Green Book

"We have an incredibly complicated set of social welfare programmes in the United States. We sort of know what food stamps are, we sort of know what welfare is and what Medicare does but there’s hundreds of thousands of rules that affect how these programmes are implemented. Those rules are important to understand, as policy makers and students of public finance. To understand the effects of these programmes on groups over time is incredibly important. The Green Book brought all that together. It’s about 1,600 pages of incredibly small print, which goes through all the details on all the major social welfare programmes administered by the Ways and Means Committee. So you could learn about exactly what happened when you went from two kids to three kids on TANF [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, otherwise known as welfare]. Or exactly what happens when you went above the ceiling for the earnings tax and Social Security. I don’t think I ever sat down and read The Green Book but I referenced it thousands of times to figure out exactly how does this programme work. It was a great resource to get if you wanted to understand these programmes and how they worked. Sure. This is just the ultimate tool for anyone who wants to get away from the polemics and really understand how these programmes work. It’s not for everyone but it can enable any real student of public policy to puzzle through these programmes and answer questions like, “How exactly are rich people vs poor people treated in terms of the Medicare premiums they pay?” It’s just the ultimate resource for questions like that. I haven’t spent a lot of time with The Green Book in a while. All the time I spent with it was during periods of Democratic control of the Ways and Means Committee so I guess I don’t know the answer to that question. Yeah, but more importantly, the government would benefit. I think it’s a benefit for the government to have someone like me be there and a benefit to me to have been there. I don’t know that it would vastly improve the quality of the economic research but it might help us be better able to turn the research we do into something useful for the world. Policymakers face a lot of hard problems every day. Economists, particularly public finance economists, are trained to think logically about the trade-offs involved in government policy."