This chapter discussed national economic policy-making by providing its historical context, forms, institutions, and ultimately procedures that have come to define macroeconomic management in the US. First, it dealt with the establishment of the early colonies as economic joint stock ventures.  The American economy grew slowly without much government intervention until after the Civil War as the government dealt mostly with the sale of public lands and the laying and collecting of imposts and excise taxes. Industrialization and mass transport technologies like steam and rail led to the emergence of macroeconomic regulation by the federal government in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries culminating with the establishment of the FED in 1913 and the 16^th Amendment’s allowance of a federal income tax. The world wars and the Great Depression’s New Deal led to the development of the permanent macro-level regulatory state and welfare provisioning system that we still have today.

     In addition to the FED, other institutions like the CEA, OMB (formerly BoB) and CBO have been established to assist the president and the Congress in the creation of economic policy. This policy has followed different formations including Keynesian, monetarist, supply-side, and new economy, but all of them have largely rejected the traditional conservatism of the past with its reliance on laissez-faire economic prescriptions. They differ from one another based on the degree to which they reject the past and employ the interventionist federal state as a macroeconomic regulator.

    The development of the welfare state has produced both social insurance and mean-tested programs operated at or at least through the federal government since the 1930’s. The employment of the federal government as an education provider for the nation as a whole since the end of World War II has provided additional opportunities and constraints on federal power and role within the polity. Questions remain as to the ultimate impacts of the increasing entrenchment of the national debt coupled with an overall decline in future revenue sources due to persistent tax cutting in the last four decades, but it is clear that the federal government is here to stay as a guiding force in the construction of economic and social domestic policy.