Imagine a hospital nursery full of newborn babies-- human potential in its earliest forms! But, will that potential they share be realized? For they also share six common risks that can derail the best-laid life plans: birth into a poor family, death of a family breadwinner, ill-health, disability, involuntary unemployment, and outliving one’s retirement savings. Each in its own way burdens—and possibly devastates—unlucky individuals and families both emotionally and financially. It is the rare life that is untouched by one or more of these six threats.
What has America done to protect its citizens and workers should any of these threats materialize? What more might it do? What might it learn from the experience of other nations? How do the answers the nation has given affect contemporary taxation, spending and the economy, as well as the prospects for individual lives?
Social Insurance: America’s Neglected Past and Contested Future answers these questions by describing and analyzing the history, economics, politics and philosophy of America’s most important social insurance programs. It provides a unifying vision of these programs’ purposes, notwithstanding their distinctive institutional structures. It reminds us, amidst the confusing and often apocalyptic rhetoric of conventional political debates why we have the programs and policies we do, and argues for reforms that preserves and enhances the protections in place. Rich in stories, data and analysis, this book will provide students—and citizens—with a strong intellectual foundation for understanding the realities behind the rhetoric—and, perhaps, for thinking more cogently about the risks they will encounter in their own lives.