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There are no public benefits unless public authorities authorize funds to pay for them. This is the case whether the benefits are provided in cash, as vouchers, or as services. This point seems elementary, but the relationship between providing revenues for public benefits and providing access to public benefits is not straightforward. As I hope to show, the process of enacting revenues for public benefits influences the choices and decisions of administrators of public programs considerably beyond simply authorizing budget levels. A useful point of departure is the anatomy of the social compact. The social compact may be understood as the set of goods and services that citizens broadly expect to be available to them, and political authorities expect to provide . In a democratic society, citizens understand at some level that they are the authors of the social compact, that they have brought the social compact into being. The social compact, along with patriotism, a sense of history, and other critical elements, shapes citizen loyalties and behaviors toward the state and fellow citizens. We usually think of the social compact as signifying a relationship between the state and citizens as actual or potential beneficiaries, but it is more than this. It is also an understanding that extends throughout the polity, including people who will never receive public benefits, that certain circumstances will trigger certain state responses. For example, an adult who never expects to have children still expects to live in a society in which children with special needs receive targeted 137 6 Revenues and Access to Public Benefits michael lipsky 06-7501-1 CH 6 10/28/08 5:23 PM Page 137 assistance. Such a person benefits indirectly from that assurance, even though he or she does not directly benefit. At this level, the social compact is fairly stable over time. New programs are introduced as the range of problems deemed to require public action expands, and as new populations are included in the broad consensus of who deserves protection . Although recent decades have witnessed vigorous efforts to cut back the welfare state, the basic composition of the broad social compact has remained intact. The primary exception in the United States has been the transformation of the basic welfare program for dependent children from an entitlement program to a time-limited assistance program emphasizing work effort. But a version of the old program remains in place, and the totality of public benefits provision otherwise has not changed very much (Pierson 2001, 72). The notion of the social compact summarizes very broadly the relationship of people to the state with respect to the provision of social policies. However, the laws and regulations that help give shape to the social compact only begin to suggest the actual provision of public benefits. This is because public benefits are significantly mediated by government agencies and partner organizations in the private and social sectors. At any given time, the social compact in reality reflects in part decisions made by public managers within their broad discretion to implement policy. Public managers are governed by three work-related imperatives that have important implications for the distribution of public benefits. First, to go over familiar ground, they are expected to administer the laws under their jurisdiction fairly, effectively, and efficiently (and, it should go without saying, honestly). This means that, as James Q. Wilson (1967) instructed: —They strive to treat similarly situated citizens in the same way. —They seek to administer programs to achieve the best results. —They try to achieve these objectives at the lowest possible cost consistent with achieving the expected results.1 These requirements of public management are often at odds with one another, which is why the conflicts among these objectives are the core challenges of public administration in human services. Second, public managers are expected to “add value” in their core areas of responsibility. The best public managers, Mark Moore (1995) rightly observes, constantly search for ways to achieve their objectives and manage the conflicts at the heart of their work in new ways that expand the capacity of their agencies, render them more effective, or achieve results at lower cost. Public managers strategize how to extend benefits widely and most efficiently when programs are just starting up or growing, and they strategize how to reduce or limit growth 138 michael lipsky 1. Another critical requirement of administrators is that they are expected to act responsively within their range of discretion. This element need not concern us here. 06-7501-1...

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