D G

All this might have got you wondering about the roots and history of social welfare in its many forms in America.  Well, wonder no more:

Federal Employers Liability Act (1908)

At the turn of the 20^th century, most industrial workplaces were dangerous. Prior to the passage of the Act (FELA), injured workers had to seek relief in court, proving not only the injury, but that it wasn’t their fault and that they hadn’t assumed the risk of the worksite. As you might expect:

Many families of accident victims had to rely on charity to weather their financial losses . . . [and] the percentages of families receiving nothing ranged from 20.4 % in a New York . . . sample to as high as 60.9 percent among men killed in Illinois before 1911.

Congress enacted FELA in 1908, which provided compensation to injured railroad workers when the railroad was at fault.

Successful, many states chose to model FELA and apply it to other industries, and shortly thereafter, the first workers’ compensation laws were enacted. “By 1930 only Arkansas, Florida, Mississippi, and South Carolina had not yet enacted legislation.”

Mothers’ Pension Movement (1911) 

Also at the turn of the 20^th century, as many flocked to cities, family life was changing and increasingly, single mothers were isolated (rather than surrounded and supported by extended families). The ad hoc welfare net of orphanages, private charities and other relief did little to alleviate these families’ desperate living conditions.

In response, progressives pushed for local and state governments to take responsibility for these families’ care:

Scoring its first statewide victory in Illinois in 1911, the mothers’ – pension movement swept forty states in less than a decade. No plank of the social-justice platform, with the possible exception of workmen’s compensation, mustered a better legislative record.

Eventually, these state and local initiatives were subsumed by the New Deal’s Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC).

Social Security Retirement (1935), Disability (1956) and SSI (1972) Benefits 

The economic meltdown of the 1930s, known as the Great Depression, “wiped out the lifetime savings of seniors, and poverty among the elderly was a growing concern.”

To protect Americans from the “hazards and vicissitudes of life,” in 1935 the Social Security Act was signed into law. Among its many provisions to provide economic assistance were “old age benefits” under Title II, or what “we now think of as Social Security.”

In 1939, the “old age” program was amended to include spouses and children “who relied on the income from a breadwinner.”

In 1956, President Eisenhower expanded the Social Security Act to include disability insurance. Although originally this expansion only covered people aged 50-64, today it includes people of all ages and their dependents.

Supplemental Security Income (SSI) was created in 1972 under President Nixon and was designed to provide “cash assistance to aged, blind and disabled individuals.”

For many years, before the Baby Boomers began retiring, Social Security was taking in more than it was spending, and those excess revenues were placed in a trust fund. In recent years, however, the program has been running a deficit, and if expenditures are made as forecasted, the Social Security trust fund will be depleted by 2033.

Unemployment Insurance (1935)

The Great Depression (1929-1939) devastated the American economy, and within three months of the Crash of 1929:

The Stock Market lost 40% of its value [and] $26 billion of wealth disappeared. . . . . unemployment [eventually] exceeded 25% [and] about 10,000 banks failed . . . . Wages paid to workers declined from $50 billion in 1929 to only $30 billion in 1932.

To deal with these high rates of unemployment, the states began programs that provided workers with unemployment insurance. Wisconsin was the first in 1932, and many soon followed its example. Prior to the inclusion of a UI program in the Social Security Act of 1935, California, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Utah and Washington had also enacted employment insurance programs.

The 1935 law gave the states a lot of freedom to implement their programs, and “by August 1937, 48 states, Alaska, Hawaii and the District of Columbia had enacted their own Unemployment Insurance laws.”

Aid to Families with Dependent Children (1935)

Built upon the foundation of the mothers’ pensions, the Social Security Act of 1935 also included the AFDC (then ADC) which:

Provided a subsidy to families with fathers who were deceased, absent or unable to work. . . . [and] was viewed as a means of extending help to these families who had the misfortune to lose a breadwinner and who, it was widely believed, should not be forced to rely on the paid work of a mother who belonged at home.

The AFDC remained the primary form of “welfare” assistance in the U.S. until it was replaced with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families in the 1990s.

