When we think about social justice, we think about fairness and equitable distribution of social goods. Social policy research is the core of creating change. Rigorous research designs that display reliable and valid results can give a face to social inequities and can be used to encourage politicians to make changes.
1. When we think about social justice, we think about fairness and equitable distribution of social goods.
Social policy research is the core of creating change. Rigorous research designs that display reliable and valid results can give a face to social inequities and can be used to encourage politicians to make changes.
My social justice research interests include the following:
Housing policies
Special education services
Food distribution programs for the elderly
I like to use qualitative designs to gain a deep insight into the human experience. For example, an open-ended question survey can be distributed to individuals in a community whose income is at or below the national poverty level to explore their experiences with fair housing attainment. A project that could explore the effects and implementation of the Fair Housing Act. If the research results indicate housing disparities, racism, etc., the outcomes could be used to advocate or lobby for needed policies.
2.Chapter 3 of your text book address the social inequities we in the US experience. Unfortunately, the US leads the world in some some inequities. A focus for me is income disparity and related healthcare accessibility and can be traced back to slavery.
When thinking about the US ranking top on this list of social disparities, reflect on:
Is this something you were already aware of?
What inequities do you think are the most important to address? Why?
The website “Pewresearch” has great articles on social justice and inequities. You may want to start your own discussion using an article from that site.
Requirements: 1000
American social policy evolved in stages over roughly 270 years if we begin counting in 1750. Policy advocates have transformed the nation’s social policies from relatively primitive ones at the local level in the colonial period to a substantial welfare state in 2019 that includes thousands of social policies of local, state, and national governments. Policy advocates engaged in policy advocacy when they realized that ordinary people were harmed by new problems as the nation moved from an agrarian to an industrialized nation. They initiated major periods of reform. They opposed persons and movements that sought to rescind social reforms with proven effectiveness. They fought for resources to fund social policies and against efforts to defund them. They advocated for marginalized populations when they were attacked by persons and movements. They developed movements that sought social justice such as for women’s rights, civil rights, gay rights, rights of disabled persons, seniors’ rights, and rights of workers.
The Colonial Period
The United States constructed its welfare state from the bottom up from the colonial period to the present. The initial set of 13 colonies had a primitive set of social institutions at the local level. These included almshouses (also called poorhouses) where destitute persons were placed only after they passed a test, called a means test, that revealed they had no money and were unable to find work. They engaged in manual work, such as cutting wood, ate spartan meals, and sometimes engaged in prayer. Some of them received “outdoor relief” in their homes. Public schools did not exist, so some youth attended private schools or were tutored by their parents. Some prisons existed. These colonies were overwhelmingly agricultural with only a smattering of small towns. Even Philadelphia, which hosted the Constitutional Convention, had only about 2,000 residents in 1789. The colonies relied on property taxes mostly for public roads and bridges and local administration. When the colonists ratified the Constitution in 1787, they failed even to mention “social policy” in it because they believed social policy fell exclusively in the province of local and state governments (Jansson, 2019b). Schools, poorhouses, prisons, and other charitable institutions were ceded to local and state governments, whereas the federal government was assigned foreign policy, developing a uniform national currency, regulating trade, developing a military force to fend off foreign powers, and overseeing federal elections. It was a small federal government that lacked even a federal income tax, forcing it to rely only on excise taxes on certain products, tariffs placed on foreign imports, and several smaller taxes. State legislatures rarely met. The federal government did not participate in social policy in a major way until the Great Depression of the 1930s. Local, state, and federal governments remained small by modern standards from 1789 to the Great Depression of the 1930s even as the nation developed mandatory public education through high school, public universities, and a sizable number of private colleges. States developed “mental asylums” but with no federal assistance after President Monroe convinced Congress in 1848 that the Constitution did not give the federal government the power to fund social programs. States and private charities developed charitable institutions for orphans and blind and deaf people and institutions for delinquent youth. Many local public and private hospitals were constructed by the end of the 19th century (Jansson, 2019b). State-funded prisons supplemented local prisons. Many local, state, and federal regulations were established in the late 19th century and the early 20th century including ones that regulated the safety of food and water, housing regulations, and work-safety regulations.
Major setbacks took place in the colonial period, such as the legalization of slavery in the U.S. Constitution; failure to honor the rights of women to vote, own property, or join professions; and the forcible pushing of Native Americans westward. Yet the colonists enacted a Bill of Rights in 1791 that protected free speech, established local and state legislatures, and developed infrastructure. Possibly their most significant achievement was to auction land to settlers so that many persons in this agrarian society owned relatively small plots of land aside from plantation owners in the South. If we exclude slaves, Native Americans, and women, colonial society had high levels of economic equality because many white males possessed relatively small landholdings, such as 60 acres.
