Social Welfare
- Social welfare in the United States
- Who deserves to benefit?
- Insistence that it be only those who cannot help themselves
- Slow, steady change in deserving/undeserving line
- Alternative view: fair share of national income; government redistribute money
- Preference to give services, not money, to help deserving poor
- Late arrival of welfare policy
- Behind twenty-two European nations
- Contrast with Great Britain in 1908
- Influence of federalism
- Federal involvement "illegal" until 1930s
- Experiments by state governments
- Argued against federal involvement because state already providing welfare
- Lobbied for federal involvement to help states
- Majoritarian welfare programs
- Social Security Act of 1935
- Great Depression of 1929: local relief overwhelmed
- Elections of 1932: Democrats and Franklin Roosevelt swept in
- Legal and political roadblocks; was direct welfare unconstitutional?
- Fear of more radical movements
- Long's "Share Our Wealth"
- Sinclair's "End Poverty in California"
- Townsend's old age program
- Cabinet Committee's two-part plan
- "Insurance" for unemployed and elderly
- "Assistance" for dependent children, blind, aged
- Federally funded, state-administered program under means test
- Medicare Act of 1965
- Medical benefits omitted in 1935: controversial but done to ensure passage
- Opponents
- AMA
- House Ways and Means Committee under Wilbur Mills
- 1964 elections: Democrats' big majority altered Ways and Means
- Objections anticipated in plan
- Application only to aged, not everybody
- Only hospital, not doctors,' bills covered
- Broadened by Ways and Means to include Medicaid for poor; pay doctors' bills for elderly
- Social Security Act of 1935
- Reforming majoritarian welfare programs
- Social Security
- Not enough people paying into Social Security
- Three solutions
- Raise the retirement age to seventy, freeze the size of retirement benefits, raise Social Security taxes
- Privatize Social Security
- Combine first two methods and allow individual investment in mutual funds
- Medicare
- Problems: huge costs and inefficient
- Possible solutions
- Get rid of Medicare and have doctors and hospitals work for government
- Elderly take Medicare money and buy health insurance
- Delaying the inevitable
- Clinton and surplus, new benefits
- Bush and attempts at new health care measures
- Social Security
- A client welfare policy: AFDC
- Scarcely noticed part of Social Security Act
- Federal government permitted state to
- Define need
- Set benefit levels
- Administer program
- Federal government increased rule of operation
- New programs (e.g., Food Stamps, Earned Income Credit, free school meals)
- Difficult to sustain political support
- States complained about federal regulations
- Public opinion turned against program
- Composition of program participants changed
- Who deserves to benefit?
- Two kinds of welfare programs
- Majoritarian politics: almost everybody pays and benefits, for example, the Social Security Act and the Medicare Act
- Client politics: everybody pays, relatively few people benefit, for example, the AFDC program
- Majoritarian politics
- Programs with widely distributed benefits and costs
- Beneficiaries must believe they will come out ahead
- Political elites must believe in legitimacy of program
- Social Security and Medicare looked like "free lunch"
- Debate over legitimacy: Social Security (1935)
- Constitution did not authorize federal welfare (conservatives)
- But benefits were not really a federal expenditure (liberals)
- Good politics unless cost to voters exceeds benefits
- Programs with widely distributed benefits and costs
- Client politics
- Programs pass if cost to public not perceived as great and client considered deserving
- Americans believe today that able-bodied people should work for welfare benefits.
- Americans prefer service strategy to income strategy
- Charles Murray: high welfare benefits made some young people go on welfare rather than seek jobs
- No direct evidence supports Murray