The Welfare State: A Very Short Introduction by David Garland

Author:David Garland
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780199672660
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2016-02-01T05:00:00+00:00

The USA

The USA is the most liberal or ‘market-conforming’ of all the major welfare states, standing at the opposite end of the spectrum from social democratic Sweden and structured quite differently than conservative Germany. Its levels of government social expenditure are lowest, its social provision more partial, and it redistributes less than other welfare states, giving rise to some of the highest levels of poverty and inequality in the developed world. And, though ‘the American Dream’ suggests otherwise, intergenerational social mobility is now lower in the USA than in Sweden, Germany, or Britain.

It was not always thus. Nineteenth-century America was a leader in state welfare, providing relatively generous pensions to Civil War veterans and widows—and later to mothers and children. But the USA lacked a reformed civil service and government positions were political sinecures distributed through the party spoils system—with the result that government corruption discredited these programmes. The weakness and low prestige of the US state and the comparative strength and popularity of the private sector have been shaping influences in American welfare history ever since.

The Social Security Act of 1935 created a national system of social insurance (see Figure 7) but because of Southern resistance and racial hierarchies, its coverage was far from universal. Agricultural labourers and domestic servants, most of whom were black, were not insured and the administration of social assistance (including aid to families with dependent children) was devolved to states and local authorities, many of which provided only a bare minimum.

7. ‘More security for the American family’, Social Security Board poster (1939).

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