Social Security Act

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• SOURCE: Slate
  5/1/2021
  

  FDR’s Second 100 Days Were Cooler Than His First 100 Days

  by Jordan Weissmann

  The first 100 days of the New Deal could be described as disaster response. The second 100 days, according to historians William Leuchtenberg, Erich Rauchway and David Kennedy, were when the administration took steps that transformed labor relations and birthed a modern social welfare state. 

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• Social Security: A Right or a Privilege?

  by Eric Laursen

  Image via Shutterstock.How did it come about that people have a “right” to certain benefits from the state -- or “entitlement,” in the loaded language of our day? A fascinating new paper by legal scholar Karen N. Tani argues that the idea of “welfare rights” first became commonplace not amongst activists in the 1960s, but with a group of mid-level Roosevelt administration officials who in the late 1930s were trying to get an ambitious new state-federal assortment of anti-poverty programs off the ground.