The Ideological Origins of American Federalism by Alison L. LaCroix, Harvard, 320pp., $35

This past week, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson released a draft report that delivered this unsettling news: “We must stabilize then reduce the national debt, or we could spend $1 trillion a year in interest alone by 2020.” That number looks all the scarier when one considers that the entire federal budget this past year was $3.6 trillion.

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