Category Archives: Government

Policy Briefs

I am going to be working on Capital Hill this summer, and I need to refresh on some of the hot button political issues. Are there any sources you know of that provide thorough, but not book length, policy briefs. Something in the 40-80 page range would be ideal. Also, the less partisan the better. Thanks!

ANSWER PERSON RESPONDS: For international affairs, you might try the CIAO database. There’s a “policy briefs” choice in the menu at the left to browse, or you can use the Search interface and check “policy brief” as the collection to search.

The Congressional Research Service (CRS) writes digested summaries of major issues at the request of the US Congress. You can search for the CRS Reports 2004-present in the Lexis/Nexis Congressional database (go to advanced search). Many older ones are in the library catalog and located on microfiche or film in the Public Documents dept (you can ask there for help).

Really, lots of think tanks have such reports, some more partisan than others, so you’ll have to look into the nature of the organization. The Rand Corporation reports in the Public Documents department (in the library catalog) may suit your needs.

This is the kind of question that is best asked at the Perkins Reference desk. There is a Public Policy subject librarian, and others for other subjects that you’re interested in.

Health care

What is the second richest country in the world that does not have universal health care?

ANSWER PERSON RESPONDS: This isn’t straightforward. The exact coverage of “universal” health care does vary by country, although it’s agreed upon that the USA doesn’t have it. Usually it’s equated with some sort of single-payer system managed by the government.

Probably because of the definitional issues, “universal coverage” isn’t listed as an “indicator” by the World Health Organisation (WHO) or World Bank. They have indicators relating to expenditures on healthcare: total, public, private, and “out-of-pocket” (which may be the difference between total private health spending and that paid with private insurance, but don’t quote me).

An interesting ratio that gets at the idea as to whether healthcare is paid by the government (i.e., from taxes and other govt. revenue) is the “Private expenditure on health as % of total expenditure on health” as reported in “Annex Table 2” of the WHO’s 2006 World Health Report. http://www.who.int/whr/2006/annex/en/index.html The USA is 55.4% in 2003. Most other wealthy countries are in the teens and 20s.

This gets tedious, but if you then rank each country by Gross Domestic Product per capita in 2003 (you can get this from the World Bank database World Development Indicators, through the library’s database list), you can scan down the list under the United States. The next richest country with >55.4% private funding is Singapore (63.9%), then Trinidad and Tobago (62.2%). Most of the coutries with a higher percentage private health expenditures are poor or dysfunctional countries. The highest is Guinea, at 83.4%.

Names of Military Operations

Who comes up with the names for US military operations, like the “Phantom Fury” or “Noble Eagle”? Is it someone’s job in the Pentagon to sit around and think about cool names for future missions? My personal hunch is that the Pentagon has a special set of dice with intimidating-sounding words. Then they just roll them and combine the two words that come up. Your thoughts?

ANSWER PERSON RESPONDS: There is a fair amount of information about this in “the literature” (which, these days here at the library, means online databases). I will summarize it here, but to find several entertaining full-length articles you can go to, say, ProQuest, then go to Advanced Search and search the words “military operations names” in the “Article title” field. You should loosen up or play around with this search to find more articles. Yes, things have come a long way from Operation Overlord to Operation Enduring Freedom, and the names are generally as amusing to AP’s cynical mind as they are to the headline writers of these newspaper articles (“Operation Slick Moniker”) … except that the folks coming up with these terms are serious!

Apparently operation names were first used by the Germans in WWI. In WWII, the Germans focused on terms from mythology and religion (e.g., “Valkyrie”). Hitler himself apparently named the invasion of the Soviet Union “Barbarossa,” relating to Frederick I, Holy Roman Emperor, who had vanquished Slavs. Joint U.S.-British operations came from the Combined British-United States Interservice Code Word Index, but still, folks like Churchill and Eisenhower seemed to have been personally involved in the naming of major operations.

Today, the naming procedure sounds like something devised by Buck Henry.

