Government and the Economy: What Every Citizen Should Know

Catalog description

Why does the US government seem unable to ever put together a budget on time? "Why does the United States regularly run deficits and why does the nation owe over $21 trillion dollars in debt? What are some of the different ways that the government intervenes in the economy and why is government intervention often so controversial in the United States? In this course students will learn how an economy functions at the macroeconomic level and about ways the federal government can influence the way the economy performs, while also learning about how the structure of the US government and the political process can shape the nation's economic policies. Our goal is to study the national economy in a way that situates basic economic insights in a political, historical, and moral-philosophical context so that we can fully understand the environment in which economic policy decisions are made. Examples of issues to be analyzed include government spending, taxes, social assistance programs, the government's response to COVID, the Social Security Program, the debt limit, and whom the government borrows from. Readings may include the U.S. Constitution; Mattea Kramer's A Peoples Guide to the Federal Budget; Burman and Slemrod's Taxes in America: What Everyone Needs to Know; the novel Boomsday by Christopher Buckley; "George Lakoff's Moral Politics; Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, and Maurizio Lazzarato's The Making of the Indebted Man.