About the Author – Eugene Steuerle is the Richard B. Fisher Chair at the Urban Institute and author of a column and blog, The Government We Deserve.  His latest book, Dead Men Ruling, suggests that we live in a time of opportunity, not austerity but are bound in mainly by a multi-decade effort of both political parties to control, not enable, the future.  Contact him at esteuerle@urban.org for further information or to receive his column.

Among past positions, he has served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Tax Analysis, President of the National Tax Association, chair of the Technical Panel advising Social Security on methods, Vice-President of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, and economic coordinator of the Treasury Department's efforts leading to the Tax Reform Act of 1986.  He co-founded the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, the Urban Institute Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy, and Act for Alexandria, a community foundation that he now also chairs.  His research and writings span sixteen books and over one thousand articles and columns.  He received his Ph.D. with distinction in public finance, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

About the Book – The news coming out of Washington, D.C., and reverberating around the nation increasingly sounds like a broken record: low or zero growth in employment, inadequate funds to pay future Social Security and Medicare obligations, cuts in funding for education and children's programs, arbitrary sequesters or cutbacks in good and bad programs alike, threats not to pay our nation's debts, inability to reach political compromise, and political parties with no real vision for twenty-first-century government.

In Dead Men Ruling, C. Eugene Steuerle argues that these seemingly separable economic and political problems are actually symptoms of a common disease, one unique to our time. Despite the despairing claims of many, Steuerle points out that we no more live in an age of austerity than did Americans at the turn into the twentieth century with the demise of the frontier. Recognizing this extraordinary but checked potential is also the secret to breaking the political logjam that –as Steuerle points out –was created largely by now dead (or retired) men.