The Gilded Age
A mismatch between public policy and social problems became glaringly obvious, however, as the nation rapidly industrialized from the start of the Civil War in 1860 through the 1920s. Tens of millions of penniless immigrants from Europe and Russia flooded growing American cities and provided labor for the many factories that were constructed. Deep recessions and a depression in the 1890s devastated these immigrants, who were forced to wait in bread lines outside police stations during economic downturns. Local regulations over housing and factories hardly existed or were not enforced, leading to catastrophes like the burning of a garment factory in 1911 in New York that killed 87 female immigrant workers who jumped to their deaths from upper stories. Like most workers in factories, these factory workers were not unionized. The period from 1865 to 1900, known as the Gilded Age, was a period of extreme economic inequality that juxtaposed these penniless immigrants with multimillionaires and billionaires, including Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford, who owned factories, railroads, and mines. Nor did either the Republican or Democratic Parties represent workingclass Americans who found no allies when they engaged in strikes for better wages. Local police and federal troops forcibly attacked them when they protested their working conditions. Nor were conditions favorable for Native Americans, African Americans, and Latinos (Jansson, 2019b). Not immune to Europeans’ diseases, millions of Native Americans perished from cholera, typhoid fever, and other illnesses. Survivors were pushed westward by the incessant flow of European immigrants prior to the Civil War. The U.S. military killed many Native Americans who refused to reside on reservations after the Civil War, where many of them remain today. African Americans were emancipated during the Civil War only to suffer extreme hardships when they were not given land. Roughly 25% of them starved during and after the Civil War. Many of them became tenant farmers who rented land from former plantation owners on terms that left them nearly penniless. The Ku Klux Klan that terrorized African Americans, Catholics, Jews, and other minorities plagued them. The United States forcibly appropriated much of the lands of the southwestern part of the nation from Mexico when it invaded Mexico and forced its national government to cede this territory. White settlers took the land of indigenous Latinos by force or by claiming that their deeds under Mexican laws were bogus. Having lost their land, many Latinos became agricultural and mining laborers who were exploited by white owners. Workers in manufacturing plants were treated harshly, lacking minimum wages, ceilings on hours worked, and lack of trade unions. Social policies that we take for granted in contemporary society did not exist, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), unemployment insurance, Social Security, and housing programs.
The Progressive Period
It seemed that the extreme inequality of the Gilded Age might be broken by the first urban reform movement in the 20th century when Theodore Roosevelt became president in 1901 after the assassination of President William McKinley. Called the Progressive movement, it was led by middle-class reformers drawn from both the Republican and Democratic Parties. Roosevelt challenged the industrialists by coming to the aid of striking workers and sought to break up monopolies. Progressives’ signature victories were enactment of local and state regulations over child labor, unsafe working conditions in factories, fire codes, public health, and housing codes. They enacted a small and relatively punitive “Mothers’ Pensions” program for destitute single mothers. Wanting far greater reforms, Jane Addams, a founder of the social work profession who had established the settlement house known as Hull House in Chicago, teamed with Theodore Roosevelt to form the Progressive Party in 1912 (Addams, 1907). Roosevelt and Addams hoped to enact major federal social programs but lost the 1912 presidential election to Democrat Woodrow Wilson. The primitive nature of American federal government was illustrated by its lack of Constitutional authority to levy income taxes. Without resources obtained from taxes, the United States could not fund major social programs. Even when this deficiency was removed when the 16th Amendment to the Constitution was enacted in 1913 (which allowed the federal government to levy income taxes), the federal government failed to collect major income taxes until World War II and beyond—and even today collects far lower levels of taxes as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) than most other industrialized nations (Jansson, 2019a). Jane Addams and other social workers engaged in micro, mezzo, and macro policy at a time when federal safety net programs did not exist (Addams, 1961). Jane Addams’s Hull House intersected with public agencies as it guided immigrants who spoke no English to educational programs, helped persons who lived in unsafe housing obtain help from city housing enforcement programs, worked with fire departments to place exits in multilevel garment factories, and helped establish juvenile courts so that children and youth would not be sent to prisons peopled by adult offenders. They engaged in mezzo policy advocacy when they developed Hull House, which provided literacy training, employment, money management, and other services to immigrants. Addams found ways to fund Hull House at a time when local, state, and federal governments had scant resources and when few public programs that we currently take for granted existed. Addams mobilized people to participate in protests about housing conditions, workplace hazards, and corruption in city government. She initiated research projects that measured the incidence and location of specific problems, such as malnourishment of children (Addams, 1961). She engaged in macro policy advocacy when she backed reform-minded candidates in municipal and state elections as well as when she worked with Roosevelt to form the Progressive Party.