The National School Lunch Program (1946)

The School Lunch Program was originally seen

As a measure of national security, to safeguard the health and well-being of the Nation’s children and to encourage the domestic consumption of nutritious agricultural commodities and other food.

In 2013, over 5,000,000,000 lunches were served as part of this successful program, and 70.5% of those were free or reduced price.

Food Stamps (1964)

Many localities had developed food stamp programs during the Great Depression as a way to combat hunger and help local farmers, but these were discontinued as the economy improved.

In 1964, as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” a federal food stamp program was implemented to improve “nutrition among low-income households.”

Successful, by 1974, 15 million people were participating in the food stamp program, and as a result of our recent Great Recession, by September 2013, “47 million Americans, one-sixth of the country,” were receiving food stamps.

In February 2014, President Obama signed an $8.7 billion food stamp cut into law, which will cause 850,000 households to love $90 each month in food stamp benefits.

Medicare (1965)

To provide healthcare for America’s seniors, Medicare came about because, as President Lyndon Johnson said:

There has been increasing awareness of the fact that the full value of Social Security would not be realized unless provision were made to deal with the problem of costs of illnesses among our older citizens. 

Medicare was expanded in 2006 under President George W. Bush to include coverage for prescription drugs in the program known as Medicare Part D. In 2013, it was estimated that $68 billion was expended on the prescription drug program.

In 2010, Medicare expenditures were:

Estimated to have been $525.0 billion . . . [and are] projected to grow 5.9 percent in 2011, but only 1.7 percent in 2012 .. . .

As of 2012, over 49 million people were benefiting from Medicare.

Medicaid (1965)

From the start, Medicaid was designed to provide health care to low-income persons who would likely otherwise go without.

A partnership between the states and Uncle Sam, the federal government dispersed Medicaid grants to those states that chose to participate in the program, which was not mandatory. Although many states willingly signed on, some held out, including Arizona, which did not begin offering Medicaid benefits until 1982.

The act has been amended many times, modified to include the elderly and disabled (1971), certain AFDC eligible recipients (1984-1985), illegal immigrants with emergency conditions (1986), pregnant women and infants (1986-1988) and low-income children (1990).

In 1997, Medicaid was expanded and empowered the states to provide benefits to children whose families earned up to 200% of poverty under the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).

The Affordable Care Act recently expanded Medicaid’s reach even further to now include those with income below 133% of poverty and certain adults without children.

Women, Infants and Children (1972)

The supplemental nutrition program WIC was designed to address “early age malnutrition [that] was a major cause of developmental problems among low-income children.” Although a pilot program in 1972, it became a permanent fixture in the social welfare net in 1975.

In 2013, nearly 8.7 million women participated in WIC at a cost of $6.5 billion.

Earned Income Tax Credit (1975) 

To address what many saw as “welfare’s disincentives to work,” Congress passed the Earned Income Tax Credit that provides tax breaks to low-income workers (who frequently end up paying no income tax).

Although many today complain about the credit, conservative President Ronald Reagan famously described it as “the best anti-poverty, the best pro-family, the best job creation measure to come out of Congress.”

In 2010, 27.5 million low- and moderate- income working families benefitted from the EITC.

Energy Assistance Program (1980)

To address the needs of low-income families who were having trouble heating their homes in the face of increasing energy costs, Congress passed the Low Income Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP). Although originally only covering heating costs, in 1984, the law was amended to include cooling costs as well.

Funding has declined slightly in recent years as a result of sequestration, dropping from $3.471 billion in 2012 to $3.255 billion in 2013.

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (1996)

In response to what many had seen as AFDC dependency contributing to generational poverty and disincentives to work, Congress replaced the old “welfare” program with TANF through a law titled the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act.

TANF made several changes to the welfare system including setting time limits on benefits, requiring recipients to work a certain number of hours, providing incentives to the states to reduce their welfare rolls and incentives to “reduce births to unmarried mothers.”

Called by many “welfare-to-work” and touted as a success, the program, particularly early in its administration, had some critics:

[TANF] eliminated federal assistance for millions of poor mothers [and] one of those . . . facing eviction from her home . . . had to put her kids up at a relative’s house so she could at least keep her “welfare to work” assignment…

In 2011, over 4 million people received benefits under TANF.

Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (2010)

Hotly debated and highly contested (even after it was passed, the Republican House of Representatives voted 46 times to end it), the Affordable Care Act expanded the nation’s social welfare net by, among other things, eliminating pre-existing conditions, ending lifetime coverage limits, allowing young adults to stay on their parents’ insurance and providing for preventive care.

The law also expanded Medicaid to cover people who earn up to 133% of poverty, and required most others to purchase insurance, although those making up to 400% of poverty may receive cash subsidies.

While the individual mandate to buy insurance is seen as “an overwhelming loss of individual liberty and freedom” by many on the right, in 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the mandate was constitutional.

Other challenges to the Act remain undecided, such as its requirement that employers provide contraception, which opponents of the law call an attack on religious liberty. In December and January, the Supreme Court granted stays allowing certain groups to not comply with the law pending the outcome of existing lawsuits that are set for oral arguments in March 2014.

Another problem with the Act’s implementation is the broken promise “if you like your plan you can keep it,” which turned out to be not entirely true. To add insult to injury, although President Obama repeatedly made this promise during his 2012 campaign, it appears that he knew the statement wasn’t completely true even then.

The President’s deception, however, was put into perspective by The Daily Show’s John Stewart:

So, yes, the president was somewhat dishonest about the promise of his healthcare program, but here’s the weird part, his opponents have been lying like mother*ckers about its effects.

Politicians being politicians on both sides of the coin.

If you liked this article, you might also enjoy:

• The Origin of the Red State/Blue State Dichotomy
• Why the Standard Retirement Age Is Set Where It’s At
• The Checkered History of Slush Funds
• The Origin of the Republican Party
• The Origin of the American Democratic Party

Expand for References

Ultrasound scan

Imagine for a moment that it’s 40,000 years in the future in a solar system far, far, away on a planet thriving with intelligent life. Extraterrestrial beings inhabit this place.  Perhaps they look like the cuddly ET, the blob, ALF, or maybe even  like the dreadlocked beings from Predator;  but either way, they are not human. An approaching speck in space catches the beings’ eyes (assuming they have them). Upon sending a craft to retrieve it, they find a probe containing a disk. Using instructions on the disk, they manage to play it. What they are about to hear and see are the sounds and images from an ancient alien civilization – 1977 Earth.

Flashback about 40 millenia to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, Earth in January, 1977. A brilliant, 43 year old professor named Carl Sagan is the director of the Laboratory of Planetary Studies there.

In 1975, he had won the Pulitzer Prize for his book “The Dragons of Eden,” a dissertation on the evolution of human intelligence. He helped shape the field of exobiology, the study of the potential for life on other planets. Sagan had also been a key adviser for NASA dating all the way back to it’s earliest days. Working out of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California (the same place that Georges Lemaitre spoke with Einstein in 1933 and where Jack Parson launched the first rocket in 1936) as a visiting scientist, he helped design and manage several space exploration missions, including the Mariner 2’s trip to Venus and Viking one & two’s trips to Mars. Also, in the late 1950s, he was involved in a plan the U.S. had to nuke the moon.

So, when Dr. Sagan received a call to come to the JPL once again to help NASA, this wasn’t out of the ordinary. But this wasn’t an ordinary mission.

In August of 1977, NASA planned on launching twin unmanned space probes called Voyager 1 & Voyager 2. The probes’ original mission was to explore and take pictures of the giants of our solar system, Jupiter, Saturn, plus all of their moons. There was also a hope that if the probe’s instruments continued to operate, the probes could do the same with Uranus and Neptune.

Due to “a rare geometric arrangement of the outer planets” that only happens every 175 years, all four planets were positioned perfectly so that a probe launched into space at the proper angle, time, and speed would be able to pass all of them. Pluto was never part of the mission due to it being elsewhere in its orbit and not part of this geometric arrangement. The probes were built to last five years, but there was considerable optimism, that has since proved founded, that they would last many years more.

