Imagining a world without the New Deal
The tea party’s backlash against the federal government envisions a return to an earlier, supposedly golden era in American history. Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan floated in April would essentially privatize Medicare and Medicaid while lowering taxes on the top income bracket to their pre-1930 rate. House Republicans’ plan to solve the recent debt crisis would have shrunk the government to its 1950s size.
In other words, conservative plans like these would effectively repeal Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.
This new idea of a federal safety net not only inspired Social Security in the 1930s, but also Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society of the 1960s. FDR and LBJ asked all working adults to care for American seniors and the poor. Before the New Deal, it was unthinkable that retired people could turn to the government for income or medical care. That responsibility fell directly to their children, if they had them. That’s why the Republicans’ proposed cuts to Medicare are so shocking — they shift these costs from the federal budget back to the family budget.
Across America, the New Deal fashioned a new social order that empowered marginalized groups, notably industrial workers. Through support for unions and the Wagner or National Labor Relations Act, FDR codified workers’ power to bargain for fair wages, reasonable hours and safer working conditions. These policies, as well as steeper, more progressive income taxes, secured a more equitable income distribution from the end of World War II to the late 1970s. And the Fair Labor Standards Act — mandating a minimum wage, a 40-hour workweek and improved working conditions — brought benefits to all workers, not just those in unions. The New Deal gave us the weekend. Would we have one without it?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/imagining-a-world-without-the-new-deal/2011/08/03/gIQAtJoBBJ_story.html?utm_term=.a76d623b7fbc
The New Deal is being systematically dissolved!
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