A Few Tentative Steps to the Left

In the last half century, Americans have experienced New Deal liberalism and Great Society liberalism. Now there are signs and portents that the 1990s will register a revival of liberal impulses, more or less dormant during the last two decades.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s style was inclusive. The Social Security Act of 1935, FDR’s enduring monument, united middle-class people and blue-collar workers. They all contributed a portion of their paychecks, matched by employers, to a trust fund specifically--though somewhat misleadingly--analogized to private insurance annuity accumulations. Accordingly, Social Security to this day is perceived by its recipients as an earned entitlement.

Currently, some 80% of the benefits flow to middle-class families and only 20% to the poor. In those two percentages lurk the secret of the program’s comparative invulnerability to conservative assault. Social Security has reduced the incidence of poverty among the elderly to a figure below the national average, but it is the distribution of the bulk of payments to middle-class senior citizens that has maintained support for a program that incidentally alleviates poverty.

The Social Security Act also established a system of unemployment benefits. Again, this limited protection against the disaster of job loss was as much a boon to the middle class as to the blue-collar workers. In the dreary 1930s, the unemployed were as likely to include white-collar bank, life insurance and corporate employees as blue-collar workers. It took World War II to usher in a long period of high employment.

New Deal emphasis was seldom upon the poor. Even the welfare provision that constituted a third part of the 1935 act was promoted as helpfor the widows and children of coal miners killed in accidents and other worthy needy types.

Great Society liberalism was something else. President Lyndon B. Johnson inherited from John F. Kennedy Medicare and tax cut bills that had been stalled in Congress at the time of his predecessor’s assassination, as well as legislation still unformulated to initiate a direct attack upon poverty.

‘Exuberant Rhetoric’

Michael Harrington’s moving tract, “The Other America,” had caught Kennedy’s eye and stirred his emotions. Johnson pushed through Congress in 1964 both Medicare and a major tax cut--both important improvements in the financial position of the broad middle class. Medicare, again incidentally, did help low-income senior citizens. The tax cut was of little or no significance to low-income families.

Nevertheless, LBJ’s own exuberant rhetoric helped convince many or most of his constituents that the Great Society was above all an “unconditional” war against poverty. The truth of the matter is that comparatively small sums were spent on programs that might fairly be called direct benefits to the poor, and even this inadequate funding shrank with the escalation of the Vietnam War.

Moreover, at least three of the anti-poverty initiatives have proved popular enough to survive eight years of Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford and a similar affliction by Ronald Reagan. I refer to Head Start, food stamps and the special nutritional program for low-income pregnant women, infants and young children--called the WIC program. They have passed the test of cost-effectiveness.

It is a misfortune that the mostly middle-class benefits that were increased during the Johnson era have been mostly ignored and that the far smaller sums directed at the poor have engraved on the public mind an enduring portrait of Democrats as big spenders, folks who throw money at problems without adequate analysis of either the problems or of the degree of public willingness to spend tax dollars on their solution.

It is, all the same, a fact of political life that Democrats seeking high office dare not propose expensive new programs--anymore than it is wise to hint that under-taxed Americans really ought to accept higher levies either in the interests of deficit reduction, infrastructure repair, environmental protection or extension of health, housing and education programs.

The new liberalism, timidly emerging among Democrats, is an incremental affair, much concerned with financing, not billed as an unconditional war against anything. Gov. Michael Dukakis’ cautious health plan for Massachusetts seems to translate into a tacit tax upon most employers and an effort to coax smaller, less prosperous enterprises to contribute toward universal coverage of the employed and their families.

The catastrophic health-care bill that President Reagan signed July 1 finances itself by increased taxes on the comparatively prosperous elderly for the benefit of less fortunate age-mates. The welfare reform bill, which faces an uncertain future in the conference committee endeavoring to reconcile differences between a meager Senate draft and a slightly more generous House version, proposes to restructure welfare, emphasize work and harass fathers who pay no child support. It exemplifies the new liberal frugality and a new liberal impulse to collect something in return for benefits.

Conservatives quietly rejoice in the thought that even if Vice President George Bush loses, the budget and trade deficits, interacting phenomena, will compel ascendant Democrats to act just like Republicans. The conservatives may be disappointed. To the extent that a Democratic President and Congress can finance social spending by shifting burdens to employers and more prosperous beneficiaries of medical and other social programs, the tax increase issue can be finessed for a spell.

The liberalism I have sketched does not lift hearts or set spirits scaring, nor does it--thus far--more than nibble at major problems. Catastrophic illnesses afflict a small number of the elderly. Congress ignored the 37 million working Americans totally unprotected by Medicaid or employer-provided health insurance. As for the elderly, their most acute problem is nursing home costs, also unaddressed by Congress.

In the end, the new, responsible liberals will need new revenue to supplement the most ingenious of financing schemes. But a President Dukakis and a Democratic Congress can probably postpone the dreadful moment when new taxes are urgently needed--for a year or two, a long time in politics.