There was also a possible additional mission- if all went as planned and they were able to carry it out, they would be the first Earth crafts to leave our solar system and become interstellar travelers. This is what NASA wanted Dr. Sagan for. In less than nine months, NASA wanted Dr. Sagan to compile a team and devise a message in case of contact with an extraterrestrial civilization outside of our solar system, a message that needed to convey what life was like on Earth and be relatively easily understood by those who receive it.

Now, the chances of the probes ever being found, detected, or recovered by an extraterrestrial civilization are incredibly small. The probes are the size of a small car which doesn’t even register as a blip in the vastness of the universe. For that matter, the Milky Way itself is barely a blip on that scale. Additionally, the probes wouldn’t even reach another planetary system until around 40,000 years into the future. At that point, Voyager 1 will be nearing Gliese 445 and Voyager 2 will be close to Ross 248.  Nevertheless, it was decided such a message should be included, just in case.

The decision was made pretty early on that whatever was sent up there needed to showcase Earth – the sights and sounds of our home planet. It had to be a “cultural Noah’s Ark with a shelf life of hundreds of millions of years.” Now, the question was what sights and sounds exactly?

To answer this question, Dr. Sagan compiled his team.  Dr. Frank Drake worked with Sagan on the Pioneer plaque in 1972, which among other things included the location of Earth, mapping it out via pulsars.

Ann Druyan was a friend of Sagan’s (later, his wife) and a young scientific novelist. She was put in charge of music selection. Timothy Ferris (at the time, engaged to Druyan) was a writer for Rolling Stone and would go on to become “the best scientific journalist of his generation.” He helped picked the images that were to be included.

Jon Lomberg had already been Dr. Sagan’s artistic collaborator for several years; his job was to bring color and artistic beauty to what the interstellar beings would see. Finally, there was Linda Sagan, Carl’s wife. She had created the artwork on the Pioneer plaque and was to help produce this project.

Their first order of business was to figure out how they were going to convey this message. The receptacle for this kind of message had to last for thousands of years and be simple to play. Drake suggested the old-school technology of a phonographic record. It was rather simple to play and as long as the physical record itself was protected, it wouldn’t erode over time. The etchings on a metallic phonographic record could last, according to estimations, for hundreds of millions of years with very little degradation.  Additionally, they decided to make it a copper disk coated in gold, further protecting it from magnetic fields and heat, as well as placing it in a protective aluminum jacket.

Coupled with an included needle and cartridge, an alien civilization would be able to play it. They also decided to design it to run at 16 2/3 revolutions per minute, as opposed to the normal 33 1/3 revolutions. This was done so that they could jam as many pictures, music, greetings, and information as they could onto the record. In order to make sure the aliens knew what to do with the disk, needle, and cartridge, symbols were etched in showing how it was to be used.  For instance, to make sure they know what speed to rotate the record at, this is etched in binary arithmetic expressed as a factor of the fundamental transition of the hydrogen atom.

In order to demonstrate how the pictures are to be decoded and viewed, the upper right portion of the cover shows the analog signal that is the start of the picture, and in binary how the first three vertical lines are marked. They further show how many vertical lines to a picture.  On the face is also a carefully chosen picture of the first picture on the record, for calibration purposes.

Next, and possibly the most arduous task, was to determine what exactly would be on this record. The team wanted the golden record to represent what life was like on Earth; the sights, sounds, and feelings we encounter everyday. After much deliberation, 115 images encoded in analog form (including a picture of DNA, human anatomy, Olympic sprinters, an African hut, and a diagram of vertebrate evolution) and an audio “track list” with greetings, sounds, and music were included.

The audio portion began with “Greetings in 55 languages.” The first greeting, in English, was from then-Secretary General of the United Nations Kurt Waldheim. The rest of the greetings included ones in Sumerian (“may all be well”), Zulu (“We greet you, great ones. We wish you longevity”), Czech (“Dear Friends, we wish you the best.”), and even a “whale greeting.”

The next audio section was known as “sounds of Earth.” They included things like a baby crying, a volcano erupting, birds calling, and a train roaring past. The last audio section was the music, overseen by Ann Druyan. Among the tracks selected for this section was Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, a Pygmy girls’ initiation song from Zaire, Peruvian panpipes and drums, and “Johnny B. Goode,” by Chuck Berry. Noticeably absent was any song from the Beatles. While the band wanted their hit “Here Comes the Sun” to be included, they didn’t own the rights to their songs. Their publishing company, EMI, did and they did not allow it to happen.

