"The consolidation of public finance has become the most prevalent topic in recent policy discourse in the US. However, the political debate about fiscal "belt-tightening" stretches back to the last decades of the past millennium, induced by deteriorating economic conditions which followed the first oil price shock in the early 1970s. Retrenchment in the American Welfare State investigates to what extent different welfare state programs in the US were affected by cutbacks during the Republican Reagan era, on the one hand, and during the Democratic Clinton era on the other, and to what extent these cutbacks reveal certain "patterns" of retrenchment, and how the measured discrepancies can best be explained."--P. [4] of cover.