According to Mike, “My man Franklin Delano Roosevelt may not have known about JavaScript and agile programming, but he knew a few things about the public provisioning of social insurance, and he realized the second category, while conceptually more work for the government, can eliminate a lot of unnecessary administrative problems.” Mike’s “second category” social insurance is universal, mandatory, and federally run, as opposed to the ACA’s triple-layered compromise half of this and half of that won’t everyone please be a good sport and help us out with this thing, which, as the Washington Post has amply documented, allowed an hysterical right-wing backlash to half rip the entire program to pieces.
But Mike should know a little bit more about his man Franklin Delano. It’s hardly a secret that the original Social Security Act was far from universal. In fact, it deliberately ignored the people who needed it the most—the millions of black and white sharecroppers in the South, and the mostly white itinerant “hired men” of the North, as well as family servants, who were much more common then than now (because so many people were so poor, help was much more “affordable”). These people, and most of the others at the bottom of the economic ladder, were deliberately written out of the act, first because they were largely disenfranchised, either formally or informally, and second because FDR did not want to antagonize small farmers and the middle class in general. The political basis of the Roosevelt Coalition was largely southern small farmers and the small businesses economically dependent upon them, and northern factory workers, who could be organized politically either through their unions or the big city Democratic machines.
Roosevelt knew that expecting southerners to pay FICA taxes for their tenant farmers—black ones, in particular—would have been politically disastrous. So he turned his back on the blacks, both in writing the Social Security Act and in shutting down “relief”—principally Harry Hopkins’ WPA—after winning re-election in 1936. The reduction in federal spending, coupled with the deflationary effects of the Social Security Act itself—money was coming into the federal government but nothing was going out in the form of benefits—helped push the country into severe recession, from which it was only rescued by the start of World War II.
In fact, Obama should have studied the New Deal—the real New Deal—more carefully as well. He might have noticed how cunning, cautious, and even callous the real Roosevelt could be. Two generations of Democrats have pursued universal health care because it was “right.” They should have noticed that most Americans already have health care, and that for them health care “reform” means “more for less,” when, in fact, most of us are getting heavily subsidized health care already, either through our employers or through Medicare.
Obama sought to thread the needle by balancing the costs of expanded health care by substantial savings via “rationalization” of delivery of services. He should have known that 1) savings achieved via bureaucratic reform never, ever match the goals of the planners, and that 2) health care is something about which people are aggressively irrational—because they want to be told that they will, in effect, live forever, which ain’t going to happen any time soon.
Democrats should not have to ask Republicans permission to enact social reforms. But a more modest program would not have provoked the wave of outrage that the Republicans rode to power in 2010. Absent that opposition, the implementation of a more modest program also would have been achieved much more smoothly. Liberals like both Mike and Barack tend somehow to think that the existing Social Security program sprang full-blown from Eff-Dee’s forehead, like Athena born of Zeus. In fact, Social Security today is the result of more than fifty years of “reform,” pushed along by an ever-growing political alliance of recipients.
