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Washington Post
2 days ago
- Business
- Washington Post
How Trump dominates and corrupts the private sector
After six months, with seven times that much time remaining, Trump 2.0 seems as transformative as the New Deal was, but different. Franklin D. Roosevelt's legacy was the institutional architecture of the welfare and regulatory state. Donald Trump's legacy will be a demonstration: How a purely transactional politician, untethered from any political philosophy and uninterested in norms of self-restraint (e.g., unforced respect for the separation of powers) can exploit this architecture for unconstrained executive power.
Al Jazeera
10-07-2025
- Politics
- Al Jazeera
Trump didn't start the war on the poor – but he's taking it to new extremes
'A budget is a moral document,' as numerous human rights activists have said over the decades. If that is true, then the so‑called 'One Big, Beautiful Bill' represents a grotesque example of the immorality of US leadership in 2025. It is a budget that slashes Medicare and Medicaid by $930bn over the next decade and could leave as many as 17 million without healthcare insurance. The cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) – a food aid scheme for Americans living in deep poverty – will render about 1 million vulnerable people ineligible for the basic human right of not starving. The US social welfare system – one that President Franklin D Roosevelt and Congress introduced with the Social Security Act of 1935 and President Lyndon B Johnson extended with Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 – is on its way to an emergency room. This is one of the steepest rollbacks of social welfare programmes in the US since their inception in 1935. Many will attribute it to Project 2025. But the disdain for social welfare in the US has always been present – because the US cannot be the US without millions of Americans who must work on the cheap, so that a select few can hoard wealth and power, and mega-corporations can hoard resources. That the US has had a mediocre and begrudging social welfare system for the past 90 years is nothing short of a miracle. While much of the Western world and other major empires either established or modernised their social welfare systems in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the US persisted with limited government intervention for citizens. Only radicals within the US labour movement typically advocated a national social welfare policy. Until the Great Depression of the 1930s, only individual states – not the federal government – provided limited economic relief to unemployed people or their families. US Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins played a critical role in persuading Roosevelt to pursue what would become the Social Security Act of 1935. Once enacted, this provided the elderly, the unemployed, disabled workers, and single mothers with federal assistance for the first time. But both of the bill's champions were aware that there would be opposition to the federal government assuming responsibility for providing benefits to Americans, even with unemployment at 25 percent. Leading business tycoons such as Ford Motor Company founder Henry Ford expressed their disdain for federal social welfare. 'No government can guarantee security. It can only tax production, distribution, and service and gradually crush the poor to pay taxes,' Ford said. Alf Landon, a millionaire oilman who served as Republican governor of Kansas and ran against Roosevelt in 1936, also opposed the Social Security Act, on the grounds that the tax burden would further impoverish workers. 'I am not exaggerating the folly of this legislation. The saving it forces on our workers is a cruel hoax,' Landon stated in a 1936 speech, also fearing that the federal government would eventually dip into Social Security funds to pay for other projects. Even when Congress enacted the Social Security Act in August 1935, the compromises made served to racialise, feminise, and further limit social welfare provision. The bill excluded agricultural workers like sharecroppers (two‑thirds white and one‑third African American, who were overrepresented in this work), domestic workers (in which Black women were overrepresented), nonprofit and government workers, and some waiters and waitresses from welfare benefits. It took amendments in the 1950s to rectify some of the racial, gender, and class discrimination embedded in the original legislation. Johnson's War on Poverty in 1964-65 prompted resistance and helped catalyse a new conservative movement. Johnson sought to add Medicare and Medicaid to the Social Security regime, provide food assistance via programmes such as Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) and SNAP (originally Food Stamps), and expand Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Republican and future US President George HW Bush ran unsuccessfully for Senate in Texas in 1964 against a pro‑Medicare Democrat, calling Johnson's plan 'socialised medicine' – a Cold War‑era slur equating it with communism. Racial segregationist Strom Thurmond remarked of social welfare programmes, in general – and Johnson's Medicare and Medicaid plans, specifically – 'You had [the poor] back in the days of Jesus Christ, you have got some now, and you will have some in the future,' a pitiful excuse for refusing to reduce poverty or extend federal assistance. The entire conservative pushback against what Republicans termed 'entitlements' grew from the expansion of the welfare state under Johnson. So much so that when Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, 'his administration slashed Medicaid expenditures by more than 18 percent and cut the overall Department of Health and Human Services budget by 25 percent'. Those and other austerity measures in the 1980s resulted in one million fewer children eligible for free or reduced‑price school lunches, 600,000 fewer people on Medicaid, and one million fewer accessing SNAP – according to one study. I can speak to the effect of such cuts directly. As a teenage recipient of AFDC and SNAP during the Reagan years – the second eldest of six children (four under the age of five in 1984) in the New York City area – I can say that the $16,000 in annual state and federal assistance between 1983 and 1987 felt like a cruel joke. It barely covered housing, offered minimal healthcare via underfunded public clinics, and still left us without food for a week every month. If this is what they call 'entitlements', then I was clearly entitled to almost nothing. In the past 30 years, leaders who opposed the federal social welfare apparatus have celebrated their victories with disturbing heartlessness. Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole declared gleefully in 1995 that he 'was there, fighting the fight, voting against Medicare… because we knew it wouldn't work in 1965'. During his 2008 presidential campaign, the late Republican senator John McCain proposed $1.3 trillion in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, along with a huge 'overhaul' of Social Security to balance the federal budget. Fiscal conservative Grover Norquist infamously said he wanted to 'get it [social‑welfare programmes] down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub'. US Speaker Mike Johnson claimed last week that Trump's budget would usher in 'a new golden age'. Budget priorities that ultimately harm those in poverty, restrict access to healthcare, and force people to work for food aid or medical care are nothing short of monstrous. Ninety years – and 44 years of tax breaks later – the greed and callousness of conservatives and the far right have precipitated yet another round of tax cuts favouring the uber wealthy and mega-corporations. It is only a matter of time before those whose grandparents once benefitted from Social Security and New Deal‑era welfare will seek to gut what remains of America's Swiss‑cheese safety net. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.
Irish Times
02-07-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
De Valera's acrimonious relationship with US President Roosevelt's man in Dublin during Second World War
The requirement that students must unlock social media profiles when applying for US visas reminds us that Irish sentiment is out of step with the White House when it comes to international affairs. The new American ambassador, Edward Walsh, is not the first to find himself at odds with Irish opinion makers – during his 1984 presidential visit, TDs and senators listened to Ronald Reagan's remarks on Central America in stony silence. Such challenges do not compare, however, to the acrimony between Éamon de Valera and David Gray, then US president Franklin D Roosevelt's man in Dublin during the second World War. Before Germany surrendered, Gray had been told by the State Department Ireland would not be invited to participate in the inaugural conference of the United Nations in San Francisco. De Valera's courtesy call on the German minister, Eduard Hempel, to express his condolences after Hitler's death caused outrage in Britain and the US, but at home it reinforced the perception that neutrality was administered impartially. READ MORE The extent of Ireland's co-operation with the Allies remained secret, and Winston Churchill's personal remarks about de Valera's policy on VE Day – the Irish government had stayed out of the war 'to frolic' with the Germans 'to their heart's content' – incensed public opinion. De Valera's dignified response on radio won him admiration, and identified neutrality with Irish independence. Following his visit to Hempel, a gesture his senior officials saw as grotesquely ill-judged, the taoiseach received fiercely critical letters from Irish-Americans. One serviceman in the Philippines wrote, 'I have a mother in Ireland, I also have brothers fighting this war, but I guess Dr Hempel means more to you. Have no more time, got to fight the Jap.' Other letter writers wrote of 'great embarrassment' and feeling 'ashamed'. On the other hand, the tactful British representative in Dublin, John Maffey, thought that de Valera's pose as the elder statesman in his reply to Churchill – skilfully working on 'all the old passions' – represented a setback for Britain's approach to Ireland. Gray arrived in Dublin in February 1940, three months before Hitler's tanks rolled over the Netherlands, Belgium, and then France. Like Roosevelt, the inexperienced American representative had no sympathy for Ireland's neutral stance – even though the US stayed out of the war until Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in December the following year. Gray could not understand the diplomatic balancing act de Valera had to perform to avoid antagonising the two nearest belligerent powers. As one of his critics put it, the American representative 'brandished the big stick too much'. Relations between the two deteriorated when Frank Aiken went to Washington in April 1941 in an effort to ease the supplies squeeze enforced by Churchill. De Valera's close cabinet colleague, responsible for co-ordinating defensive measures, did succeed in purchasing two ships, but only after a fraught meeting with the president. According to an Irish source, Aiken insisted that Ireland had to contend with a twin threat of 'aggression' – from Britain, and Germany. The pro-British Roosevelt thundered 'nonsense' and pulled the tablecloth to land his lunch on the floor. Furious with the reception Aiken received during his visit, de Valera believed Gray had misrepresented him to the president. But their relationship reached a critical point in February 1944 when the American envoy asked de Valera to recall the German and Japanese representatives. The taoiseach saw the 'American note' as an ultimatum and rejected it as undermining Ireland's neutrality. When Hitler took his own life in April 1945, Gray demanded the keys of the German legation before its records could be destroyed ' – de Valera rejected this too. T he cessation of hostilities in Europe did not mark the end of this period of testy US-Irish relations as Gray stayed in Dublin until 1947. Sceptical about the benefits of joining the UN, de Valera told the Dáil in June 1946 that Ireland 'was losing nothing' by not applying for membership. 'But all changed in a matter of weeks,' his biographer Ronan Fanning writes, 'as the cold war deepened'. Soviet efforts to have their Eastern European satellites admitted as members of the UN led to the British and the Americans supporting the applications of neutral European countries. However, the Soviet Union used its Security Council veto to reject Irish membership – ostensibly because diplomatic relations had not been established. This refusal caused little upset in Dublin, creating, as one leading civil servant put it, 'neither surprise nor disappointment'. A Soviet spokesman later stated at the UN general assembly that states such as Ireland and Salazar's Portugal could not be regarded as 'peace-loving' because they had 'supported fascism' during the war, and, he said, they maintained 'particularly friendly relationships' with Franco's Spain, 'the last offshoot of fascism in Europe'. Ireland finally became a member of the UN in 1955.