The Great Depression
The Great Depression savaged the nation from the stock market crash in 1929 to American entry into World War II in December 1941. The national unemployment rate surged as high as 25% by 1933 and still remained about 15% in 1940 until it was erased by wartime industrial production during World War II. Unemployment remained far higher among African Americans, women, and Latinos. Roughly 60% of the wealth of affluent Americans disappeared in the wake of the crash of the stock market and the bankruptcy of many businesses. Franklin Roosevelt, a rich man afflicted with polio, became the unlikely advocate for ordinary people during this national emergency. He orchestrated two major accomplishments. He proposed and enacted sweeping federal social legislation for the first time in American history (Jansson, 2019b). He attracted millions of working-class voters to the Democratic Party that he headed, making it a powerful advocate for these voters as compared with the Republican Party, which came mostly to represent relatively affluent people (Leuchtenberg, 1963). The Democratic coalition included those African Americans who were allowed to vote in the North and the South, intellectuals, Jews, and members of the working class. White conservative Southerners also joined the Democratic coalition because they had shifted to the Democratic Party in the wake of the Civil War away from the Republican Party, headed by Abraham Lincoln, who had emancipated slaves. Most Southerners belonged to the Democratic Party until the 1980s and beyond. Franklin Roosevelt developed and nurtured this Democratic coalition as he developed his New Deal legislation to get people through the Great Depression (Patterson, 1967). Tens of thousands of persons became homeless as their houses were foreclosed on. Farmers were unable to sell corn, beef, and other products. Even conservative politicians mostly voted for New Deal programs because their constituents, too, had lost jobs and houses. New Deal programs included the following (Jansson, 2019a): The Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) that provided grants to states allowing them to make welfare payments to destitute individuals and families. It required them to establish state commissions separate from their existing welfare programs with uniform eligibility processes throughout the state and provisions to discourage discriminatory administration. It began in 1933 and was ended when welfare programs in the Social Security Act were enacted in 1935. It ended so-called poorhouses funded by local governments, where unemployed persons were required to reside under harsh conditions. A variety of work-relief programs that gave recipients jobs, including the Civilian Works Administration (CWA), which hired 16 million Americans for 190,000 work projects between November 1933 and January 1934 alone; the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which provided jobs to 2.5 million young men, mostly in rural areas under the administration of the Army and the Department of Interior; and the Public Works Administration (PWA), which built complex projects like airports, dams, and roads throughout the 1930s. Roosevelt replaced the CWA with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1935, which funded hundreds of projects across the nation. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and other programs to stabilize banks. Programs to combat the aggressive cutting of prices by corporations as they sought to retain sufficient market share to remain afloat during the Great Depression, including the National Recovery Act of 1933 (NRA). It helped industries in specific sectors negotiate set prices but was declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1935. Programs to cut foreclosures, such as the National Housing Act of 1934, that established the Federal Home Administration Act (FHA) to help banks refinance home mortgages at lower rates of interest. He averted foreclosures on farmers and home owners by having the government purchase mortgages and refinance them under the Emergency Farm Mortgage Act and the Farm Relief Act in 1933. He established the FHA to insure mortgages and home improvement loans. He established the Wagner-Steagall Housing Act of 1937 to provide low-interest loans to local authorities to build public housing. Programs to encourage economic growth in entire regions, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), through a network of dams and generating stations to power fertilizer plants and to help fund reforestation and flood control projects. The Social Security Act that provided pensions for seniors financed from payroll deductions of employers and employees. It also provided welfare programs funded by matching federal and state funds that included Aid to Dependent Children (ADC), old age assistance (OAA), and Aid to the Blind (AB); funds for child welfare and public health programs; and unemployment insurance by appropriating funds to help states administer their unemployment funds in return for an agreement by the states to hold fair hearings to avoid discrimination in their distribution of unemployment benefits. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which established fair working conditions and minimum wages. The Wagner Act of 1935, which allowed workers to decide whether they wanted to unionize in elections monitored by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). A variety of programs that addressed nutritional, health, dental, and other needs of impoverished persons, which included partnerships among the federal government, states, and not-for-profit organizations. The Agricultural Adjustment Agency in 1933, which convened producers of specific crops to reduce crop surpluses that had driven their prices so low that many farmers were bankrupted—and other legislation that protected sharecroppers. Make no mistake: When taken together, these programs helped persons in the lower economic echelons in ways that were unprecedented in the United States. They increased their resources, wages, food, housing, and employment. They increased their morale during an unprecedented decade of mass unemployment. They kept families together. They averted disease and starvation. They cut homelessness. These policies were revolutionary in a nation where virtually no social programs had been enacted by the federal government. Many social workers worked in New Deal agencies. Above all, New Deal programs gave the federal government the power to fund and administer a host of social programs as compared with state and local governments that had exclusively served these roles prior to the New Deal. Notable exceptions to the generosity of the New Deal included Roosevelt’s decision not to support federal anti-lynching legislation and his decision to incarcerate tens of thousands of Asian Americans primarily of Japanese descent at the outset of World War II. He feared that southern conservatives in the Congress would veto New Deal legislation if he supported antilynching legislation. He incarcerated Japanese Americans due to mass hysteria and racism against them as contrasted to white German and Italian immigrants (Jansson, 2019b). The work relief programs of the New Deal were terminated during World War II by Republicans and conservative southern Democrats who argued they were no longer needed when the nation had returned to full employment in World War II as the United States manufactured munitions for nations that opposed Germany, Italy, and Japan (Jansson, 2001). Yet the programs of the Social Security Act remained intact as well as the federal minimum wage, housing programs, prohibition of child labor, and regulations that allowed unions to organize. Social workers engaged extensively in policy advocacy in the 1930s. They engaged in micro policy advocacy to help destitute individuals use the New Deal work programs (Wenocur & Reisch, 1989). They engaged in macro policy advocacy to help establish and implement work relief and welfare programs for millions of people. They worked to educate local residents about the myriad services and programs established during the New Deal. Roosevelt’s wife, Eleanor, worked with distressed communities during the 1930s to develop social services, housing, and businesses when most residents suffered extreme poverty. She helped find resources to rebuild their infrastructure. She helped African Americans gain access to work relief programs. Franklin Roosevelt repeatedly visited persons in the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma to find ways to improve their lives by introducing new agricultural techniques that would decrease the dust storms that ruined farmlands. The federal government did not aggressively use its power to levy income taxes until World War II, when it had to fund American military forces at high levels. As we shall see, this power was eventually used, as well, to fund many social programs enacted in the 1960s and early 1970s even if these taxes were lower as a percentage of GDP than in most other industrialized nations. Moreover, the United States spent far more money on military forces during the Cold War from 1949 through the 1980s than other industrialized nations (Jansson, 2001).