For everything the team included on this golden record, probably the most unique – and telling – inclusion was an EEG brain scan of a young woman, newly in love. That woman turned out to be Ann Druyan. Druyan had planned on going through “a mental itinerary of the ideas and individuals of history whose memory I hoped to perpetuate,” as well as thoughts of her fiancé Tim Ferris while being connected to the EEG. But two days before the recording, something extraordinary happened. She fell in love with Dr. Carl Sagan.

Days before, they had shared a rather intimate phone call where they ruminated about life when they both realized they loved one another. They hadn’t had a single date nor a kiss or even a romantic moment before this, but they decided to marry, despite them both being in other relationships. As described by Druyan herself, “It was a Eureka! moment for both of us—the idea that we could find the perfect match. It was a discovery that has been reaffirmed in countless ways since.”

As for the brain scan, she stated,

Earlier I had asked Carl if those putative extraterrestrials of a billion years from now could conceivably interpret the brain waves of a meditator. ‘Who knows? A billion years is a long, long time,’ was his reply. ‘On the chance that it might be possible why don’t we give it a try?’

Two days after our life-changing phone call, I entered a laboratory at Bellevue Hospital in New York City and was hooked up to a computer that turned all the data from my brain and heart into sound. I had a one-hour mental itinerary of the information I wished to convey. I began by thinking about the history of Earth and the life it sustains.

To the best of my abilities I tried to think something of the history of ideas and human social organization. I thought about the predicament that our civilization finds itself in and about the violence and poverty that make this planet a hell for so many of its inhabitants.

Toward the end I permitted myself a personal statement of what it was like to fall in love.

On August 20, 1977 Voyager 2 lifted off into space. Voyager 1 joined its twin 16 days later. Over the next four years, they explored and took snapshots of Jupiter and Saturn. In 1986, Voyager arrived at Uranus. By 1989, it had passed by Neptune. Voyager 1 officially entered interstellar space on August 25, 2012 and as of February 20, 2014, it was 127.25 AU from Earth.  The farthest away of any man-made object.

With perhaps as many as 500 billion galaxies each with billions of stars (for reference the Milky Way has about 300 billion), many of which have planetary objects orbiting them, it seems likely enough we’re not alone in the universe.  The Voyager probes will orbit the Milky Way indefinitely, so you never know.  One of them might encounter an intelligent alien civilization, maybe even long after humans have gone the way of the Dodo bird.

And if that day does come when a Voyager Golden Record is found, first contact may well be dreadlocked Predator-like extraterrestrials listening to Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Good.”

While it’s a long-shot, as Sagan himself noted,

The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet.

(For the full contents of the Golden Records, go here.)

If you liked this article, you might also enjoy:

• The First Man To Walk In Space Almost Got Stuck Out There
• How Do Astronauts Go to the Bathroom in Space?
• When the U.S. Sent Several Hundred Million Needles Into Space
• You Can Survive Being Exposed to the Near Vacuum of Space for About 90 Seconds With No Longterm Damage
• 10 Interesting Space Related Facts

Bonus Facts:

• In order to allow the recipients to view certain images in color, three consecutive images were used in these cases, each representing red, green, and blue.  In order for them to determine whether they are calibrating it correctly, a picture of our sun was included.  Using the pulsar map to locate it, the aliens should be able to directly compare our sun’s exact color (which isn’t yellow by the way) with the image included.
• As one could imagine, despite the cute love story between Dr. Sagan and Ann Druyan, there were pretty dire consequences due to their secret marriage. They both decided not to reveal it to their partners until the project was completed. But when they eventually did, it led to a eight year legal battle between Carl and Linda, longer than it took the Voyagers to pass by Jupiter.
• The team was able to secure a rather valuable and heartfelt audio message for the probe from US President Jimmy Carter. The message said: “This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.”

Expand for References

I will be extremely cautious before ever accepting VC investment again and would only do it on my terms.

Change your Avi fail

Submitted by: Insider