welfare state 
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SOURCE: Boston Review
1/25/2022
Abortion isn't a "Choice" without Racial Justice
by Sara Matthiesen
The recent failure of the broad social spending initiatives of Build Back Better and the impending judicial overthrow of Roe are connected, and signal the need for a movement for reproductive freedom that goes beyond "choice" to address systemic inequalities.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
12/19/2021
History Can Guide Fixes for America's Abysmal Maternal and Infant Health Outcomes
by Michelle Bezark
The brief history of the U.S. Children's Bureau shows that treating the health of mothers and infants as a national issue can get results.
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SOURCE: Boston Review
12/2/2021
In Praise of One-Size-Fits-All Social Policy
by Lawrence B. Glickman
"To call a vaccine mandate a constraint on an “intensely personal decision” is to obfuscate the fundamental reality that pandemics are intensely social."
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SOURCE: New York Times
10/8/2021
Joe Manchin's Denigration of "Entitlements" is Nothing New
Historian Larry Glickman's work shows that Joe Manchin's fear of "entitlements" is part of a longstanding idea that American capitalism can't work without the threat of poverty and immiseration.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
7/16/2021
Will Biden Reverse 50 Years of Failure on Child Care Policy?
by Anna K. Danziger Halperin
Achieving better childcare policy requires recognizing women may be both mothers and workers, and moving past ideological views that women's economic independence is against the interest of families.
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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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SOURCE: The Dispatch
5/3/2021
The Era of Big Government is Here
From a conservative writer's perspective, the conservative movement is at a low moment, without the ability to set the boundaries of policy debates as the Biden administration considers deficit spending and progressive reform.
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SOURCE: Public Seminar
3/11/2021
The United States Is Picking Up Where The Great Society Left Off
by John Stoehr
Comparing the recent COVID relief bill to the 2009 bailout of the subprime crisis shows a rapid turn away from the Republican and New Democratic consensus that social welfare assistance must be tied to work and limited to people who are "deserving."
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SOURCE: New York Times
2/18/2021
‘There’s No Natural Dignity in Work’
by Ezra Klein
Is it time to revisit the basic premise of American welfare policies that encouraging or requiring paid labor is the best way to deal with poverty?
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SOURCE: Skipped History
11/3/2020
Do Daniel Patrick Moynihan's Issues with his Father Help Explain Mass Incarceration?
by Ben Tumin
Ben Tumin's "Skipped History" video series tackles the legacy of the Moynihan Report through the work of historians Elizabeth Hinton and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor.
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SOURCE: New York Review of Books
11/5/2020
The Supreme Court We Need
by Linda Greenhouse
The veteran Supreme Court reporter argues that the nation needs the court to enable government to actually take action to solve big national problems.
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SOURCE: Public Books
9/22/2020
How the Welfare State Became the Neoliberal Order (Review)
by Pablo Pryluka
Although the Tennessee Valley Authority was a pioneering public works project, its alumni worked in Latin America to advance redevelopment projects that elevated the authority of big business, a model now associated with the neoliberal turn in the developed world.
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SOURCE: CNN
9/20/2020
Capitalism Isn't Working Anymore. Here's How The Pandemic Could Change It Forever
Historian Larry Glickman suggests that the pandemic has opened up discussion of a broader role for government in meeting people's needs during a crisis.
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SOURCE: HowStuffWorks
4/29/2020
Frances Perkins: The Unsung Creator of U.S. Social Security
Author Kristin Downey covered Social Security for years, which has driven her to correct the tendency to overlook Frances Perkins's key contributions to the most important social welfare program in America.
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SOURCE: TIME
4/27/2020
If the Great Depression Is Any Indication, Things Won’t Just Go Back to ‘Normal’ After the Coronavirus Pandemic Ends
by James C. Cobb
New Deal programs had difficulty returning the United States to "normal" life because FDR had difficulty persuading many Americans that the federal government was supporting their economic security. This failure makes a comprehensive response to COVID-19 less politically feasible.
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4/5/2020
Sick Leave Provisions in the COVID Relief Bill Were Historic. That's the Problem.
by Vicki Shabo
It is well past time for lawmakers to provide permanent paid sick days protections, so that no one is forced to work sick, risk their paycheck or risk their job.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
3/23/2020
Covid-19 May Destroy Donald Trump’s Presidency
by Meg Jacobs
Has Trump plunged America into another Great Depression?
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SOURCE: Special to HNN
6-15-13
Jim Cullen: Review of George Packer's "The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013)
Coming in at over 400 hefty pages, The Unwinding offers a granular, empirical confirmation, at the level of lived experience, of what many of us experience as the defining perception of our time. And that is that we are moving backward, that the hard-won gains of the welfare state -- a story whose lineaments Richard Hofstadter sketched in The Age of Reform (1955) and whose trajectory extended into the Great Society -- are unraveling at an accelerating rate.
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Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea
by Mark Blyth
Credit: Oxford University Press.This book has a rather unusual genesis. David McBride from Oxford University Press emailed me in July 2010 and asked me if I wanted to write a book about the turn to austerity in economic policy. I had been playing with a book idea called “The End of the Liberal World” for a while but really hadn't been getting all that far with it. Dave's offer seemed to be a ready-made alternative project. After all, someone had to write such a book, and since I had, as bankers say, “skin in the game” here, for reasons I shall elaborate below, I said yes. Shortly thereafter Geoffrey Kirkman, Associate Director of the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, where I am a faculty fellow, wondered if there was anything that I would like to make into a short video. I say yes – I'd do something about this new book that I have agreed to write.
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SOURCE: Salon
1-16-13
Michael Lind: More Market Means More Welfare State
Michael Lind is the author of Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States and co-founder of the New America Foundation. Few conservative misconceptions are more deeply rooted than the idea than the welfare state competes with the market for resources. In fact, modern business and the modern welfare state have grown up together –and both have grown at the expense of the family.Before the industrial revolution, most production as well as most care-giving was performed within the farm household, by family members. You churned your own butter and you cared for your children, your elderly parents and your sick spouse at home.Thanks to the development of machinery powered by mined or collected energy—be it coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear or renewable energy—most production has long since moved out of the household into mechanized factories. You now buy your factory-produced butter in a store.
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