The Great Society
Lyndon Johnson succeeded John Kennedy when he was assassinated in November 1963. Inheriting Roosevelt’s coalition of working-class people, African Americans, white Southerners, and intellectuals, he won a landslide victory over Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964. He encountered massive levels of poverty, the oppression of African Americans throughout the nation, lack of medical care for seniors, and many other social problems. The Great Society included the following (Jansson, 2019b): Enacting the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, which protected voting rights of African Americans, desegregated public facilities and transportation, prohibited hiring discrimination in federal contracts, gave the U.S. attorney general the right to file suits to desegregate schools—and gave rights to women through Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 Enacting the so-called War on Poverty that came to include the Job Corps, Head Start, the Neighborhood Youth Corps, legal aid centers, health clinics, and community action programs Enacting Medicare and Medicaid, with the former providing health care for seniors and the latter providing means-tested medical benefits for low-income persons Establishing the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and enacting or expanding public housing and affordable housing programs Enacting the Older Americans Act, which provides Meals on Wheels and other programs Enacting the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), which provided federal funds primarily to schools with large numbers of low-income children Johnson was the first American president to fund scores of new social programs. They were often funded, however, at low levels because he enacted a massive tax cut in 1964 and made an ill-advised decision to commit 600,000 troops to the Vietnam War (Jansson, 2001). The war split the Democratic Party because many white Southerners and blue-collar voters favored the war in contrast to many liberals and Martin Luther King. Johnson chose not to run for a second full term in 1967, leaving the door open for Vice President Hubert Humphrey to oppose Richard Nixon in the election of 1968.
Nixon’s Surprise
Many liberals feared that Nixon’s accession to the presidency would doom further social reforms because he was a staunch Republican conservative. Nixon chose, however, to initiate social reforms that rivaled ones that Johnson enacted because he wanted to rebuild the Republican Party by gaining credit for domestic reforms that had traditionally been initiated by the Democratic Party. He also wanted to draw conservative southern Democrats and white blue-collar voters into the Republican Party by supporting the Vietnam War, opposing school busing of minorities into white schools, and opposing affirmative action (Reichley, 1981). Nixon correctly predicted that many white northern Catholics and southern white Democrats, angered by Johnson’s civil rights measures, would join the Republican Party. He could not accomplish this goal because he resigned from the presidency before the Congress was on the verge of impeaching him. Nixon nonetheless achieved these domestic reforms (Jansson, 2019b): Indexing Social Security benefits to inflation to assure regular increases Enacting the Supplementary Security Income (SSI) Program to provide means-tested benefits to seniors and persons with disabilities Enacting the Earned Income Tax Credit of 1975 to give working persons in families tax credits if they earned less than a specified income Expanding the Food Stamps Program by federalizing it and increasing its benefits Enacting the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974, which established rental subsidies for low- and moderate-income persons Establishing the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) of 1970 to regulate and improve working conditions Enacting Title XX of the Social Security Act to fund the social service programs of states Enacting the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) to train workers and provide them with jobs in public and not-for-profit agencies, with an emphasis on longterm unemployed persons; fund summer jobs for high school students; and providing fulltime jobs for 12 to 24 months with the goal of providing marketable skills Passing the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of disability in programs conducted by federal agencies, in programs receiving federal financial assistance, in federal employment, and by federal contractors Enacting the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, which required all public schools that accept federal funding to provide equal access to education and one free meal a day for all children with physical and mental disabilities Establishing the U.S. Department of Education Approving affirmative action in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke When taken together, enactments of the Great Society and Nixon’s presidency transformed America. Nondefense spending went from 8.1% of the gross national product in 1961 to 11.3% in 1971 and 15.6% in 1981 (Jansson, 2001). About two-thirds of this domestic budget consisted of social insurance and means-tested social programs. Total federal social spending rose from $67 billion in 1960 to $158 billion in 1970 (in 1980 dollars) and to $314 billion in 1980. Social workers engaged in advocacy during the Great Society and Nixon’s presidency. They helped persons learn about and gain access to the scores of social programs enacted in the 1960s and early 1970s including food stamps, Section 8 housing vouchers, Medicaid, and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)—all new programs. Many social workers worked in programs of the War on Poverty. They helped residents in marginalized communities develop community action councils that engaged in planning to develop new programs. They worked with welfare rights organizations (WROs) that worked to increase welfare grants for single mothers and to decrease punitive practices of some welfare departments, such as raiding homes to see if men lived in households with women on welfare. Even with the reforms of the Great Society and the Nixon presidency, critics believed that many of them were underfunded. Welfare programs reached relatively few poor people because many states established harsh eligibility standards for Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), just as the federal government established harsh eligibility standards for food stamps. Huge sections of American cities housed persons of color in segregated communities with poor schools and housing (Jansson, 2001).
