Should have FDR vetoed the Social Security Act as passed?

[SpartanDem]

I ask because I think Social Security provides an interesting parallel to the health care debate in terms of what is and is not acceptable progress. Few would doubt that SS is one of the best things to happen to this country, but the bill passed in 1935 was far from perfect, if we were debating this issue on DU in the 1930's it would've, of course, had a lot support. With the flaws of the original act, from discrimination to implementation in which it would've taken seven years(in the middle of the Great Depression) before SS as we know it in the form of monthly checks began though that was later reduced to five years and checks started in 1940. Many progressives of the era no doubt would've found this very objectionable, I have to imagine there would be a contingent demanding that he veto it and that the Democrats pass a "real" Social Security bill. So would you have found the bill AS PASSED acceptable? Should FDR have vetoed and told Southern Dems who were responsible for much of weakening to pass a better bill.

Most women and minorities were excluded from the benefits of unemployment insurance and old age pensions. Employment definitions reflected typical white male categories and patterns.<11> Job categories that were not covered by the act included workers in agricultural labor, domestic service, government employees, and many teachers, nurses, hospital employees, librarians, and social workers.<12> The act also denied coverage to individuals who worked intermittently.<13> These jobs were dominated by women and minorities. For example, women made up 90% of domestic labor in 1940 and two-thirds of all employed black women were in domestic service.<14> Exclusions exempted nearly half the working population.<13> Nearly two-thirds of all African Americans in the labor force, 70 to 80% in some areas in the South, and just over half of all women employed were not covered by Social Security.<15><16> At the time, the NAACP protested the Social Security Act, describing it as “a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through.”<16>

Some have suggested that this discrimination resulted from the powerful position of Southern Democrats on two of the committees pivotal for the Act’s creation, the Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee. Southern congressmen supported Social Security as a means to bring needed relief to areas in the South that were especially hurt by the Great Depression but wished to avoid legislation which might interfere with the racial status quo in the South. The solution to this dilemma was to pass a bill that both included exclusions and granted authority to the states rather than the national government (such as the states' power in Aid to Dependent Children). Others have argued that exclusions of job categories such as agriculture were frequently left out of new social security systems worldwide because of the administrative difficulties in covering these workers.<16>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_(United_States)

as enacted, New Deal measures were far from universal. Political realities--especially the enduring power of urban political machines in the North and black disenfranchisement in the South--powerfully affected the drafting of legislation. The result was a two-tiered system that offered generous, nationally established benefits to some Americans, primarily white and male, while leaving others with lesser entitlements or none at all.



The Social Security Act, the centerpiece of the New Deal "welfare state," encompassed a series of programs with divergent structures and target populations. The most generous--old-age pensions and unemployment insurance--provided aid automatically and without the stigma of dependency. By linking benefits to taxes paid by eligible wageworkers, these programs identified assistance as a right rather than charity. But the exclusion of agricultural, domestic and casual laborers left uncovered the large majority of the employed black population.

http://www.fathom.com/feature/121864/index.html

[NYC_SKP]

1. Very good question.... And..

And one worthy of inclusion as debate ensues as to whether or not accepting "something imperfect" is better than rejecting anything that doesn't "go far enough".

:patriot:

[DrToast]

2. Paul Begala wants his article back

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/12/AR2009081202575.html

[Pirate Smile]

3. Ezra Klein on Begala's article:

What Social Security Teaches Us About Health Care

Paul Begala has an op-ed in this morning's Washington Post that's the most important argument you'll read today. I'm going to quote a nice big chunk of it here.

I think my fellow progressives ought to give Max Baucus and other members of the Senate Finance Committee a little breathing room as they labor to produce a health-care bill that can garner enough votes to pass the Senate.

Progressive politics is, in my view, a movement, not a monument. We cannot achieve perfection in this life, and if that is our goal we will always be frustrated. The right has far more modest goals: At every turn, its members seek to advance their power and protect privilege. I've never seen the Republican right oppose a tax cut for the rich because it wasn't generous enough; I've never seen them oppose a set of loopholes for corporate lobbyists because one industry or another wasn't included. The left, on the other hand, too often prefers a glorious defeat to an incremental victory.

