Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: This feature may not be available in some browsers.
My father's father died in 1928, leaving a widow and family of five. No one finished high school, as they went to work. My father left after the sixth grade, and began working in a paper house. There was no Soc Sec survivor benefit. One benefit was he got newspaper to pad his coat and mend his shoes. When he needed his appendix out, there was no health insurance, so the operation occurred on the table the famly ate at. The first dental care and preventive care he got was in the WPA. Unfortunately, he had asthma, which prevented his enlisting in WWII, and then getting the GI bill benefits, that put a generation through college, and is generally considered the single largest govt improvement to gnp in US history.
He was able to retire with soc sec, and savings and owning his home. And medicare. I have doubts about Obamacare, but the hysterical degree of the TPM "debate," caused me to decide let's see what happens, and fix it later.
This is the society that Tea Baggers and Libertarians long for. A society of survival of the fittest where people who fall through the cracks suffer. A society that does not care for its less fortunate
People have been comfortable in poverty since the beginning of the creation of cultural societies. All welfare did was replace the cruel overseer/Prince/poor house/et al with a less cold paternalistic state.
Get over it. Your demented myths have no basis in reality
I think the propertied classes have never gotten over the medieval discovery that the serfs were having a good time reproducing like rabbits (it was one of the few things that didn't cost money in the way of entertainment in the Dark Ages), while they were stuck with the homely ice queen/bozo prince their parents had married them to when they were seven. Class envy explains a lot before the Romantic Era!
usmb gold! Great post 
America Was Better Off Before The Socialism of FDR, JFK, LBJ... add Truman (equal rights in military), add Nixon (housing issues), add Carter, add Cinton and Obama.
At least this is the con-argument.
What would America have looked like withouth the socialist programs pushed and enacted by these Presidents?
We would look like Mexico today if it were not for the great WWII generation deciding to create a strong and stable middle class and to pass a social safety net so that we can better handle economic downturns.
The Great Depression was awful for them and they felt like if the country had had safeguards in place, it could have been made to be less bad, so they passed those safeguards and we've never had a depression since.
In fact, we've never had a downturn anything like that since except for 5 years ago after a decade of trying to get rid of the safeguards that our Great Generation passed.
That is probably the greatest generation in American history along with the one that fought to end slavery.
First, thanks for the rare historical perspective that those who fought to save the Union and a year later to purge the country of the great evil of a slave society were by any reasonable definition a Great Generation. We can also have sorrow for the misguided zealots who fostered both disunion and slavery, but not admiration.
Second, what is often lost is how varied both the support and the opposition to the social compact of the 40s and 50s was. On one side was both Truman and Eisenhower, integrating the military, passing civil rights bills, promoting public works and higher education, rebuilding the rest of the world which in the process gave America its greatest period of economic advance since early industrialization. One the other side were the remnants of the isolationist Right, the racist Democratic South, and an assortment of ideologues of every political persuasion from Marxists to John Birchers.
For better or worse (and most of it is better) this is the world our grandparents made. That we do not understand their achievement or take it for granted says much more about us than it does about them!
