Product Description
In Mirage, Eric Pianin and George Hager tell the behind-the-scenes story of the repeated efforts to balance the budget and reduce the deficit: how America got into this mess and why every attempt over the past two decades to get us out has failed. It is a story of wishful thinking compounded by a chronic failure of leadership -- from Ronald Reagan's something-for-nothing plan to reduce the deficit to Bill Clinton's missed opportunity to enact a deficit plan that would really work instead of making of a modest effort that would spend vast amounts of political capital just to make a dent in the problem. And it is a warning that American democracy may finally have found, in the budget and the deficit, a challenge it simply cannot meet. The American political system, so adept at reacting to crises and giving people what they want in the short run, is ultimately unable to manage the long-term sacrifice needed to address the budget problem.
