The DB question and textbook attached below- Question- The Social Security Act is easily the largest piece of legislation from a social services perspective in the history of the USA. how it has changed into today? who are beneficiaries of SS now that were not originally. Is this a good thing or bad? Does it come at some cost and if so, what are those? How can we make SS last for future generations? Integrating the text into your discussion posts and responses is the best way to illustrate to me that you have read the text and understand it. Text - The Social Security Act, which is the foundation of the American welfare state, contained many programs to address a variety of social problems. Roosevelt wanted to decide, once and for all, which relief functions would be maintained by federal and local governments. He also wanted to prevent destitution by developing social insurances to address the economic needs of persons who were unemployed and elderly. Finally, he wanted to develop some permanent and ongoing programs to constitute his legacy to the nation. Roosevelt had many policy interests, but he wanted a single piece of legislation to encapsulate them, because he realized that some relatively controversial measures, such as unemployment insurance, would not pass unless they were part of a larger piece of legislation that also contained more popular programs such as old age pensions and welfare assistance for older persons. He reasoned as well that the Supreme Court would find it more difficult to attack specific programs if they were part of multi-faceted legislation. o plan this legislation, Roosevelt appointed a Committee on Economic Security in June of 1934. The committee, chaired by Frances Perkins, included the secretary of the treasury, the attorney general, the secretary of agriculture, and the administrator of the FERA. A large advisory committee and a technical committee were also formed. The committee accomplished its complex task with remarkable speed and was able, after marathon sessions during the Christmas holidays, to issue its final report on January 15, 1935. The legislation passed overwhelmingly in the Congress and was signed into law by Roosevelt in August 1935. The Social Security Act contained two social insurance programs, three relief programs, and other smaller programs.Footnote Social insurances, principally unemployment insurance and old age pensions (Social Security), were attractive to Roosevelt for several reasons. They were self-funding programs; their benefits were financed from payroll taxes levied on employers and employees. Roosevelt favored the payroll tax so that future generations would not have to fund these programs from general revenues. He also believed that these insurance programs would reduce the size of welfare rolls, as the benefits paid to older persons and unemployed workers in these programs lifted them above the threshold of poverty. Moreover, he knew that insurances were politically acceptable to many Americans because they represented earned benefits rather than welfare payments.Footnote Roosevelt initially showed little interest in Social Security because he was preoccupied with the needs of unemployed workers, but he vigorously declared his support of it when critical stories appeared in the press in 1934.Footnote Despite the political popularity of these programs, Roosevelt believed he needed to make concessions to conservatives to ensure their passage. Over the protests of some liberals, he supported a regressive system of payroll taxes that levied stiffer taxes of Social Security on low-income wage earners than on more affluent persons, and he refused to contribute general revenues to Social Security. (Liberals believed the use of general revenues would have been more equitable and would have allowed major increases in the size of benefits.) Some liberals also opposed his decisionsupported by Southern agricultural intereststo exclude farm and domestic workers from both unemployment and Social Security benefits.Footnote Although Roosevelt made concessions to conservatives, he also made policy choices that defied them. Some persons believed that participation in Social Security should be voluntary, but FDR insisted on mandatory participation. Frances Perkins, a believer in states' rights, initially favored allowing each state to keep its own Social Security fund, but FDR rejected this policy on the grounds that movement of workers between states would make it unworkable.Footnote Originally conceived as a measure to provide pensions to retired workers, Social Security was broadened in 1939 to include family members of the worker. Arthur Altmeyer, chair of the Social Security Board, explained that "this system, formerly a plan to provide old-age annuities for individual wage earners, has become a broad system of family insurance, which protects not only the wage earner but his wife and children, and if they are dependent on him, his aged parents."Footnote Social Security was amended to include benefits to the wives, widows, and children of retireesa salutary step even if it was grounded in a patriarchal notion of the family, in which men were regarded as breadwinners and it was assumed that women would not work.Footnote Senator Wagner and other liberals had introduced various versions of a federal unemployment insurance program since 1933, but much controversy existed about how best to proceed. Should funds collected by a payroll tax on employers be kept in a central pool in Washington or in each of the states? Should a general fund be established, or should separate accounts be maintained for each industry? Should the federal government take the lead in administering the funds, devise the level and duration of unemployment benefits, and levy taxes? Should employers' participation in the scheme be mandatory or voluntary? The unemployment insurance program embodied in the Social Security Act represented an ingenious compromise between these policy alternatives. A payroll tax was levied on employers by states; participation was technically voluntary, but participating employers were given generous federal tax credits to offset most of their payroll taxes. States collected the payroll taxes, but they gave the revenues to the federal government, which maintained a central fund for each state that was then used to pay unemployment benefits to workers. The federal government paid the states' costs of administering their programs. Although this plan sounds complicated, it was a rather simple scheme to allow the federal government to bear most of the costs of unemployment insurance while lending the appearance that participation by employers was voluntary.Footnote Each state enacted its own unemployment insurance law that specified benefit levels and duration. Many liberal critics contended that the legislation penalized states with high levels of unemployment, whose funds would be more severely burdened than states with low levels of unemployment. Others feared that conservative states might choose to pay low benefits to unemployed persons. Why, some liberal critics asked, should workers have to be unemployed for four weeks before obtaining benefits? Many liberals favored federal contributions to the program to enable it to pay higher benefits for longer periods. They feared that workers would be forced onto welfare rolls because they could not survive on the meager assistance, which was limited to about 14 weeks in many states. Liberals were also unhappy that Roosevelt had capitulated to