Our history teaches us otherwise. No self-respecting liberal today would support Franklin Roosevelt's original Social Security Act. It excluded agricultural workers -- a huge part of the economy in 1935, and one in which Latinos have traditionally worked. It excluded domestic workers, which included countless African Americans and immigrants. It did not cover the self-employed, or state and local government employees, or railroad employees, or federal employees or employees of nonprofits. It didn't even cover the clergy. FDR's Social Security Act did not have benefits for dependents or survivors. It did not have a cost-of-living increase. If you became disabled and couldn't work, you got nothing from Social Security.

If that version of Social Security were introduced today, progressives like me would call it cramped, parsimonious, mean-spirited and even racist. Perhaps it was all those things. But it was also a start. And for 74 years we have built on that start. We added more people to the winner's circle: farm workers and domestic workers and government workers. We extended benefits to the children of working men and women who died. We granted benefits to the disabled. We mandated annual cost-of-living adjustments. And today Social Security is the bedrock of our progressive vision of the common good.

Health care may follow that same trajectory. It would be a bitter disappointment if health reform did not include a public option. A public plan that keeps the insurance companies honest is, I believe, the right policy and the right politics. I believe subsidies should extend to as many Americans as need help and that the hard-earned health benefits of middle-class Americans should not be taxed. I believe insurer abuses like the preexisting-condition rule should be outlawed. The question is not whether I or other progressives will support a health-reform bill that includes everything we want but, rather, whether we will support a bill that doesn't.

Baucus and the others working on health care have earned the right to take their best shot, and we progressives should hold them to a high standard. I carry a heavy burden of regret from my role in setting the bar too high the last time we tried fundamental health reform. I was one of the people who advised President Bill Clinton to wave his pen at Congress in 1994 and declare: "If you send me legislation that does not guarantee every American private health insurance that can never be taken away, you will force me to take this pen, veto the legislation, and we'll come right back here and start all over again." I helped set the bar at 100 percent -- "guarantee every American" -- and after our failure it's taken us 15 years to start all over again.

I would disagree on one point: The original Social Security legislation wasn't "perhaps" a "cramped, parsimonious, mean-spirited and even racist" program. It simply was those things. But it was something else, too. A start. Over the next 50 years, it was built upon. But not only by Democrats. Some of the largest advances came when Republicans saw political opportunity in strengthening the entitlement. Begala implies that progressives eventually added cost-of-living increases to Social Security. In fact, it was Richard Nixon who signed that bill. Similarly, whether you like the structure of Medicare's prescription drug benefit or not, it was a massive expansion of an entitlement program, and it was proposed and signed by George W. Bush.

The trickiest part of my job right now is to balance the desire for a better bill with the need to argue that the bill that's likely to emerge still makes for a better country. You don't want to ease the pressure on Congress too early, but you don't want to see your allies forget that this is about more than the public option. Imagine for a second that health-care reform looks exactly like the House bill, but the public option is excluded. What will be easier over the next 10 years? Passing a simple piece of legislation that establishes a public option? Or starting from scratch with a 1,000-plus-page bill that spends $1.3 trillion expanding coverage, and regulates insurers, and creates health insurance exchanges, and reforms the delivery system, and cuts payments to the private insurers overcharging Medicare ... and all the rest of it?

You don't want to compromise too early. But nor do you want to realize that you should have compromised only to learn that it's too late. I don't know where we are along that continuum. But Begala has seen this fail before, and it has taken us 15 years to return to the place where we can conceive of passing a worse piece of legislation. He's worth listening to.

By Ezra Klein | August 13, 2009; 4:14 PM ET

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/08/what_social_security_teaches_u.html

If anyone wants to know why Obama wont "draw a line in the sand" or make a veto threat, that was what permanently killed the 93' HCR. Obama wont do it this time.

[DJ13]

4. A cave is a deep hole and a traditional Democratic principle

[Political Heretic]

5. It is a great question. One that all critics should be gutsy enough to answer. I'll start:

First of all, its a great question. Because its extremely easy to criticize all the capitulations and concessions made in the health care process and "piously" demand a veto.