The Independent
21-06-2025
- Business
- The Independent
There's a new retirement age for 2026 if you need to collect Social Security
Don't quit your day job — because Americans will soon have to wait longer than ever to retire. For the first time since Social Security's creation 90 years ago, the full retirement age is set to hit 67 years old in 2026. That is of course, if Social Security lasts long enough for you to reach that age, with new data showing the program is likely to run out of money by 2034. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law in 1935, creating an insurance program to provide workers aged 65 and older with a steady income in retirement. Introduced to fight elder poverty, biographer Kenneth S. Davis described it as "the most important single piece of social legislation in the entirely of American history." But next year, Americans will have to wait until they turn 67 before they can collect payments with no limitations. Those approaching retirement face important decisions about when to collect their Social Security payouts — with the repercussions being significant and worth thousands of dollars. Should I retire at 62, 65, 67, or 70? When to start collecting Social Security benefits depends entirely on individual circumstances. Americans can opt to take early retirement at 62 years old, though, monthly benefits will be reduced permanently. Those born in 1959 will be the first group to face a full retirement age of exactly 67 and each year a claimant waits past the FRA permanently increases their benefit (until 70). Using a FRA of 67 and a base monthly benefit of $1,800, here's how the numbers play out. Americans turning 62 next year – the first age group that can claim Social Security benefits – would receive just 70 percent of the full amount, or $1,260 per month, if they begin early retirement. At age 65, the benefit rises to roughly 87 percent of the full benefit, or $1,560. Retiring at 67 unlocks the full benefit of $1,800. For those who delay retirement until age 70, monthly payments climb to an estimated $2,323, around 124 percent of the base amount. Benefits no longer increase after becoming a septuagenarian. Why did the law change? The new retirement age did not happen overnight and has been climbing gradually after Congress passed a set of reforms which were signed into law by President Ronald Reagan more than four decades ago. While the Social Security Act was born in the depths of the Great Depression, its 1983 amendment came amid another era of economic strain. The system was on the brink of financial collapse after the U.S. had experienced back-to-back recessions. Benefit payouts began to exceed income, meaning Social Security, as it stood, was no longer sustainable. The original act was designed when life expectancy in the U.S. was just 61 years, so there were vastly fewer retirees and benefits would not have been collected as long. By 1983, Americans were living much longer, with the average life expectancy over 74 years (79 today). The ratio of active workers to retirees also shrank dramatically, from 42 to 1 to 3.6 to 1 (2.7:1 today). The law change meant that people turning 65 in 1990 were the last to have a full retirement age of exactly 65. Starting in 1991, the full retirement age increased by two months each year, meaning those turning 65 in 1991 had to wait until 65 years and 2 months; in 1992 it was 65 years and 4 months, and so on. From 1996 to 2007, anyone turning 65 had an full retirement age of 66 years. After that, the retirement age continued rising by two-month increments until it reached 67 for those turning 65 in 2026 and beyond.
Yahoo
19-06-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
FDR's grandson discusses Social Security, Medicare go-broke dates being moved up
A new report says rising health care costs have pushed up the go-broke dates for Medicare and Social Security. Former Associate Commissioner of the Social Security Administration James Roosevelt III, the grandson of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, joins Chris Jansing to explain what's behind the report and the action that can be taken.
