Word: states
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Ever since the depression, noisy prophets had been springing up along the Pacific Coast to lead the aged in holy wars on the nearest state treasury. They were an odd lot-power-hungry Communists, vote-hungry politicos, sharp-eyed promoters and croupy and lugubrious old bucks with top-heavy cargoes of park-bench economics. They herded the "senior citizens" into irascible pressure groups, made pensions a permanent political issue, and damned those who opposed them as monsters who would starve their own grandmothers...
...Mother Machree-it was hard to be critical because the words were so sad. Furthermore many of the old folks had a legitimate case. But this summer thousands of taxpayers were recalling their own generosity with purse-clutching alarm. The Pacific Coast had become a minor-league welfare state of its own, and new pension and welfare plans seemed to be pushing the states toward the brink of bankruptcy...
...Embarrassment. California's grandiose Proposition 4, voted in as an amendment to the state constitution last November, had not only boosted pensions for the aged to $75 a month, but made the money delightfully easy to get. It lowered the age limit from 65 to 63 and ended the embarrassment of proving pauperism; old folks could have $3,500 in real estate, a car, furniture and jewelry, $1,500 in liquid assets, be supported in part by relatives, and still qualify...
Saved by the Bell. Oregon was in less perilous financial condition. Its voters passed an initiative measure like California's last autumn. They were rescued by their own shortsightedness-they voted for pension increases which would have cost more than the whole expense of running the state, but they failed to provide any means of paying them...
When investment houses refused to buy Oregon bonds on the grounds that the state was technically insolvent, the state attorney general ruled the measure invalid. But pensions would still cost $26 million for the next two years-as compared with...