Social services are way, way better now than they were in the '50s.
A higher corporate tax rate isn't necessarily better, either. Remember that the cost of taxation isn't the dollar value being taxed (which generally just gets spent back in the private sector). It's deadweight loss; crowding out of other, more economically efficient spending; and potentially distributional effects (often but not always good).
Eh, again this requires specific lenses. Aggregate spending on welfare is higher, but who did that make it better for?
"there has been a redistribution away from non-elderly and non-disabled families to families with older adults and to families with recipients of disability programs, a redistribution away from non-elderly nondisabled single parent families to married parent families, and a redistribution of transfers away from the poorest families to those with higher incomes. These redistributions likely reflect long-standing, and perhaps increasing, conceptualizations by U.S. society of which poor are deserving and which are not."
Contrary to the popular view that the U.S. welfare system has been in a contractionary phase after the expansions of the welfare state in the 1960s, welfare spending resumed steady growth after a pause in the 1970s. However, while aggregate spending is ...
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Point being the welfare system was always biased. And that that bias not only still exists, but has had a contractionary effect on the impact of the welfare state.
The US has ranked pretty low with regard to the well-being of children in developed Nations, 34th out of 35 in 2016:
On the 20th anniversary of Bill Clinton’s promise to “end welfare as we know it,” a social work scholar asks why child poverty is still such a problem in the U.S. and what race has to do with it.
theconversation.com
And leave us not forget that right this second Republicans rejected renewal of the child tax credit for families, and are currently doing sh*t like rejecting Federal funding for free school lunches on the State level, rolling back child labor laws, and interfering with municipal Government regulations on businesses. The common trend in the US is for the political and economic landscape to be shaped with the highest regard for the needs of the capitalists, who then are going to shower us with their affection in terms of lucrative jobs, and innovative products at amazing prices. Except that on the consumer level, the opposite is being perceived. Now I dont think that's ENTIRELY the case, but it is the case with a lot of people...hence our being also relatively poorly ranked in perceived happiness.
It seems to me that this discussion hinges on who we're talking about . People who are hurting right now definitely dont feel like their worlds are particularly awesome. There is almost little chance of affording homes. My wife is a quasi-Governmental employee and even she has said "you know, I did everything right. I got a degree, I got the good job with the pension, I should be able to afford a house." And she has been there for 15 years, their COL increases dont do much. We cant afford one with our combined incomes without becoming house poor. Conservatives would put that on us as being irresponsible or something, but our biggest expense has been her chronic auto-immune condition, which has been expensive even with insurance. Hell we have "good insurance" and when my kid broke his wrist they tried to charge us $14k for the ER visit. We had to fight them to get it down to $1,500, but it makes you wonder how many people arent savvy enough to do that.
There are aspects of times past that were better, and ones that were worse. There were good ideas that were eventually eliminated, and bad ideas that were implemented.
