| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Divided Welfare State: The Battle over Public and Private Social Benefits in the United States. By Jacob S. Hacker. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xvi, 447 pp. Cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-521-81288-7. Paper, $23.00, ISBN 0-521-01328-3.)
Many commentators on the American welfare state have documented the sheer size of tax-subsidized social benefits to American citizens. I recently calculated these so-called tax expenditures to total $10.98 trillion (in 1992 constant dollars) in lost tax revenues from 1974 through 2004—or about one-half the size of revenues from individuals' income taxes, with a major share consisting of tax breaks to corporations for their contributions to employees' health insurance and pensions (see Jansson, The Sixteen-Trillion-Dollar-Mistake, 2001, p. 379).	1
Jacob S. Hacker takes historians, social scientists, and political scientists to task for not making explicit reference to these private social benefits because their focus is on direct public social expenditures. Aggregate American social spending that combines public and private benefits places the United States in the middle of Western industrial nations rather than near the bottom, as many social scientists contend. (Private social benefits constitute one-third of all social welfare spending in the United States, as compared to less than 10 percent in most other industrial nations.)	. . .

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