James Petras — Rise and Decline of the Welfare State: Class Struggle and Imperial Wars as the Motor Force of US History

Introduction

The American welfare state was created in 1935 and continued to develop through 1973. Since then, over a prolonged period, the capitalist class has been steadily dismantling the entire welfare state.

Between the mid 1970’s to the present (2017) labor laws, welfare rights and bene ts and the construction of and subsidies for a ordable housing have been gutted. ‘Workfare’ (under President ‘Bill’ Clinton) ended welfare for the poor and displaced workers. Meanwhile the shift to regressive taxation and the steadily declining real wages have increased corporate pro ts to an astronomical degree.

What started as incremental reversals during the 1990’s under Clinton has snowballed over the last two decades decimating welfare legislation and institutions.

The earlier welfare ‘reforms’ and the current anti-welfare legislation and austerity practices have been accompanied by a series of endless imperial wars, especially in the Middle East.

In the 1940’s through the 1960’s, world and regional wars (Korea and Indo-China) were combined with signi cant welfare program – a form of ‘social imperialism’, which ‘buy o ’ the working class while expanding the empire. However, recent decades are characterized by multiple regional wars and the reduction or elimination of welfare programs – and a massive growth in poverty, domestic insecurity and poor health…. 

Good historical summary, but glosses over the bipartisan political corruption behind it.

James Petras Website
Rise and Decline of the Welfare State: Class Struggle and Imperial Wars as the Motor Force of US History
James Petras | Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York and adjunct professor at Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Nova Scotia

also

America’s homeless population has risen this year for the first time since the Great Recession, propelled by the housing crisis afflicting the west coast, according to a new federal study.

The study has found that 553,742 people were homeless on a single night this year, a 0.7% increase over last year.

The Guardian
America's Homeless Population Rises for the First Time Since the Great Recession

Alastair Gee

Mike Konczal — The Conservative Myth of a Social Safety Net Built on Charity

The right yearns for an era when churches and local organizations took care of society's weakest—an era that never existed and can't exist today.

History lesson.

With this history in hand, it’s worth teasing out a general theory of why the voluntary sector has limits in providing social insurance that the state does not. Economics as a field has theorized extensively about the concept of market failures, or moments when markets don’t allocate resources efficiently. It has also described government failures, particularly in the libertarian-influenced “public choice” theory. This focus on markets and governments leaves the study of the voluntary sector under-theorized. In turn, this lack of critical attention leads to assumptions that the voluntary sector can solve problems it cannot.Why

But the Great Recession offers the perfect case study in why the voluntary sector can’t solve these problems. If people like Mike Lee are correct, then the start of the Great Recession would have been precisely the moment when private charity would have stepped up. But in fact, private giving fell as the Great Recession started. Overall giving fell 7 percent in 2008, with another 6.2 percent drop in 2009. There was only a small uptick in 2010 and 2011, even though unemployment remained very high. Giving also fell as a percentage of GDP (even as GDP shrank), from 2.1 percent in 2008 to 2.0 percent in 2009 through 2011. (The high point was 2.3 percent in 2005.)
As research by Robert Reich and Christopher Wimer showed, the decline occurred with all sources and hit almost all types of nonprofits. Individuals gave 8 percent less in 2008 than the previous year, and their giving dropped an additional 3.6 percent in 2009. Charitable bequests fell 21 percent overall between 2008 and 2010. Contributions by corporations fell in 2008, and only slowly increased afterwards. Foundations also gave less in the Great Recession even though they have legal payout and operating rules to follow that would presumably put a floor on this.

There were some bright spots—giving to food banks, for instance, increased. But as the economy went from free fall in 2008 to stagnation in 2010, private charity still remained depressed. Worse, as a wave of austerity hit state and local governments—with large retrenchment in spending and layoffs of public-sector workers—the state pushed harder on private charity to pick up the slack of social work.

Why didn’t this sting as badly as it could have? Because of the role the federal government played. “Automatic stabilizers,” a key policy innovation of the welfare state, were there to pick up the slack. Automatic stabilizers are policies such as unemployment insurance and food assistance that maintain an income floor and security for people, which allows for more spending when an economy goes into a recession. This ability to boost purchasing power automatically is a major, effective response to a recession. These stabilizers, in turn, also decline automatically as the economy starts to recover.

The Atlantic
The Conservative Myth of a Social Safety Net Built on Charity
Mike Konczal

A huge role of a modern government is providing social insurance that only the currency issuer has the means to do. Private insurance is unable and unwilling to do so, and charity declines instead of expanding to meet the need in downturns.

Pope Francis — Evangelii Gaudium, 56

Conservatives seem to have caught their breath and are now attacking the Apostolic Exhortation of Pope Francis as "Marxist." Here is the passage in especially in question.

56. While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. Consequently, they reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control. A new tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual, which unilaterally and relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules. Debt and the accumulation of interest also make it difficult for countries to realize the potential of their own economies and keep citizens from enjoying their real purchasing power. To all this we can add widespread corruption and self-serving tax evasion, which have taken on worldwide dimensions. The thirst for power and possessions knows no limits. In this system, which tends to devour everything which stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule. — Evangelii Gaudium

Marxist? Really?

Joshua Sperber — Krugman’s Austerity Blinders

Yet what is critical here is Krugman and other liberals’ understanding of precisely what “work” in fact means. 

Liberals are of course correct that European austerity, as well as the US version, has not generated an immediate economic expansion. But to get a clearer idea of the actual purpose of austerity, it is far more useful to listen not to liberal economists but to the politicians who actually decide to implement it. Greek European Commissioner Maria Damanaki recently noted, “‘The strategy of the European Commission over the past year and a half or two has been to reduce the labour costs in all European countries in order to improve the competitiveness of European companies over the rivals from Eastern Europe and Asia.’”

Similarly, in her recent keynote speech at the World Economic Forum, Angela Merkel was admirably frank in asserting that high unemployment is, according to the Guardian, the “price Europe had to pay to become more competitive.” Merkel’s statement that austerity is intended to “ensure the prosperity of our people” is an oxymoron only to those liberal economists who do not see capitalism as a class-based system. For, Krugman’s contention that recessions are merely “technical malfunctions” ignores what both politicians and capitalists have long asserted: recessions are “correctives” that reduce the cost of the one commodity that is more adjustable and often more expensive than any other: labor. 

Austerity, via slashing social spending and expanding a surplus labor pool that is ever more desperate, achieves its aim via making labor cheap enough so that it can again be profitably exploited by capitalists. That is, our recession will come to an end, and the standard of living will be ever-lower, once business can again make a profit off of an ample number of workers, which of course is wage labor’s raison d’etre in capitalism in the first place. While the consequences of further impoverishing millions of people in order to more effectively profit off of them might engender political instability, this is not part of the economic equation. After all, political instability is what police states are for.

Counterpunch
Krugman’s Austerity Blinders
Joshua Sperber

(h/t Kevin Fathi via email

Austerity was never about "fixing the debt" or reducing the deficit. Just another tool for wage suppression and reduction of worker benefits and protections in a race to the bottom with emerging markets and the undeveloped world. This race will occupy the better part of this century unless something intervenes.