Conservative Counterrevolutions
History demonstrates that policy advocates often encounter counterrevolutions in which the nation turns sharply toward conservatism. Policy advocates guided by social work’s code of ethics feared that elections of Ronald Reagan in 1981 and Donald Trump in 2016 might lead to repudiations of prior social reforms because both opposed social programs widely used by marginalized populations. If Reagan repeatedly sought cuts in social programs, Trump followed suit and also attacked immigrants, African Americans, Latinos, women, and Muslims (Jansson, 2019b)
Gridlock During the Presidencies of Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush
In the blink of an eye, many voters bought into the arguments of Ronald Reagan, a former movie star who had changed from liberal views in the 1930s to conservative ones in the 1950s and beyond. A two-term Republican governor of California in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Reagan ran unsuccessfully for the presidency in 1976 but won a landslide victory over Jimmy Carter in the presidential contest of 1980—and won another one-sided election in 1984. He glamorized the Gilded Age even with its extreme income inequality and racism. He invented the term “welfare queen” to describe a woman in Chicago who he alleged had many children to increase her welfare grants. (Only later was it established that he had invented this woman.) He liked the theories of economist Arthur Laffer, who believed that deep tax cuts stimulated economic growth without causing deficits because economic growth caused by lower taxes would produce higher tax revenues (Roberts, 1984). Many economists and David Stockman, Reagan’s budget director, believed Laffer was wrong (Stockman, 1986). Their forecasts proved to be correct: Reagan’s deficits exceeded the sum total of all the deficits of all prior American presidents.
Reagan created a rival coalition to Roosevelt’s that included evangelicals, southern whites, affluent Americans, and suburbanites. Reagan’s policy agenda flowed from his ideology and his coalition. He cut taxes deeply for everyone but with the largest cuts given to affluent Americans whose top marginal rates were cut from 70% to 28%. He increased military spending to the level during the Vietnam War even though the nation was not at war. He argued that the resulting budget deficits required him to cut domestic discretionary spending deeply—including food stamps, welfare, housing vouchers for poor people, and many other programs. He enacted all of this legislation in 1981 (Stockman, 1986). Reagan ushered in a new era of income inequality that came to equal the income inequality of the Gilded Age (Jansson, 2019a). He initiated few social reforms aside from the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which gave more than 3 million undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship. He made many Americans averse to increasing taxes. He attacked the federal government and social welfare programs in general but did not cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. No major legislation was enacted in the presidency of George H. W.
Gridlock During the Presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama
Two relatively liberal presidents (Bill Clinton from 1993 through 2000 and Barack Obama from 2008 through 2016) were unable to initiate new liberal eras because the federal government was gridlocked by Republicans who controlled one or both of the chambers of Congress. Recall that Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson achieved their legislative successes because Democrats controlled both chambers of the Congress, unlike Presidents Clinton and Obama (Jansson, 2019a). Bill Clinton hoped to enact national health reform and social investments but was stymied by the Republican Congress. President Obama was able to enact the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the Stimulus Plan, and banking regulations in 2009 and 2010 because Democrats barely controlled both chambers of the Congress for most of that period. He was gridlocked, however, for the rest of his presidency as Republicans gained control of one or both chambers of Congress. He encountered numerous budget battles leading to a budget deal in 2013 that required huge cuts in domestic and military spending up to the year 2023 (Jansson, 2019a). Clinton and Obama lacked resources for major social reforms because they were burdened by the huge increases in the national debt by Presidents Reagan and George W. Bush.
