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Changing Domestic Priorities

reagan_moduleEconomic and Social Policies under President Reagan


The Urban Institute's Changing Domestic Priorities project examined the shifts in the nation's economic and social policies under the Reagan administration and analyzed the effects of these changes on people, places, and institutions.

About the Research

In 1982, the Urban Institute launched the Changing Domestic Priorities project to study the dramatic domestic policy changes set in motion by the "Reagan Revolution." Researchers spent eight years tracking and assessing the effects of policy change during and immediately after President Reagan's tenure. The work yielded a telling history of an important political era and placed the adminstration's policies in historical perspective.

The Reagan Experiment (1986) analyzed the major concerns, new policy directions, and first steps of the Reagan administration. The Reagan Record (1984) revealed a mixed record in achieving such goals as shrinking government's size and scope, reducing taxes, strengthening the military, streamlining regulation, and cutting entitlements. Challenge to Leadership: Economic and Social Issues for the Next Decade (1988) helped frame the national debates on the economic outlook, commitments to the next generation, the obligations of the haves to the have-nots, and trade-offs between individual liberty and public safety and well-being.

Findings


Findings from Changing Domestic Priorities touched on every sphere of policy and American life, including the following:

  • Family incomes: Established that family incomes were growing more slowly than in the past and began to document the growing inequality in the distribution of family incomes from the late 1970s onward.
  • Family structure and roles: Analyzed how rising divorce rates and women's greater workforce participation created needs to reform child care and child-support practices.
  • Economic growth: Showed how federal deficit-reduction measures of the 1980s translated into per capita income gains over the next five years and beyond.
  • Persistent poverty: Assessed the social costs of the emerging urban underclass and its origins—family weaknesses, joblessness, and lack of education.
  • Elder care: Extrapolated demographic changes and rises in health care costs to predict a cost crunch and propose ways to ease it without scrimping on care for the truly sick and poor.
  • Taxes: Provided an historic record of the extraordinary shift in the 1980s in tax rates and the tax base.
  • Fiscal choices: Compared belt-tightening strategies and found program cuts and revenue raisers that together could reduce the deficit if tough political choices were made.
  • International trade: Determined that the trade deficit of the 1980s stemmed from unsound policies, not an underlying lack of competitiveness, and warned against protectionism.

Publications