Abstract
The Social Security Act was created in 1935 as America was emerging from the Great Depression. Revisiting this monumental legislative achievement 80 years later arouses nostalgia not unlike visiting a childhood home. It may be the same basic house, but it may have an addition or different windows, and it may even look a bit shabby. It often seems smaller. As comfortable as it might have felt in childhood, the home seems insufficient for one who has grown up and faces present day realities. Returning to a childhood home causes change: a change in the environment and a change in the way the past is remembered.
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Notes
Present-day social welfare programs under the authority of the Social Security Act are Social Security, both Retirement, Survivors Insurance, and Disability Insurance (Title II), Unemployment Insurance (Title III), Aid and Services to Needy Families with Children and Child Welfare Services, including financial assistance to needy families (TANF), Child and Family Services, Child Support Enforcement, and Foster Care and Adoption Assistance (Title IV), Supplemental Security Income (Title XVI), Medicare (Title XVIII), Medicaid (Title XIX), Social Services (Title XX), and Child Health Insurance Program (Title XXI). Together these programs account for over 90 percent of all federal social welfare spending, and drive a high proportion of state social welfare spending as well. For a detailed analysis of these programs see Andrew Dobelstein, Understanding the Social Security Act (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Present-day social welfare programs under the authority of the Social Security Act are Social Security, both Retirement, Survivors Insurance, and Disability Insurance (Title II), Unemployment Insurance (Title III), Aid and Services to Needy Families with Children and Child Welfare Services, including financial assistance to needy families (TANF), Child and Family Services, Child Support Enforcement, and Foster Care and Adoption Assistance (Title IV), Supplemental Security Income (Title XVI), Medicare (Title XVIII), Medicaid (Title XIX), Social Services (Title XX), and Child Health Insurance Program (Title XXI). Together these programs account for over 90 percent of all federal social welfare spending, and drive a high proportion of state social welfare spending as well. For a detailed analysis of these programs see Andrew Dobelstein, Understanding the Social Security Act (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Ron Haskins, one of the architects of the 1996 welfare reform wrote: “If the federal responsibility for social programs were moved to the state level, why not also move the responsibility for raising the funds to pay for the programs to the state level?…Taken together these reforms would constitute a complete overthrow of the New Deal and the War on Poverty and return to a much smaller and less powerful meddlesome federal government.” Ron Haskins, Work over Welfare. The Inside Story of the 1996 Welfare Reform Law (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2006), p. 85.
Geoffrey Kollmann, “Social Security: Summary of Major Changes in the Cash Benefits Program,” Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, May, 2000.
Patricia P. Martin and David A. Weaver, Social Security Bulletin, Vol. 66, No. 1, 2005.
Julian E. Zelizer, Taxing America. Wilbur D. Mill, Congress, and the State, 1945–1975 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Eric M. Patashnik, Putting Trust in the US Budget (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Cohen was known as Mr. Social Security with good reason. His studied views of social insurance enterprise won loyal political support from influential people in labor, the social welfare community, and even the insurance industry. See Edward D. Berkowitz, Mr. Social Security. The Life of Wilbur J. Cohen (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1995), particularly chapter 4.
John A. Svahn and Mary Ross, Social Security Amendments of 1983: Legislative History and Summary of Provisions. Washington, DC: Social Security Bulletin, July 1983/Vol. 46, No. 7.
This “good business” view was sufficiently widespread when Wisconsin passed its unemployment insurance law, the model for today’s Unemployment Insurance. See Edwin Witte, The Development of the Social Security Act (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963), pp. 112–14.
See Arthur Altmeyer, The Formatiave Years of Social Security. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966, pp. 14–17
Karen M Tani, “Flemming v. Nestor: Anticommunism, the Welfare State and the Making of New Property,” Law and History Review, 26 (2008), p. 381, note 7.
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© 2014 Andrew W. Dobelstein
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Dobelstein, A.W. (2014). The Social Insurances. In: Poverty in the United States. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137476630_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137476630_4
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