MORE lies and propaganda from the gop / tea-bagger convention in Tampa, this time spewing from the mouth of that consummate liar rick santorum. He, like rep paul ryan, is a Catholic, and so I have to ask the same question; that is, when rick santorum goes to confession will he list these lies among his sins?
The Truth-O-Meter Says:
When his grandfather arrived in the United States, "there were no government benefits for immigrants."
Rick Santorum on Tuesday, August 28th, 2012 in a speech at the Republican National Convention in Tampa
Rick Santorum says that when his grandfather arrived in the U.S., “there were no government benefits for immigrants"
During a speech to the Republican National Convention in Tampa, former
presidential candidate Rick Santorum evoked the America his father found
when he arrived on these shores as an immigrant in the 1920s.
"In 1923, there were no government benefits for immigrants, except one: Freedom!" Santorum said.
This is close to a claim by Santorum that made in a
Feb. 29, 2012, speech near Knoxville, Tenn., he said that during that era "there were no government benefits," which
earned a False on the Truth-O-Meter.
So we will re-evaluate it here, though we won’t consider the issue of
"freedom," which we believe is too vague to be fact-checked.
When we first looked at this question, we found there were two major
sources of payments to individuals prior to 1925 -- veterans benefits
and workers' compensation.
Veterans benefits. The federal government began
funding benefits for Civil War veterans in 1862, initially for those who
had been injured and then, progressively, to wider and wider groups of
those who had served. In 1904 President Theodore Roosevelt signed an
order defining "disability" to include old age, as long as the
beneficiary had at least 90 days of service and an honorable discharge.
University of Arizona economist Price V. Fishback wrote that "roughly
40 to 48 percent of the elderly in the North and Midwest in the early
1900s were receiving pensions" through the system. Peter Blanck and Chen
Song wrote in a 2003 paper in the William and Mary Law Review that "at
its height in the 1890s, the (Union veteran) pension scheme consumed
almost half of the federal budget and was intimately linked to the
Republican Party's strategy to maintain the soldier vote and hold the
White House."
Worker compensation. A federal worker-compensation law
to help civilian government workers injured or made sick on the job was
adopted in 1908, according to a history on the Social Security
Administration website. Starting in 1911, states began passing such
laws, and by 1929, laws were in effect in all but four states.
While these are the clearest examples that run counter to Santorum’s claim, there are a few other efforts worth noting.
Local government aid to the poor. During the period
Santorum is talking about, local governments were responsible for
providing benefits to the poor, Fishback told PolitiFact. These payments
tended to be modest. Fishback cited a study by Brendan Livingston of
Rowan University that looked at welfare policies in Massachusetts --
generally considered the most generous state in the first decades of the
20th century -- and found that local governments were spending an
amount equivalent to about 0.5 percent to 1 percent of all income earned
by state residents on relief for the poor. Private charities were
spending at about twice that rate.
By 1925, most states also had "mothers' pensions" on the books, which
allowed widows to raise their children without having to put them in
orphanages, according to Fishback’s paper. By then, a handful of states
also had means-tested pensions for the elderly, and a sizable number had
pensions for the blind. And states or municipalities often operated
mental hospitals, old-age homes, orphanages and general hospitals, all
for the public benefit.
Schools and universities. While education isn’t a
direct payment to individuals, it’s worth pointing out that they
represented a government-provided benefit in kind. "Primary and
secondary education were already overwhelmingly paid for by taxes from
the late 1800s on," said Peter Lindert, an economist at the University
of California at Davis.
Meanwhile, higher education had land-grant subsidies -- federally
backed institutions dating back to the Morrill Land-Grant Acts of 1862
and 1890. "Because they were public institutions, tuition was cheaper on
account of public subsidies," said Gary Gerstle, a historian and
political scientist at Vanderbilt University. "This was clearly a
government benefit."
Health funding for mothers and newborns. In 1921,
President Warren G. Harding signed the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and
Infancy Protection Act, which gave states matching federal funds to
build and operate prenatal and child health care centers.
All told, by 1922, various expenditures for public benefits amounted to
6.8 percent of expenditures by the three levels of government combined.
