Welfare spending

• 1. Introduction

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  Welfare spending is government support meant to ensure that members of a society can meet basic human needs like food and shelter. In the Roman Empire, the first emperor Augustus handed out the Cura Annonae, a grain dole for citizens who could not afford to buy food each month. Centuries later, a seventh century caliph named Umar turned almsgiving into a codified tax. These scattered acts of provision share a question that still has no settled answer. Who is a society obliged to feed, to heal, to house, and on what terms. The listener will hear how that question moved from the church and the guild to the state. It will pass through a German chancellor, a New Zealand farming revolution, and a 1996 American law that promised to end welfare as one president knew it. Along the way, two stubborn problems recur. Defining who deserves help, and finding the money to provide it.

• 2. Faith And The Common Chest

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  Zakat, one of the Five Pillars of Islam, was implemented by the caliph Umar as a codified universal social security tax, traditionally estimated at 2.5% of an individual's assets. Government zakat funds went to groups including impoverished people and those in severe debt. Collection grew during the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates, yet the system was often inefficient and corrupt. Islamic jurists frequently told Muslims to give directly to the needy instead, to maximize the impact of their giving.

  Tzedakah in Jewish tradition treats charity as a matter of religious obligation rather than benevolence. Contemporary charity continues the Biblical Maaser Ani, the poor-tithe, alongside practices like letting the poor glean the corners of a field. The Shmita, or Sabbatical year, allowed harvest by those in need.

  Martin Luther turned this religious duty into local administration. In 1520, in his Appeal to the Christian Nobility of the German nation, he called for the abolition of begging and provisions for those in need. In 1523, after a request from the citizens of Leisnig in Saxony, he devised a plan for a Common Chest. It ordered casks kept for all time, holding bread, cheese, eggs, meat, and other provisions, plus boxes where money could be put for the chest's upkeep. The 1522 Wittenberg Church order had already set up its own common chest for welfare work. In France in 1536, Francis I ordered each parish to register its poor and provide for the impotent from contributed funds.

• 3. When The State Took Over

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  Imperial Germany, lasting from 1871 to 1918, was the first welfare state, where the Bismarck government introduced social security in 1889. Otto von Bismarck, Chancellor of Germany, built one of the first welfare systems for the working classes under pressure from the workers' movement in the late 19th century. Some historians reach further back, viewing the codified almsgiving of Umar in 634 CE as an early example of universal government welfare.

  Great Britain followed within a generation. The Liberal government of Henry Campbell-Bannerman and David Lloyd George introduced the National Insurance system in 1911. The United Kingdom adopted the welfare state with the National Insurance Act 1946, during the Attlee government that ran from 1944 to 1951. Clement Attlee expanded the earlier system that Lloyd George had begun.

  England's older machinery was harsher. The English Poor Relief Act 1601 gave parishes responsibility for welfare payments to the poor. The 19th-century Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 substantially modified that system and introduced the workhouses. The right to social security and an adequate standard of living is asserted in Articles 22 and 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

• 4. The Granary And The Dole

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  The Song dynasty government, dating from 960 CE, ran programs that read like a modern social ministry. They included state hospitals, low-interest loans for peasants, state orphanages, free pharmacies for the poor, filled granaries, fire stations, libraries, retirement homes, public clinics, and paupers' graveyards. The economist Robert Henry Nelson wrote that the medieval Roman Catholic Church operated a far-reaching and comprehensive welfare system for the poor.

  The Qing Dynasty of the 18th century, by one study's account, ran the most elaborate relief system in world history, built on state and local granaries used in times of shortage to stabilize food prices. That system weakened after imperialism entered China following the 1840 Opium War, and after the Taiping Rebellion of 1850 to 1860 produced a crisis in the Qing Dynasty. After the Republic was founded in 1912, civil wars and warlordism left the state granary system almost non-existent.

