Receiving thoughtful comments in this symposium from 19 of the discipline's most innovative empirical researchers is gratifying and goes a long way toward bringing issues of replication and data accessibility into public view. The progress made in the preceding pages clearly demonstrates the virtues of a community of scholars willing to share sufficient information to benefit from each other's work.
To understand the nature of those proposals, one needs to realize that when Unger speaks of the Dictatorship of No Alternatives and humanity's desperate need to overthrow it, he is not just talking about the narrow spectrum of politics in the United States, where the center has shifted so far to the right that tepid Clintonian triangulation has become the left wing of the possible; he's dissenting from the idea that the projects of egalitarian social justice should be funded by the redistribution of wealth.
Election Briefing Note 5 shows how households have been affected by Labour's tax and benefit reforms. This Election Briefing Note discusses further tax-benefit reform that Labour proposes to introduce if re-elected. The first section discusses three "credits" the government is proposing to introduce - the integrated child credit, the pension credit and the employment tax credit. We analyse their likely effect on household incomes and how much each would cost to introduce. The new credits represent developments of tax-benefit reforms implemented in the last Parliament, but Labour's manifesto also contains proposals for "asset-based" welfare, which would represent more of a new departure. In particular, the party plans to introduce two new policies - the Child Trust Fund and the Saving Gateway. Both are targeted towards low-income households and provide financial assistance in the form of assets. This method of asset-based welfare delivery contrasts with (and is intended to complement) the traditional approach of providing social security benefits as income supplements. Section 2 considers some of the arguments for and against the proposed new approach. Finally, we consider Labour's approach to income tax.
It is a project to write an informed and authoritative 3000 word proposal to a government minister. The module is Perspectives on Early Childhood Education: Issues in policy, practice and research. Because the field of early childhood education is evolving the course is flexible to respond to emerging issues. The students need to be informed on the bigger policy backdrop in Early Childhood Education. The brief is responsive to whatever is currently happening regarding government policy in this area. At this point in time a National Early Years Strategy is being developed by the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, Frances Fitzgerald. The students are required to write a proposal to the Minister outlining: the history of the development of the early childhood sector outlining why such a Strategy is necessary, the potential benefits that high quality early childhood education and care, embodied in a National Early Years Strategy, could engender in Ireland and to focus on two themes arising from OECD reports (2006/2012) that should be key components of the Strategy.