The names are generated by computers in the military’s NICKA unit (for the Nickname and Exercise Term System). AP is not making this up (not that I ever do). Each of a couple of dozen Defense Department entities is assigned a series of two-letter alphabetic sequences, such as AG-AL, ES-EZ, etc. (Operation names now always seem to consist of two words, so these would be the first two letters of the adjective.) Possibilities are passed up through the command until the Secretary of Defense gets the final decision (at least for the big operations). They look for names that avoid “lightness or vulgarity,” and most people agree that these names sound as though they were written by committee rather than chosen by a decisive Churchill- (or Hitler-) like figure.

Your dice theory may work as well.

For an official history from the Army, see “The Art of Naming Operations” by Gregory C. Sieminski, complete with 107 endnotes, published in the Autumn 1995 issue of Parameters (v.25, no.3), from the United States Army War College at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. You can find this in Perkins Library’s Public Documents collection in the basement at call number D 101.72:v.25.

Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises

What are the respective differences between taxes, duties, imposts and excises? What does it mean concerning taxes when in the US Constitution it says “all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States”?

ANSWER PERSON RESPONDS: This is from Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution: “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States…”. The glossary from the U.S. Treasury Dept’s International Trade Data System http://www.itds.treas.gov/printglossaryfrm.html defines duty as “a tax levied by a government on the import or export of goods,” imposts as “a tax, especially an import duty,” and excise taxes as “taxes on the manufacture, sale, or consumption of goods, or upon licenses to pursue certain occupations, or upon corporate privileges,” which, they explain, in current usage covers about everything besides income taxes. It seems like the writers of the Constitution were throwing in all sorts of synonyms to cover the bases, although in the usage of the 18th century the words may have had other subtle differences. You might want to check an unabridged dictionary or the Oxford English Dictionary to get earlier definitions of these terms.

The uniformity clause makes AP’s head swim when reading about it. Basically, with regard to taxation, everyone must be treated the same within a jurisdiction (same tax rate, etc.). It’s pretty obvious that tea arriving at the port of Charleston would need to have the same rate of federal duties as tea arriving at the port of Baltimore. Beyond that, interpretation gets very, very complex and there seem to be a lot of court cases on whether a tax violates this clause or not. I think the Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was to get around the problem of the income tax not being uniform in some persons’ eyes, i.e., it is apportioned based on income, which varies, rather than strictly on numbers of persons from the census. Also involved was the complicated issue of “direct” (applied to all instances of a good or service) versus “indirect” (applied sort of to a potential, like a licensing fee) taxes. Whether one interpreted the income tax as one or the other affected whether it violated the uniformity clause. However, all this gets into legal areas in which AP is not an expert, so you’re forbidden to quote me! You might want to check if the Law Library has an Answer Person (or perhaps a friendly reference librarian).

What is the difference: payroll and income tax

What is the difference between payroll and income tax? Is payroll merely the weekly form of income tax or is it different since it raises money specifically for social security and medicare/medicaid.

Is the govt trying to screw over the poor by making us pay more in payroll taxes that are more regressive than income taxes?? I hate how they only have a sales tax for goods, which the poor (and everyone) need, and not for services, of which the rich buy a larger share proportionally.

Thanks!

ANSWER PERSON RESPONDS: Technically, a payroll tax is a tax paid by the employer based on its payroll. An example would be the employer portion of U.S. Social Security (Old Age and Survivor’s Insurance or OASI) or unemployment insurance (FUTA, for Federal Unemployment Tax Act). There may be all sorts of variations, such as limits on the level of wages on which the Social Security tax is applied. Colloquially, I’ve heard the term used for the entire Social Security program, including the employee portion, as you suggest. The income tax comes from the employee based on their income and, from a theoretical or policy (but perhaps not from a psychological) standpoint, is considered distinct. The money isn’t earmarked the same way as OASI or FUTA money. You can read about these topics in standard textbooks or dictionaries of economic or public policy terminology.

The topics of tax policy and tax incidence (e.g., who ultimately pays for the employer portion of OASI, or corporate income taxes, or property taxes — is it “passed on”?) has been studied extensively in academic literature (but probably not so much by politicians!). You’re correct that Social Security and sales taxes are generally considered more regressive than some other taxes, although ultimate incidence can be debated and you also have to consider the recipients of expenditures funded by a tax (which might make it less or even more regressive). I invite you to search our library’s catalog or databases that index articles or ask at our Reference Dept.