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The Safety Net blog
The Housing Act of 1949 and Its Promise of a Decent Home for Every Family Truman signed the Housing Act of 1949 promising a decent home for every American family. Here is how its public housing goals were cut, delayed and steered by local politics. The Long Argument Over Whether the War on Poverty Worked Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty in 1964, and Americans have argued about the outcome ever since. Much of the dispute turns on a ruler that never counted the help it was meant to measure. Coxey's Army and the 1894 March of the Unemployed on Washington In 1894 an Ohio businessman led the unemployed to the Capitol to demand public works jobs and was arrested for walking on the grass. Forty years later his idea was federal policy. Frances Perkins, the First Woman in the Cabinet, and the List She Handed FDR In 1933 Frances Perkins agreed to be labor secretary only if Roosevelt backed her list of demands. Here is the checklist, item by item: what she won and what she never did. Georgia Pathways and the Cost of Checking Who Works Georgia launched the only active Medicaid work requirement in July 2023. Its thin enrollment and heavy paperwork costs are a warning now that federal law pushes every expansion state the same way. Housing First and the Thirty Years of Evidence Behind It Housing First began in 1992 New York with a simple bet: give people a home without preconditions. Three decades of trials show it keeps people housed. Here is the case and its limits. How a 2012 Supreme Court Ruling Made Medicaid Expansion a State Choice NFIB v. Sebelius saved the ACA's insurance mandate as a tax but let states refuse Medicaid expansion. Here is how that ruling created the coverage gap and how voters answered it. How Social Security's Trust Funds Work and the Choices Ahead Where Social Security's money comes from, what the trust funds hold, what the trustees project for the 2030s, and the real menu of benefit and revenue choices Congress has to close the gap. Ida May Fuller's First Check and the Building of Social Security A retired Vermont legal secretary got the first monthly Social Security check in 1940. How a narrow 1935 law grew to cover workers it first left out. Julia Lathrop and the 1912 Children's Bureau That Studied Why Babies Died In 1912 Julia Lathrop became the first woman to run a federal bureau and set out to learn why so many American babies died. Her door-to-door studies led to the Sheppard-Towner Act. Pruitt-Igoe and the Myth That Public Housing Was Doomed to Fail The 1972 implosion in St. Louis became the symbol of failed public housing. The record shows the towers were starved of money and residents, not doomed by the idea itself. The 1983 Social Security Rescue and the Deal Between Reagan and O'Neill How a Republican president and a Democratic Speaker saved Social Security from a cash crunch in 1983, what each side gave up, and what that bargain says about the shortfall ahead. The Case for Lifting the Social Security Payroll Tax Cap In 2023 both parties stood in the House chamber to promise no cuts to Social Security. Here is the argument that keeping that promise means taxing high earnings the way all other wages are taxed. The Social Security Act at Ninety and the Workers It First Left Out Social Security began by leaving out farm and domestic workers, which shut out most Black workers in the South. How that happened, how it was fixed, and who is still left out. The Treaty of Detroit and the Bargain That Built the Blue-Collar Middle Class The 1950 five-year UAW-GM contract traded labor peace for pensions, health coverage and steady raises. How that bargain built a middle class, and why it came apart. The Year Child Poverty Fell by Nearly Half, and Why It Came Back In 2021 a monthly child tax credit drove child poverty to the lowest rate on record; when the payments stopped it more than doubled. Here is the case for bringing it back for good. Title I and the 1965 Law Signed in Front of a One-Room Schoolhouse Lyndon Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act beside his first school in 1965. How its Title I money for poor children works, and why it is under pressure now. Utah's Celebrated Drop in Chronic Homelessness and the Questions It Raised In 2015 Utah said it had nearly ended chronic homelessness, and the country cheered. What the program really did, how the counting changed and what critics found later. What Happened When Arkansas Tied Medicaid to Work Hours in 2018 Arkansas was the first state to enforce a Medicaid work requirement. Over 18,000 people lost coverage before a judge stopped it, and the research found little change in employment. What the 2025 Budget Law's Medicaid Work Requirements Actually Require Who must report 80 hours a month to keep Medicaid under the 2025 budget law, who is exempt, when it starts, and why paperwork rather than work drives most coverage losses. What the Great Society Actually Built and Which Parts Still Stand An inventory of what Lyndon Johnson's Great Society created in a few years in the 1960s, from Medicare to Head Start and school aid, and which of those programs are still standing sixty years on. What the July 2025 Tax and Spending Law Did to Medicaid and SNAP A plain guide to the work requirements, six-month renewals, state cost shifts and benefit changes for Medicaid and SNAP in the July 4, 2025 law, and when each one is set to arrive. Why Lyndon Johnson Flew to Independence, Missouri, to Sign Medicare Johnson signed Medicare at the Truman Library in 1965 to settle a debt: the old man watching had proposed national health insurance twenty years earlier and lost.