The Maverick Presidency of Donald Trump
Not even Donald Trump predicted he would win the election of 2016 in his contest with Democrat Hillary Clinton. With strong support from blue-collar workers coupled with suburban voters, he achieved an upset victory. He campaigned as a populist who would help white voters in coal country and in towns and small cities where factories had moved to other nations or gone bankrupt. Trump quickly vanquished 17 Republicans in primary elections and narrowly defeated Clinton. He promised to renegotiate trade treaties with China, Mexico, and Canada as well as with other developing nations where American factories had fled. He vowed to increase tariffs on nations that impeded imports from the United States. He promised to “build a wall” on the southern border with Mexico to impede immigrants who he believed took jobs from Americans. He promised to stop the flow of refugees from the Middle East, Mexico, and Central America. He promised a large infrastructure program that would provide jobs for his base of support. He promised to “repeal and replace Obamacare” (the ACA) but offered no substitute to meet the health needs of the more than 20 million persons insured by the ACA. He promised large tax cuts particularly for the middle class. He promised not to cut Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid (Jansson, 2019b). He had accomplished some of these objectives by mid-2018. He renegotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), although he put on hold trade agreements with many European nations. He cut taxes deeply. He oversaw a surging economy with low levels of unemployment, although it was unclear if his policies had caused this outcome because unemployment had already declined greatly during Obama’s presidency. But Trump failed to enact many of his campaign promises by late 2018. No wall had been built on the Mexican border. He had not repealed and replaced the ACA, although he had enacted some policies that weakened it. No infrastructure program had been proposed. He betrayed his white blue-collar followers in coal country and rural areas by not enacting social programs that met their employment, education, and other needs—and by seeking deep cuts in Medicaid and the ACA that they needed for opioid drug addiction and other health needs. He proposed deep cuts in SNAP and other safety net programs used by his base of support (Jansson, 2019b).
Many liberals questioned his tax cuts for several reasons. They argued that his deep tax cuts mostly favored affluent persons and corporations that received roughly 83% of their benefits as compared with only 17% for low- and moderate-income persons, including Trump’s followers. They feared that he was emulating President Reagan’s creation of massive budget deficits that would prevent budget increases for social programs in coming years. They contended that tax cuts that favored affluent persons and corporations would exacerbate income inequality in the United States that already exceeded levels of 20 other industrialized nations (Jansson, 2019a). They criticized his insufficient attention to opioid poisoning in 2018 that had led to 70,000 deaths in 2017. Distressingly, Trump attacked members of many marginalized populations during his campaign and his presidency, including Muslims, Latinos, African Americans, women, and disabled persons. He attacked the press almost on a daily basis even though freedom of the press is enshrined in the Bill of Rights. He attacked leading Democrats, using words like “morons” and “clowns.” He vilified Republicans who dared to question his policies. He attacked climate control, even though 97% of climate scientists have contended that the world is heading into significant temperature increases that could have major consequences like raising sea levels, health epidemics, food shortages, and conflicts among nations. These fears were registered by major climate reports issued by the United Nations that predicted these adverse outcomes were likely as early as 2040 unless carbon dioxide emissions were cut significantly, particularly by China and the United States, which ranked first and second in these emissions (Davenport, 2018). Social workers engaged extensively in micro, mezzo, and macro policy advocacy during the first two years of Trump’s presidency. They participated in marches to protect immigrants’ rights, to seek policies to avert climate change, to protect women from sexual exploitation, to affirm science, and to decrease deaths of unarmed African Americans. They participated in protests at town hall meetings of conservative politicians who sought to repeal the ACA. Many women chose to run for political office, including many social workers.
Falling Behind Other Industrialized Nations
The United States had evolved a substantial set of social programs by 2018 that lifted many people from extreme poverty to higher levels of resources when cash benefits, pensions, inkind benefits, medical services, social services, housing programs, educational opportunities, and childcare are aggregated. Many individuals and families received tax credits and deductions, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit. (I discuss these benefits in more detail in Chapter 9.) Despite these advances, however, the United States has lagged behind 20 other industrialized nations in two ways: income inequality and many kinds of social problems (see Figure 3.1 developed by Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009). When the ratio of the income of the top 20% of the population to the bottom 20% is calculated, the United States had a ratio of roughly nine to one as compared with roughly eight to one for Portugal; seven to one for the United Kingdom; six to one for France and Canada; five to one for Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands; four to one for Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark; and 3.5 to one for Japan (see the x-axis in Figure 3.1). In other words, the bottom 20% of Americans find themselves far poorer than persons in the bottom 20% of 20 other industrialized nations—and often way poorer. Some social scientists contend that extreme inequality produces many ill effects for people in the bottom 20%, including higher levels of social problems measured in Figure 3.1 by the Index of Health and Social Problems (see the y-axis in Figure 3.1). Residents of nations with higher levels on this index have higher levels of lack of trust, low life expectancy, high infant mortality, high rates of obesity, poor educational performance, high rates of teenage births, high rates of homicide, high rates of imprisonment, and low rates of social mobility (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009). These findings are hardly comforting to Americans. Despite our overall affluence and success in developing a more robust welfare state, we still lead the world in mal-distribution of income and in levels of a wide array of social problems. The unequal distribution of income places people in the bottom 20% in an extreme subordinate position as they witness on television and with their cell phones homes, cars, and lifestyles they cannot obtain or emulate. They also find themselves with far lower rates of health insurance, poorer schools, lower pensions, and poorer vocational training than many of the other industrialized nations—the social investments that would help them move upward in the social order. Nor can they rely on upward mobility to move them to a higher position in the nation’s economy because five separate studies show that Americans in the lower economic echelons are less likely to move upward than persons in England, Germany, France, and Canada.