Make no mistake, there are conditions where I feel a veto would be absolutely appropriate. But what we have here is a real dillemma.

One one hand, sometimes when you settle for something so weak that it is nearly worthless on its face, the rationalization is that "we'll come back a little later and keep adding to it." Indeed this was the exact rationalization when the paid leave provision was dropped from the Family Medical Leave Act in the 90s. It is now fifteen or so years later, and not only has no one ever gotten back to it, its not even remotely on the political radar. In that instance the "we'll fix it later" was used as an excuse to pass something and then bury it. When advocates attempted to lobby for part II, the response from congressional representatives was "we've already 'done' family medical leave."

But on the other hand, social security is a great example. Not everything was there when it initially passed, and it was revisited later, more than once, and made better. So what does that mean for us now? I think it leaves us pretty much where we've always been, with acknowledging that there's probably a point where a bill is so bad that it should be killed, but bills that don't include everything but have a strong framework might need to be passed.

Where is that line? Well, that's the debate we've been having yes? I think that line is at a public option. The ideal would have been single payer. The acceptable compromise is a public option. Anything less than that isn't meaningful health care reform. It might be insurance reform, but its not comprehensive health care reform and its not what Americans need or deserve.

[SpartanDem]

8. You make a good point about the FMLA and it faults

that have never been addressed that is certainly is a real possibility. The FMLA even if it was perfect wouldn't be the radical restructuring that Social Security was or health reform will be and I think that's important, because those radical changes that made something a right that is very salient to people have always progressed. Even without a public option health care would become a right and there are Americans who, against there best interest, don't see it that way right now. But as we've seen once something is established as a right like Social Security or Medicare Americans will fight to death for it. Americans would be come to see the government having a role in providing health care to EVERYONE even without public option.

[Hissyspit]

9. Add to your last line: "or voted for."

[John Q. Citizen]

6. FDR had a guy from Montana write the bill for him, congress passed it and he signed it. Montana

already had a state retirement program. He brought the guy from Montana to write the bill and administer the program.

So the question really should be, Should Obama have gotten somebody to write him a bill and then had Congress pass it, like FDR did with social security?

People seem to really stretch to try to justify giving private insurance companies a trillion a decade of tax money and making us buy their crappy product.

I assure you FDR never did anything like that with Social Security, and the Dems stopped bush from doing that with Social Security just a few years ago.

Why they want to do it with health care is clear. They like the campaign cash.

It's just so wrong.

[FreakinDJ]

7. They Over-rode FDR's Veto in 1942

Some thing your piece leaves out

In 1942 when the bodies of american Servicemen fighting in WWII started arriving on US soil, a group of Republican Senators crafted the bill that changed Social Security from a Federaly Secured Savings Account to the "Pay as You Go" plan it is now

[Political Heretic]

14. If they overrode his veto then it wasn't just a group of Republican senators.

You have democratic senators to thank for that as well.

[Doremus]

10. Just cause they messed it up in 1935 is no reason not to get it right the 1st time now.

How many people in need fell through the cracks until they *did* get it right?

Why shouldn't we strive to do it better this time?

[SpartanDem]

12. Nothing wrong with trying to get it right the first time

the question is though is at point is OK to delay progress in order to get it right? FDR no doubt strived to get it right, but he to deal with the political realties of the era and he had to decided if more harm than good would be done by singing something that was not perfect.

[Sebastian Doyle]

15. That's what the DLC said about NAFTA

Yeah, we know this bill is a total piece of shit. But we'll fix it later, we promise

Not fucking acceptable this time. No half-assed bills with a promise to fix it later. Because they won't.

[uponit7771]

11. Good point

[chieftain]

13. Great point. n/t

[Cleita]

16. It wasn't fundamentally different than what he wanted. I could be built on.

If it had been a Republican dream of savings accounts and Wall Street investments I think he would have vetoed it.

This is the trap in the health care debate. Would a bill that doesn't do everything you want but is fundamental to a system that could be built on acceptable? Or, is it a big giveaway to the private health care industry like the prescription drug benefit in Medicare?