Santorum does have a point that social welfare spending by 1925 was
relatively small compared to what it would ultimately become, because
two major programs, Social Security and Medicare, didn't start until
later.
It’s worth noting that the specific individual Santorum cited -- his
newly arrived immigrant grandfather -- wouldn’t have directly benefited
from military pensions or a land-grant college upon his arrival on these
shores, though other immigrants, such as those who arrived in time to
serve in previous wars, could have. Experts contacted for this story
said they were not aware that the benefits provided were restricted only
to the native-born.
In the meantime, his ability to collect worker compensation would have
depended on what state he lived in upon his arrival. Similarly, the
local aid to the poor he would have qualified for would have varied
significantly depending on what city or county he lived in, and it would
have been small by the standards of later decades. Still, it was not
zero, as Santorum said.
Our ruling
Contrary to Santorum’s claim, millions of Americans in the 1920s would
have either qualified for benefits directly, such as payments to
veterans, or have been protected by work
ers' compensation laws that
provided benefits to those who became disabled by their jobs. And state
and local governments had the longstanding role of paying support to
people who were disabled or indigent. This provides a much more complex
picture than Santorum is painting. We rate his statement False.
About this statement:
Published: Wednesday, August 29th, 2012 at 7:30 p.m.
Subjects: Welfare
Sources:
Rick Santorum, speech at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Aug. 28, 2012
Knoxville News Sentinel,
Rick Santorum speech at Temple Baptist Church in Powell, Tenn., Feb. 29, 2012 (26.8 MB audio file)
Statistical Abstract of the United States, Federal, State and Local Expenditures by Function, 1902-1970
U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Table 2.1.
Personal Income and Its Disposition, accessed Mar. 5, 2012
Social Security Administration, "
Historical Development," accessed Mar. 5, 2012
Price V. Fishback, "Social Expenditures in the United States and the Nordic Countries: 1900-2003," August 2009
Peter Blanck and Chen Song, "’
Never
Forget What They Did Here’: Civil War Pensions for Gettysburg Union
Army Veterans and Disability in Nineteenth-Century America," William & Mary Law Review, 2003
Gregory P. Guyton, "
A Brief History of Workers' Compensation" (article in Iowa Orthopedic Journal), 1999
University of Virginia Miller Center, "
Harding Signs Sheppard-Towner Act–November 23, 1921," accessed Mar. 6, 2012
PolitiFact, "
Rick Santorum charts explosion of federal entitlement spending since 1958," Feb. 23, 2012
PolitiFact, "
Santorum says when his grandfather came to the U.S. in 1925, 'there were no government benefits,'" March 6, 2012
Email interview with Eugene Steuerle, fellow with the Urban Institute, Mar. 5, 2012
Email interview with Caleb Quackenbush, research assistant with the Urban Institute, Mar. 5, 2012
Email interview with Michael B. Katz, historian at the University of Pennsylvania, Mar. 5, 2012
Email interview with Peter Lindert, economist at the University of California at Davis, Mar. 5, 2012
Email interview with Price V. Fishback, economist with the University of Arizona, Mar. 5, 2012
Email interview with Henry Aaron, economist at the Brookings Institution, Mar. 5, 2012
Email interview with Gary Burtless, economist at the Brookings Institution, Mar. 5, 2012
Email interview with Dean Baker, economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Mar. 5, 2012
Email interview with Arloc Sherman, economist at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Mar. 5, 2012
Email interview with Gary Gerstle, professor of history and political science at Vanderbilt University, Mar. 6, 2012
Email interview with Douglas J. Besharov, public policy professor at the University of Maryland, Mar. 5, 2012 and Aug. 29, 2012
Email interview with Timothy M. Smeeding, director of the Institute for
Research on Poverty at the Robert M. La Follette School of Public
Affairs at the University of Wisconsin, Mar. 5, 2012 and Aug. 29, 2012
Written by: Louis Jacobson
Researched by: Louis Jacobson
Edited by: Bridget Hall Grumet
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/aug/29/rick-santorum/rick-santorum-says-when-his-grandfather-arrived-us/
Former Sen. Rick Santorum speaks at the Republican National Convention in Tampa.