Three Commentaries on the Proposals

O ne of the obstacles to examining academic proposals for major policy change is the tendency to evaluate them in terms of the current political climate. There is certainly a large discontinuity between the politics of the 1990s and the proposals put forth in the two articles by James Walker and by Edward Zigler and Matia Finn-Stevenson. Both articles call for significant, new, and expensive public interventions at a time when the political system is retrenching toward spending far less on social programs, particularly at the federal level. But the politics of the day will change again. The appropriate evaluation of these policy proposals is the extent to which they can be turned into strategy, that is, translated into achievable goals around which advocacy is possible and effective. And, as always, the key question with such proposals involves a realistic approach to financing: Assuming the benefits of these policy approaches, how can they be financed?