Figure 3.1 Rankings of 21 Industrialized Nations by Inequality and Social Problems Policy advocates have a full agenda before them in coming years. They need to augment an array of social programs in the eight sectors discussed in Chapters 7 through 14. They need to establish or improve programs that will give persons in the lower 20% a road to upward mobility, not to mention persons in the bottom 50%, who also have restricted upward mobility and high rates of many social problems. They need to buttress safety net programs. They need to pressure public officials to work toward social justice just like policy advocates in the Progressive era, New Deal, Great Society, and early 1970s. They need to oppose deep tax cuts for affluent persons and corporations so that the nation possesses resources to help low- and moderate-income Americans receive resources and social programs commensurate with ones already in place in many other industrialized nations. Take the case of homelessness as an example of possibilities for social reform. I witnessed almost no homeless people on the streets of Stockholm, Helsinki, and Copenhagen in the summer of 2017. With its great resources, the United States could emulate these Nordic nations—and many other industrialized nations—by constructing necessary units in and around urban areas in the United States. It is a national problem that needs leadership from a federal government whose revenues are roughly two times the aggregated revenues of the 50 states. The nation needs to greatly increase funding for construction of new units and conversion of old ones. It needs to create jobs programs. It needs to increase rent subsidies. It must resort to greater rent control in many cities were rents have skyrocketed beyond the reach of many people as witnessed by 80 million evictions from 2000 to 2018 in the United States. It needs to increase support staff, including social workers, to help homeless people cope with mental illness and substance abuse. It must be willing to spend tens of billions of dollars on this issue. Many policy advocates work on the micro, mezzo, and macro levels to reduce homelessness as illustrated by the policy advocacy of Andy Bales, a former minister who heads the Union Rescue Mission in downtown Los Angeles, where 13,000 people receive food and lodging each day (Castellanos, 2018). Living with his father and grandfather as a child, he was homeless for extended periods of time. He gives micro policy advocacy to innumerable families with children, women, and others each week. He encourages homeless people to contact him directly through his Facebook, Twitter, and other accounts. He always interrupts his schedule when he hears that a woman is homeless, even during the early morning hours. He engages in mezzo policy advocacy when he creates housing for communities of homeless people that takes them off the streets. He created a 77-acre campus in Sylmar in 2005 that gave permanent housing to senior women. He opened another facility for women and children in 2007 in Carson that gave them living space for up to three years combined with educational training and supportive services. He engages in macro policy advocacy when he takes the lead in documenting the “dumping” of homeless people from hospitals’ emergency rooms rather than transporting them to shelters and community programs. Using video cameras to gather evidence, he has helped authorities convict hospitals of this illegal practice that violates state and federal laws. Not only did the offending hospitals have to pay large fines, but they received adverse publicity.
He was a leading advocate for enactment of bond issues in Los Angeles City and Los Angeles County to provide funds to build many housing units for homeless people and to provide them with supportive services. Realizing these government measures and the construction of housing units will take a decade to implement, and even then will serve only a fraction of the homeless people in Los Angeles, he is initiating many “sprung-tent communities” across Los Angeles County that will each house 100 people for 6 months and provide them with case management services. He aims to create thousands of units of micro-unit housing—so-called tiny homes modeled after a program in Austin, Texas. Such housing would not require the large government subsidies needed for homes of 1,000 square feet and larger and could easily be transported to specific sites. He perseveres despite losing a leg from three flesh-eating infections that he contracted from contact with human feces in encampments of homeless people who lacked even rudimentary facilities.
Why Social Workers Need to Engage in Policy Advocacy in 2020 and Beyond
The Positive Picture
Contemporary social workers have inherited many social policies. The United States has constructed a federal welfare state with a network of important social policies that include programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and SNAP—called entitlements—that are automatically funded to the level of claimed benefits each year. It funds many programs annually from the federal budget—called discretionary spending—including childcare, Head Start, housing, public health, welfare, mental health programs, portions of child welfare, substance abuse, portions of education programs through the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, federal prisons, and many others. It funds eight major block grants that give funds to the states that they use for social services; community services; alcohol, drug abuse, and mental health services; maternal and child health services; community development services; primary health services; preventive health services; and childcare and development. It shares funding with states for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), a welfare program mostly used by single mothers.
