Guaranteed Insurance Contract Economic & Social Policy
The insurance ideal calls for neither tight economic regulation nor massive redistribution, and, in that sense, it is conservative. Yet it is also eminently progressive. Economic security, after all, is something the affluent take for granted.
The guaranteed insurance contract extends such guarantees to those least capable of obtaining them on their own--namely, those with limited means or a high probability of needing assistance.
"National security is not a half-and-half matter. We must face the fact that, in this country, we have a rich man's security and a poor man's security, and that the government owes equal obligations to both.: It is all or none." FDR said in 1938.
As Roosevelt's words suggest, the guaranteed insurance contract extended to national security and was always seen by New Dealers as having both a domestic and a foreign component. Indeed, foreign threats made security at home even more vital.
War meant shared sacrifice and shared fate. There could be no "rich man's security" when poor and rich were fighting beside each other, no "rich man's security" when the fates of all citizens were so intertwined.
Today, the ideal of economic security and the guaranteed insurance contract seems dated to many. But the exact opposite is true.
The big economic trends of the past 30 years--deregulation, de industrialization, increased foreign competition, the decline of unions, the transformation of the family from single breadwinners into two-earners balancing work and kids, the decline of the guaranteed insurance contract - have all created powerful new forces pushing toward increased insecurity.
Americans are richer than they were a generation ago.
People are also facing much more dramatic swings in their income. Over the past decade, moreover, insecurity has moved up the economic ladder and the guaranteed insurance contract has become more important. Increasingly, educated middle-class Americans are riding the economic roller coaster once reserved for the working poor.
