffectually combatting them with another. In Financial Exclusion, Robert E. Wright shows that America once ameliorated financial discrimination by leveraging the power of competition, allowing people who felt they were irrationally deprived of loans, insurance, or other financial services for reasons of ethnicity, gender, race, or religion to form their own financial institutions. Abandonment of that tradition for top-down government regulation in the 1990s led inevitably to the financial crisis of 2008. More regulation or direct government provision of financial services will not aid the those living in the hopeless, hungry side of town as much as a return to America's free market traditions will. Robert E. Wright has served Augustana University as the inaugural Nef Family Chair of Political Economy since 2009. After receiving his Ph.D. in economic history from SUNY Buffalo in 1997, Wright taught economics at the University of Virginia and New York University's Stern School of Business. His 18 previous books include Mutually Beneficial, The First Wall Street, Financial Founding Fathers, One Nation Under Debt, Bailouts, Fubarnomics, Corporation Nation, Little Business on the Prairie, and The Poverty of Slavery.

Practical ideas to provide affordable housing to more Americans Much ink has been spilled in recent years talking about political divides and inequality in the United States. But these discussions too often miss one of the most important factors in the divisions among Americans: the fundamentally unequal nature of the nation’s housing systems. Financially well-off Americans can afford comfortable, stable homes in desirable communities. Millions of other Americans cannot. And this divide deepens other inequalities. Increasingly, important life outcomes—performance in school, employment, even life expectancy—are determined by where people live and the quality of homes they live in. Unequal housing systems didn’t just emerge from natural economic and social forces. Public policies enacted by federal, state, and local governments helped create and reinforce the bad housing outcomes endured by too many people. Taxes, zoning, institutional discrimination, and the location and quality of schools, roads, public transit, and other public services are among the policies that created inequalities in the nation’s housing patterns. Fixer-Upper is the first book assessing how the broad set of local, state, and national housing policies affect people and communities. It does more than describe how yesterday’s policies led to today’s problems. It proposes practical policy changes than can make stable, decent-quality housing more available and affordable for all Americans in all communities. Fixing systemic problems that arose over decades won’t be easy, in large part because millions of middle-class Americans benefit from the current system and feel threatened by potential changes. But Fixer-Upper suggests ideas for building political coalitions among diverse groups that share common interests in putting better housing within reach for more Americans, building a more equitable and healthy country.

What war on drugs? Is our government complicit in the continued proliferation of the illegal drug trade in our nation? This supposed war on drugs has been ongoing for better than one hundred years with no apparent conclusion in sight. Perhaps we should entertain a new strategy to achieve ultimate victory in this never-ending conflict.Our criminal court system provides numerous avenues for offenders to eschew responsibility for their misdeeds. Overburdened criminal courts rely heavily u

The intent of this book is to look at our educational system as it currently works and to evaluate not only why this system is broken, but also how we might move forward, together, to fix it.So, how do we fix our failing schools? We begin by finally taking the educator out from behind the desk and bring them to the table to share in the decisions and solutions regarding what is happening in our schools. It is time to part the curtains on our public school system and show you the villains, the heroes, the talented, and the not so talented. It is time to give you a behind the scenes view of our educational stage.