Social Security

Social Security
First of all I must admit I’ve been a passive part of our society in that I haven’t really paid attention to what was going on in the world around me, that outside of my direct life.   Now I know everyone has a social security card and we all pay into a retirement account through employers thus known of as social security. I have heard this and that here and there about the background of social security, but I truly didn’t know much of anything about the history behind our national old-age insurance program until I did the research for this paper.
The search of our social security history took me back to 1601 to the English “poor laws”, an Elizabethan law, that had the first idea the citizens welfare was the states responsibility. Though the law saw the government’s duty to provide welfare to the poor it also viewed the poor as being outcast and treated them as such. This was the fundamental structure the pilgrims brought with them to the new world. Because there was a great stigma with receiving welfare aid we relied mostly on our large networks of friends and family for help in times of need and when that wasn’t possible some were able to receive help from churches.
Colonial America had many of the same ideas and customs they knew from England. They made their laws similar to those of Queen Elizabeth in that they had local taxation to help provide support for the poor, they determined the worthiness of the poor, and made relief as unpleasant as possible to discourage reliance on the aid. In many cases those receiving the aid were treated as second class citizens at best they could lose their property, right to vote, right to move, and in some cases they were required to were a big “P” on their clothes to show their status. One of the first people to propose an idea for retirement security was Thomas Paine. In his last great pamphlet published in the winter of 1795, Agrarian Justice; he called for the establishment of a public system of...