  Trajan enlarged the social welfare that Augustus had begun, and his program drew acclaim from many, including Pliny the Younger. Ancient Greek city-states provided free medical services for the poor and slaves. Welfare also took root in the Inca Empire, the Aztec Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and precolonial Africa, long before the state monopolized the work.

• 5. The Shape Of A Benefit

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  Social insurance is built partly on individual and employer contributions paid toward benefits like healthcare, unemployment payments, and old-age pensions. The International Labour Organization defines social security as covering old age, the maintenance of children, medical treatment, parental and sick leave, unemployment and disability benefits, and occupational injury. Social security can mean welfare in general, or specifically those insurance programs that support only people who have previously contributed.

  Means-tested benefits go to those unable to cover basic needs because of poverty, unemployment, sickness, disability, or caring for children. Eligibility is often subject to a comprehensive and complex assessment of an applicant's social and financial situation. That complexity has a cost. Selective social rights carry a higher non-take-up rate than universal social rights, because of the information involved and the bureaucracy. Not all citizens use their social rights, and some need other people to mediate them.

  Universal or categorical benefits, also called demogrants, go to whole sections of the population without a means test. Examples include family allowances and New Zealand Superannuation, the public pension there, alongside the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend. Welfare to work flips the arrangement, providing benefits while the recipient is required to take paid work or sometimes compulsory education, aiming for self-sufficiency. A 2014 report from the ILO estimated that only 27% of the world population has access to comprehensive social security.

• 6. Three Worlds Of Welfare

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  Esping-Andersen classified the most developed welfare state systems into three categories. Social Democratic, Conservative, and Liberal. The Nordic countries, Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland, run a system known as the Nordic model.

  Germany channels 27.6 percent of its GDP into an all-embracing system of health, pension, accident, long-term care, and unemployment insurance, compared to 16.2 percent in the US. Its child benefit, Kindergeld, begins at 192 euros per month for the first and second child, rising to 198 for the third and 223 for each child after that, until age 25 or a first professional qualification. Since 2005, full unemployment pay of 60 to 67 percent of the previous net salary has been restricted to 12 months in general, and 18 months for those over 55. After that comes the lower Arbeitslosengeld II, the Hartz IV concept, with single adults receiving up to 449 euros a month plus the cost of adequate housing.

  Spain shows the Mediterranean model's strain. Public health spending there in 2020 was around 8% of GDP, or 1907 euros per capita, against a European Union average of 2,244 euros per capita. The model leans heavily on the family, which is assumed to cover services like childcare or care for the elderly. The result is a polarized welfare state, where higher income groups use private services in health and education while lower income groups use public ones. Sweden funds its government pension through an 18.5% pension tax, split since January 2001 into 16% for current payments and 2.5% for individual retirement accounts introduced that year.

• 7. Welfare As We Knew It

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  Aid to Families with Dependent Children, originally called Aid to Dependent Children, was created during the Great Depression to ease poverty for families with children and let widowed mothers keep their households. The New Deal employment programs, such as the Works Progress Administration, primarily served men. Before the New Deal, anti-poverty programs ran mostly through private charities or state and local governments, and the depth of need during the Depression overwhelmed them.

  In 1964, black people made up about 27% of those in photographs in three weekly news magazines. By 1967 that proportion jumped to 72%, driven by the civil rights movement and urban riots from the mid-1960s. News media then portrayed stereotypes of black people as lazy and undeserving, and as welfare queens, even though this did not necessarily reflect a fall in the share of the population living in poverty.

  The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 changed the structure of welfare payments. President Clinton said the reforms would end welfare as we know it. The new program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, hands federal money to states at a flat rate based on population, requires some employment search, and imposes a five-year lifetime limit on cash assistance. In fiscal year 2010, TANF families were 31.8% White, 31.9% African-American, and 30.0% Hispanic. Pope Francis has called welfare projects valuable only as temporary or provisional responses, arguing that lasting structural change is needed to avoid dependence on welfare.