fact, the contrast is even more striking when we note its persistence over time. U.S. institutions
have produced a major investment in distant social-security outcomes twice in the last 30 years,
while Britain never did. Six years before Reagan’s 1983 reform, Jimmy Carter had enacted an
even costlier investment in the program’s long-term sustainability with the largest peacetime tax
increase in American history. While of only modest interest in distributive terms – its designers
did not aim to cut benefits – the Carter investment arguably represents the most dramatic
intertemporal change to an American social program in the era of welfare-state reform. The 1977
episode, and the absence of similar outcomes throughout this era in Britain, are thus critical to
illuminating the distinctive intertemporal dynamics of U.S. and British welfare-state reform.
Why, I ask, did the United States enact dramatic intertemporal shifts in the financing of
retirement security while British politicians were stymied in their attempts to do the same? As I
will argue, several strands of explanatory logic common to analyses of retrenchment politics
serve only to deepen the puzzle. Standard institutionalist arguments in the retrenchment literature
cannot explain why a governing majority within Britain’s highly centralized institutions could
achieve less intertemporal adjustment than a U.S. President facing separated powers, divided
government, and weak party discipline. The inherited policy features upon which DWS focuses
would seem equally unable to explain the difference: features of the British pension system that
facilitated benefit cuts do not appear to have eased investment in long-term cost-control. Finally,
the intertemporal comparison confounds the core logic of intentionality underlying the
explanations put forward in DWS and other studies of reform. As we will see, it was Thatcher
who most eagerly sought a long-term intertemporal shift in pension costs, while U.S. politicians
were largely preoccupied with closing short-term gaps in Social Security’s finances.
I will contend that these divergent intertemporal policy outcomes were determined by the
institutional context within which U.S. and British politicians operated. While institutional
arguments are common to studies of ordinary distributive politics, the structural logic of
investment departs in important respects from institutional effects on cross-sectional distributive
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