Revealing America's Welfare State

Abstract

In the simplest sense, historians write narratives about change over time. What distinguishes social welfare historians from their colleagues is that they choose to write not about what happened but rather about what did not happen. This strange tendency has to do with a desire to compare the American and European welfare states. Such comparisons cause historians to emphasize what we do not have, such as a guaranteed income or a program of national health insurance, and to miss much of what we do have. Christopher Howard, a political scientist rather than a historian, seeks to redress the balance by pointing out that much of our welfare state remains hidden from scholarly view because it takes the form of tax expenditures. Instead of providing national health insurance directly, for example, we finance it indirectly through our tax code. Simply put, employers who choose to pay for part of their employees' health care get a tax break. According to Howard, the hidden welfare state of tax expenditures amounts to nearly half the size of the visible welfare state making the United States appear less a welfare state laggard than many cross-national studies claim (p. 17). The concept of the hidden welfare state has great utility in capturing the unique nature of America's social welfare policy. Not only do we use tax policy as a tool of social policy, creating important links between public and private social welfare provision, we also rely on the courts to transfer money to certain classes of individuals, such as those who have been exposed to asbestos, harmed by medical malpractice, or denied what the court deems to be adequate care in a public facility such as a state mental health hospital. The federal nature of our social policy also obscures the size of our welfare state. For example, although we have no national workers' compensation law, we do have a series of state laws that cover the entire country and make our workers' compensation system among the largest in the world. Howard does not push the concept that far. Instead, he focuses on tax