Structural Safeguards

Federalism was created to form a centralized national government and unity between the “essentially autonomous states” after the Articles of Confederation. The “devolution revolution” was a movement that reduced the responsibilities of the federal government and gave power back to the states, “a transition propelled by both popular sentiment and budget imperatives.” It focused on the New Federalism ideology Ronald Reagan supported. The author of Devil in Devolution, John Donahue argues “letting Washington fade while the states take the lead is badly timed.” In his opinion, states are powerful enough and “the federal government’s retreat to a domestic role.”

This passage was called The Merits of the Federal System and was written by James Bryce. The topic of this passage is the federal system and how federalism affects countries. The author’s purpose is the explain the role of a federal system in a country. Bryce’s thesis is that the federal system had some very strong arguments to supports it, but federalism also has some cons. The federal system can unify a nation under one government and can help develop and expand a country. A con that James Bryce mentions is that federalist nations have to work hard to preserve national unity, but also let diversity thrive.

A fiscal deficit is when a government's total expenditures exceed the tax revenues that it generates. A budget deficit can be cut by either reducing public expenditure or raising taxes. In this essay, I am going to analyse the benefits and costs of increasing tax rates to reduce fiscal deficits instead of cutting government expenditure.

Budgeting is perhaps the most essential process involved in the United States government. While this process seems to exist only in the background, it is, in reality, what allows all other processes of government to function as they do. In order to satisfy the most necessities of modern society, changes must be made to each of the three major categories of the budget: the big five, the middle five, and the little guys.

Kernaghan, K. 2000. The Post-Bureaucratic Organization and Public Services Values. Interational Review of Administrative Sciences 66. 2000, pp. 92-93.

New Federalism is also known as Competitive Federalism due consent struggle of the national and local government trying to be “equal.”

Federalism defines many roles of power, relationships, and structure in government and how a federal system is an ever changing form of government. In the United States, the government has gone through many phases of federalism and each phase has brought both good and bad aspects of government policy with them. Dual Federalism defined that national and state governments pretend that they were functionally separate and working independently, but not against each other. Cooperative Federalism has an interstate dimension, as participatory programs were undertaken among several states and the federal government. Creative Federalism gave

The increased of industrialization in American cities brought a new social demand to public officials who were unprepared to target the existing issues of society. Administrative officers started to gaining power to conduct intervention programs or institutions. However, people started to distrust public administrators and institutions for their inefficiency and incapacity they gave to the treatment of social issues. The author

There seems to be a general consent among scholars and policy makers working in this field that constitutional structures do matter. Though, there is a disagreement on how constitutional structures, such as electoral rules or systems and forms of government, affect the quality of governance and economic performance in a democracy. The chapter showed that there were theoretical arguments pointing to different directions concerning the effect of electoral rules and form of government on economic growth. The verification for any of these theoretical arguments failed to progress, since each point of view retained plausibility and there were strong theoretical arguments justifying both sides of each view. Even though there was some empirical evidence

To define the terminology of federalism to a simplistic way is the sharing of sovereignty between the national government and the local government. It is often described as the dual sovereignty of governments between the national and the local to exert power in the political system. In the US it is often been justified as one of the first to introduce federalism by the ‘founding fathers’ which were developed in order to escape from the overpowered central government. However, federalism in the United States is hitherto uncertain where the power lies in the contemporary political system. In this essay I will outline and explain how power relationship alternates between states and federal government. Moreover I will also discuss my

Federalism is a concept that refers to a system of government in which power is shared between the national and non-national governments. Cooperative Federalism is a model of federalism in which all governments are linked and participate in the administration of programs. Creative federalism was a term used to describe the Great Society program of Lyndon Johnson. President Johnson sought to devolve powers to the states using creative federalism. The devolution of responsibilities to the states began under President Nixon but were accelerated in the 1980s under President Reagan. Ronald Reagan 's brand of new federalism dramatically decreased the use of categorical grants. Federalism under President Obama is still in the development stage, but the 2009 Federal Stimulus Plan can best be described as new federalism, creative, federalism, and general revenue sharing. There are four controversial examples of federalism at work today.

The Government Finance Officers Association (GFOA) budget criteria framework covers 27 budgeting categories and was launched in 1984 to encourage the preparation of high quality budgets (Bland, 211). The following memo evaluates the budget of the City of Lake Oswego using GFOA’s Distinguished Budget Presentation Awards Criteria, and also compares it to the budget of the City of Detroit.

In the following paragraphs, I will explain the dominant theory in public administration practice and elaborate on the major theoretical assumptions of the Old Public Administration. As stated in the question, the world has transformed through globalization, information technology, and devolution of authority since the latter part of the last century. The dominant theory in public administration has been replaced from the traditional rule-based, authority-driven processes of the Old Public Administration with market-based, competition-driven tactics in the New Public Management, beginning in the 1980s (Kettl, 2000, p. 3). This was an effort to privatize government and streamline public administration to maximize efficiency and productivity. Heavily relying on market mechanisms to guide public programs, public administrators in the New Public Management are encouraged to “steer, not row,” meaning they should not bear the burden of delivering services, but instead define programs that others will carry out, through contracting or other means (Denhardt & Denhardt, 2011, p. 13). Core values of the New Public Management include using private sector and business approaches to the public sector, squeezing as many services as possible from smaller revenues, market style incentives, providing customers more choices, and focusing on outputs and outcomes instead of mainly processes.

According to our text, people perceive government as a tool to maximize their own self-interest in the political economy model (Rosen & Gayer, 2014, p. 108). This commonly takes the form of public service programs, which is why fiscal sustainability is an essential factor in government operations, especially on the local level. It has turned out to be an immense challenge on every level due to fluctuating operating deficits, tax revenues, and demographics. These issues are similar to the tragedy of the commons, which occurs when several people try to obtain the largest profit from a common resource. As demand surpasses the supply of the resource, those who seek personal gain disregard society’s well-being and other people are not able to experience the benefits (“Tragedy of the Commons”). The larger problem is that public expenditures are paid for by mostly everyone within a single jurisdiction, yet the benefits from government expenditures are focused on certain groups. This leads to each group craving a greater portion of the common revenue pool, however, if every group tries to increase their share then it would result in unnecessary public spending or economic crisis. This study by Tang, Callahan, and Pisano (2014) examines fiscal sustainability within local governments as a common-pool resource (CPR) problem by considering the political economy of monetary institutions, applying six

The paper provided two solutions that contradict the strange dichotomy. The solutions provide reasons as to why central government intervention is not required to establish preferences at a local level. The first solution is a competitive decentralized government as proposed by Oates. The second solution provides insight into unconditional grants that are made use of to solve preferences that are not known, ex-ante, once decentralization has occurred in order to align perverse