Setting National Priorities: The Next Ten Years

In each of the past six years Brookings has published a Setting National Priorities volume, providing an analysis of the President's budget proposals for the forthcoming fiscal year. In 1976 this series is continued, but with a different format and approach. This book examines a set of major national problems from a longer-range perspective, not restricted to the current Federal budget. The first part deals with foreign policy and national defense. It addresses four major topics: U.S. foreign policy and national security, with emphasis on averting military conflict; the policy issues raised by the growing economic interdependence of industrial countries; the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons; and the problems of managing U.S. foreign policy. The second part discusses domestic policy issues: the prospects for improving the nation's economic performance, particularly with respect to inflation and unemployment; the past and prospective size, growth, and composition of the public sector of the economy, and the fiscal relations among Federal, state, and local governments; Federal regulation of economic activity in such fields as environmental protection, energy, consumer product quality, and occupational health and safety, with emphasis on more efficient methods of attaining national goals in these fields; and trends in income distribution, coupled withmore » an analysis of alternative future strategies for governmental income-maintenance programs. The book concludes with an examination of congressional-executive relations, and of the problems of formulating and carrying out increasingly complex national programs in a government of divided powers.« less