The federal government funds an array of tax expenditures that give resources to residents not through the budget but through tax deductions or tax credits that are funded by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Americans receive these benefits if they apply for them on their income tax forms, such as the Child Tax Credit and the EITC. Employers finance a considerable portion of the health care costs of their employees from deductions from their corporate taxes or from subsidies from the ACA. Some of them fund wellness programs and other health programs as well as leaves for employees for childbirth. Expenditures of the American welfare state also include an array of programs funded by states and local governments, including roughly 90% of the nation’s secondary education programs, part of the costs of eight block grant programs and TANF, and most of the costs of community colleges and public higher education, nonfederal prisons, mental health programs, and general relief for single men and women. The private sector also funds many social programs. Charitable contributions to hospitals, universities, secondary schools, and not-for-profit agencies are considerable. Hospitals and physicians give considerable charitable care. Private donors fund a significant share of the budgets of nongovernment organizations (NGOs), such as the YWCA, YMCA, homeless shelters, and child guidance centers that are also funded by contracts with local, state, and federal agencies. Consumers of service fund a considerable share of social programs. They often pay fees. They pay deductibles and co-insurance in many health and mental health programs. They often fund tuition of secondary schools, community colleges, colleges, and professional programs. Unfortunately, consumers’ expenses and payments are often onerous for persons in the lower economic echelons—and sometimes for middle-class persons and above. When added together, the United States possesses a significant welfare state—one that emerged over decades with considerable assistance from macro policy advocacy by public officials, advocacy groups, and private citizens. Social workers have assumed important roles in enacting and funding social programs.
The Challenge
Policy advocates must now begin a new round of policy advocacy at micro, mezzo, and macro levels to augment the American welfare state so that the United States can catch up with the 20 other industrialized nations portrayed in Figure 3.1. We should no longer encounter the following: Parents who have to decide who to feed in their families because they cannot afford food for everyone Tens of millions of Americans who are medically uninsured—and many more with health insurance that fails to cover a large portion of their medical costs More than 500,000 homeless people partly caused by 80 million evictions from rental housing from 2000 to 2018 Tens of thousands of students who drop out of community colleges and colleges because they cannot afford tuition Tens of thousands of persons who do not receive timely assistance for opioid and other addictions Enhanced food distribution programs to decrease the number of families whose members are malnourished. To achieve these goals, the United States has to tap resources of affluent Americans and corporations (Jansson, 2019a). Many Americans don’t realize that other industrialized nations have fewer social problems than their nation because they invest more heavily in schools, services, infrastructure, and benefits. They can make these investments for (at least) three reasons. First, the United States taxes its affluent citizens and even its middle and lower-middle classes at lower levels than other industrialized nations. The top marginal tax rate in the United States was 39.6% in 2014—now reduced to 37.5% as compared with top marginal tax rates in Denmark (60.2%), Sweden (56.6%), Belgium (53.7%), Spain (52%), the Netherlands (52%), France (50.7%), Austria (50%), Japan (50%), Greece (49%), Finland (49%), Portugal (49%), Canada (48%), Ireland (45%), Israel (48%), Australia (47.5%), and Iceland (46.2%) (Eaton, 2014). Second, it spends as much on its military as the next seven nations combined. Although military spending is often necessary in a world with considerable conflict, its level in the United States is viewed by many experts as excessive (Jansson, 2001, 2019a). Third, it spends two times more on its health care system than many other industrialized nations partly by ceding its management to private insurance companies rather than using the government to manage and administer it and by other inefficiencies—and has poorer health outcomes than these other nations, such as shorter life expectancy and greater infant mortality. By increasing the top marginal tax rate on affluent Americans to from 37.5% to 40% and taxing wages, interest, dividends, employer contributions to health plans, overseas earnings, and growth in retirement accounts, the United States would gain $157 billion in tax revenues in the first year. It would gain even more ($276 billion in the first year) if the top marginal rate was increased to 45%, which would still allow this group to take home at least $1 million per year (Cohen, 2015). Nor would raising tax rates harm the super-rich since the top 0.1% of American families, who all have assets worth more than $29 million, own more than 20% of all household wealth in the nation, compared with the 1970s when it controlled only 7 percent (Cohen, 2015)
Preparing for a New Reform Period
We have discussed the evolution of the American welfare state, including its meritorious features as well as its shortcomings. We have discussed how social workers engaged in micro, mezzo, and macro policy advocacy throughout the 20th century and into the 21st to improve social policies in the United States. We discussed prior eras of reform and conservatism. Now we need to carry policy advocacy forward at micro, mezzo, and macro levels to catch up with other industrialized nations and to produce another era of reform. Who knows? Maybe the United States can enter another reform period similar to the New Deal and the Great Society.
Learning Outcomes
You are now equipped to:
Understand how the American welfare state has evolved in stages from the colonial period to the present Describe key policies of the following periods: 1. The colonial period 2. The Gilded Age 3. The Progressive Era 4. The Great Depression 5. The Great Society and the early 1970s . Conservative counter
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