Social Security has achieved a privileged status in American politics. As a result of the Social Security tax, supporters claim, recipients have not received unearned benefits, nor has Congress felt as if it were building a massive welfare state. Indeed, the Social Security tax system has legitimated the program in the minds of policy experts, politicians, and recipients. Through Social Security, the American state has forged a strong alliance with the elderly and their descendants, both with retirees who received cash payments and with working families who did not have to finance their parents' retirement years.

During the mid-1960s, the governments of the United States and Canada each declared “war” on poverty. The former venture has received far greater scholarly attention, and for obvious reasons: its high-profile inception, the broader spirit of Great Society liberalism that it embodied, the profound crisis of American society and politics within which it soon became embroiled, the rapidity with which its prescriptions and hopes were extinguished. By comparison, the Canadian War on Poverty seems an unimportant venture, and one that lacks the stuff of which drama is made. It has, accordingly, been neglected by scholars on both sides of the 49th parallel.

In his 1974 testimony before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly, Bradford Snell lay partial blame for the decline of mass transit in the United States on a targeted program, spearheaded by General Motors (GM), with the goal of “substitution of buses for passenger trains, streetcars and trolley buses; monopolization of bus production; and diversion of riders to automobiles.” Snell argued that General Motors and its subsidiary company National City Lines were responsible for “the destruction of more than 100 electric surface rail systems in 45 cities including New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, Oakland, Salt Lake City and Los Angeles.”

During the Clinton administration, for the first time in almost twenty years, the character and direction of the U.S. industrial relations regime has become a matter of serious public debate. Clinton-appointed chair of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) William Gould IV has sought with some success to revivify an agency that in the 1980s had come to seem almost superfluous. The 1994 report entitled The Commission on the Future of Worker-Management Relations (Dunlop Commission) stirred debate on the role of unions in the nation's future. Organized labor has sought, with some limited success, to place such critical topics as striker replacement on the national agenda. Meanwhile, congressional conservatives have sponsored measures to curb new organizing strategies such as “salting” anti-union workplaces with union activists. Even more moderate politicians, with support from at least some sections of the labor community, have proposed measures aimed at drastic recasting of the Wagner Act's Section 8(a) (2), which outlawed company unions, so as to permit so called “team” approaches to employee representation. The shake-up in the leadership of the AFL-CIO and the federation's launching of an unprecedented program of political mobilization, which in turn has drawn Republican counterfire reminiscent of the rhetoric of the 80th Congress, increases the possibility that basic matters of federal labor policy may, after a long absence from mainstream public discourse, may return to center stage.