Reimagining the Welfare State

by Jennifer Mittelstadt ~ 7-23-15

Since the creation of the free-market Liberty League by the DuPont brothers in 1936, hostile corporate leaders, financiers, economists, and lawmakers have been bent on destroying Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal welfare state.

Wisconsin workers have seen their right to collective bargaining outlined in the New Deal’s Wagner Act gutted, while public pensions, created during the Great Depression to bolster public employment and ensure long-term economic security, have been attacked from Alaska to Florida. Congress also continues to chip away at the state-sponsored provision of basic needs, recently targeting the food stamp program (originally created under FDR) by proposing that all recipients hold jobs, suffer lifetime limits, and receive lower overall benefits.

To many observers, it appears that the New Deal and its safety net have been shredded. Political scientists and others have argued that the perilous individual economic risk that Americans faced before the New Deal has been foisted back on them as its collective protections have withered. With the shocking growth in economic inequality that has arisen alongside cuts to the New Deal, freedom from want — the keystone of Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” — has been chipped away to a pebble. It’s enough to make Americans long for a revival of the politics of the 1930s.

But we should be clear-eyed rather than nostalgic about the demise of the welfare state ....

Much more here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/07/fdr-social-security-gi-bill/