SAVING UP FOR THE RAINY DAY
Fitzpatrick, F. W.
SAVING UP FOR THE RAINY DAY What Postal Savings Insurance has done in Other Countries to Protect the Workingman Against Illness and Old Age. Why it Should be Established in this Country By F. W,...
...Crane's entire responsibility for the newspaper story—he would have addressed to Mr...
...when a man is dying of hunger we pick him off the streets and fix him up in great shape for his final dissolution...
...it this Paternalism...
...It is more than attractive and the more one thinks of it or about it and sees what such institutions have done and are doing for other countries the stronger is one's conviction that it is something we must have and that it is our duty to insist upon having—and now...
...The instruction may cost us some money...
...There he pays, let us say, fifty cents a week from the time he is twenty-one, and with a life expectancy of forty years, his family will receive the munificent sum of $820...
...When a man grows so old and feeble that he can no longer earn even bread and water, the state steps in and houses him and feeds him bountifully—but as a pauper...
...But certain it is that they would lead to a better understanding, a mutual drawing together of men and of interests, of the people and the government...
...France gets closest to its people and does more to help them help themselves than does any other country...
...With the same saving rut into postal savings insurance, as it is managed elsewhere and can be done here, there would be instead $2,265 for his family...
...That form of insurance, also, has been tried elsewhere and not found wanting...
...Nonsense...
...Why it Should be Established in this Country By F. W, FITZPATRICK FROM POSTAL SAVINGS the economist's most natural step is in the direction of Postal Savings Insurance...
...During twenty years $555,000,000 have been paid out in Germany for illness, $232,000,000 on account of accident and $13,-000,000 on account of old age...
...One is a complement of the other...
...It owes him that much...
...The thought is maddening...
...And we also know that 70 per cent...
...A Fair Give and Take" THE government can go into the insurance business for the laboring man, not for the profit there is in it, but to really insure him, at the minimum cost to himself, while offering him safety he can find nowhere else...
...Just think of insurance at reasonable rates (and without having to pay for favorable legislation, fat commissions to sons and sons-in-law, banquets, ballet dances, and the other regular and irregular accompaniments of certain old line, "regular," insurance companies), entered into voluntarily,—without the blandishments of an agent who is as oil and myrrh before the consummation of the transaction and a very Nemesis afterward—managed not for profit but by your own elected officers, an insurance in which you have a voice and feel an interest...
...Mr...
...Knox adopted the ways of diplomacy, had he consulted the interests of the country—even assuming Mr...
...that is as sound as the Rock of Ages;—an Insurance Office and a Savings Bank at your own local Post Office...
...We say the laboring man is extravagant and lives infinitely better than does his European brother...
...He has to deal with the industrial insurance companies...
...Why not do something to prevent those things, rather than wait to cure them...
...Why not make an effort to abolish three-quarters of those institutions that are pauperizing the people and establish in their stead others that will teach them and help them to become self-reliant, satisfied, happier men and women...
...when things get so bad that they are intolerable and a shame to us, we step in, with a great flourish of trumpets, and proceed to eradicate them...
...Crane.—Sigmund Zeisler in the Chicago Tribune...
...In France, "mutuality" between government and individual is very well developed...
...is all that goes to expense...
...of the premium goes to the expense acount, salaries, rent, etc., while in postal insurance 1.47 per cent...
...But why do we have to wait until such deplorable conditions exist...
...Knox's performance in publicly washing our soiled linen is a vastly greater violation of diplomatic usage and has done the country an immeasure-ably greater damage than anything that has been laid at the door of Mr...
...Paternalism...
...Aldrich and his followers rely upon as a means of farcing a central bank bill to the front and putting it through Congress.—The New York Journal of Commerce...
...Why should there not be a reciprocation—not paternalism, not charity, but just simply a case of fair give and take...
...The Aldrich-Vreeland currency law has proved an utter failure...
...that, later, death may carry one away altogether, leaving them helpless beggars, charges upon one's friends or the community...
...Yet, even in this country of wonderful prosperity and abundance, one out of every four of our laboring class has to be assisted at some time or other during the earning period of his life...
...In England the government has not only the "old age pensions" postal savings but when those savings reach a certain figure their holders may purchase annuities—insurance, in other words—insurance at low rates and with full governmental security...
...But, Mr...
...it Subsidizes them to save money...
...Had Mr...
...Nothing is obtained without some effort or cost...
...How better may we direct the national tendency toward economy than by encouraging the labor class, from which all the others derive their strength and are so largely recruited, to save money and to be provident against an evil time or old age...
...Further, taking the same company as an example, we know that in the last thirty years $287,000,000 have been paid into its coffers in premiums, while its payments to policy-holders have amounted to but $92,-000,000...
...But who of us Americans would be justified in throwing the first stone at the laboring man on that score...
...Crane confidentially a reprimand and caution for the future...
...It encourages thrift...
...New Zealand, New South Wales and Victoria already have 45,000 beneficiaries of their old age pensions...
...I am not prepared to believe with those who claim that they would prove an estoppage of labor disputes, strikes and such tribulations...
...It exists by and depends upon him...
...With postal savings and insurance there are no premiums lost...
...I am not of those enthusiasts who believe that in those two movements for postal savings and postal savings insurance, exists a cure for all the social evils of our times...
...This is precisely the factor which Mr...
...There the laborer puts in so much, a saving from his daily wage, the employer adds to it, not a donation, but a dividend upon the employee's labor, and the government adds something on top of that in the shape of interest, and the result is that sick or disabled by accident, a man knows that his family is provided for, not by charity, but by a fund his saving has earned, and when he reaches the age of fifty-five, he can make way for a younger man in the shop or in the field and retire upon an earned pension that averages $400 a year, and France thinks so well of the plan that she is contemplating spending $20,000,000 in enlarging its scope...
...Poverty is hard to endure, not in the sacrifice, the privation, it imposes upon one from day to day, but in the certainty that some day or another one's earning capacity, such as it is, will cease, accident or sickness will intervene, and one's loved ones will suffer...
...In Germany 60,000,000 of people have profited by Bismarck's enlight-oned policy that gave that country such a form of insurance...
...We already have insurance companies, yes, but the endowment policies, the twenty-payment policies and all such are not for the laboring man...
...The Belgians do much the same thing, and the Germans have a compulsory insurance...
...of its patrons have dropped out in three years' time, losing all they put into it...
...WE spend millions in hospitals, poorhouses and asylums...
...Cannon, if waterways improvement is to be paid out of the current funds what is to become of the river and harbor and public building industries which are bo highly important to the congressional business?—The Indianapolis News...
...The difference is simply that in the industrial companies, 37.31 per cent...
Vol. 1 • November 1909 • No. 45