special interests when he excluded domestics, cannery workers, and farm laborers from coverage. They were nonetheless delighted that FDR supported the concept of unemployment insurance and that he had withstood pressure from conservatives for each state to have its separate unemployment program.Footnote Most liberals supported the Federal Emergency Relief Administration because it gave relief to a broad range of needy Americansincluding families, single persons, older persons, and nonworking and working poor personsand they were furious when it became apparent that Roosevelt had decided to scuttle the FERA and replace it with federal relief programs to only three groups of persons in needelderly persons (Old Age Assistance, or OAA), children in families with one caretaker (Aid to Dependent Children, or ADC), and blind persons (Aid to the Blind, or AB).Footnote All other destitute persons, including single nonelderly persons and families with two parents, were returned to local or general assistance welfare programs, which were entirely funded by state and local resources. Many of these poor relief agencies were punitive in orientation and racist in their practices. These three programs followed a similar format. States received matching or formula funds from the federal government. Under OAA, for example, the federal government paid one-half of local grants for each eligible person, as long as local grants did not exceed $30 per month. (The federal government paid only one-third of ADC grants.) Federal authorities insisted that a state agency be designated to implement the programs, that uniform standards of eligibility be established within each state to preclude specific counties from developing relatively punitive policies, and that fair hearings be established so that aggrieved recipients could appeal eligibility decisions.Footnote Liberal critics were pleased that Roosevelt had developed some permanent programs, but they were displeased that many persons were shunted to local welfare programs. They contended that the legislation gave states undue power to establish eligibility standards and levels of benefits. Would not Southern and relatively conservative states, they asked, make their programs so restrictive that they would deny assistance to vast numbers of poor persons and people of color? As federal authorities were given no power over the states' personnel decisions and were not required to use social workers in supervisory positions, critics wondered if patronage would dominate local agencies.Footnote Some liberals were also unhappy that the ADC program restricted assistance to families with a single parent or that the welfare grants to these families included funds only for the children and not for the parent. The policy limiting the grants to children was not amended until 1950, when the name of the program was changed to Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Even this restrictive program was more liberal than a version advocated by some social workers, who wanted relief to be given only to those children who were found, on casework investigation, to reside in "suitable homes," on the grounds that many destitute mothers provided improper care.Footnote As liberals had predicted, eligibility standards and grant levels were far more restrictive in Southern and rural states than in industrial states, and Southerners kept benefits low, partly to force African American women and their children to labor for miserable wages in cotton and tobacco fields, and partly because Southern states lacked the tax revenues to fund more munificent programs. The central innovation of the New Deal was its development of the federal government's social policy roles. States and localities were the prime movers in social policy before the New Deal, as our discussion in Chapters 3, 4 and 5 suggests. Using the New Deal as an example, analyze the ethics of FDR's decision to make assertive use of federal power. What ethical criticisms would he have encountered had he not developed national programs in the Great Depression such as the CWA, PWA, TVA, unemployment insurance, and Social Security pensions? Consider the fiscal resources of the federal government (e.g., its tax and borrowing powers) when compared with state governments, particularly during the Great Depression, when many states verged on bankruptcy and lacked the ability to issue and sell bonds on the magnitude used by Roosevelt to fund his emergency budget. Consider, as well, some other reasons why states often cannot or will not develop social policies, such as state officials' fears that corporations will relocate if state taxes are raised to pay for social programs or the bias against urban areas in many state legislatures.Discuss whether Roosevelt gave states too much power in ADC, OAA, and AB. Keep in mind that Southern Democrats, a key part of Roosevelt's coalition, adamantly insisted that states have considerable powers, partly because they did not want many African Americans to get welfare rather than to work for starvation wages on large Southern farms.Fast-forward to the Great Recession of 2007 into 2009. Were states able to fund the unemployment, education, and welfare costs linked to this economic downturnor was President Obama's stimulus bill necessary to help them fund them?Limited as they were, OAA, ADC, and AB were the first permanent and major federal relief programs. Many persons believed in 1935 that these programs would be extremely small. Social Security benefits, it was thought, would allow elderly persons to escape the OAA program; ADC did not attract much attention as most people thought it would be a federal-state version of mothers' pension programs; and AB applied only to a relatively small population of persons with a specific disability.Footnote Had they guessed the future size of OAA and ADC rolls or realized that Aid to the Blind would be expanded in the 1950s and subsequent decades to include persons with mental and physical disabilities, many conservativesand possibly Roosevelt himselfmight have thought twice about establishing these federal programs. Reformers were able to obtain provisions in the Social Security Act that provided grants to localities for child welfare and maternal health programs (Title V) and public health programs (Title VI). The amounts of money involved were small; $1.5 million was authorized for the child welfare funds, but the money was allowed to be used only for the administrative costs of state agencies. These small grant programs nonetheless represented grudging acceptance of the notion that local governments needed federal assistance in providing a range of social welfare services. Not until the 1960s were federal programs enacted to fund a range of mental health, health, and other services. The Social Security Act created programs that would have been unthinkable five years earlier. (See Table 6.2 for a summary of its major provisions.) It committed the federal government to permanently fund an assortment of programs. However, many concessions were made to Southern Democrats and other conservatives in the specific programs, and many programs were missing from the legislation altogether. Roosevelt had contemplated including national health programs in the act, but he changed his mind because he feared that opposition from the American Medical Association and conservatives could imperil its passage. A public works program was not placed within the Social Security Act because of the controversy it would have generated.Footnot