ABSTRACT
The Social Security Amendments of 1939—with strong bipartisan support—had sharply altered the new American welfare system, giving retirement benefits to homemakers and survivor benefits to children. As a Ways and Means Committee Report explained, the 1944 Act creating a uniform exemption should impose a "lesser burden on the taxpayers with a large family and a greater burden on taxpayers with a smaller family". In 1948, a Republican Congress—over President Harry Truman's veto—forced through a new tax reform measure. Veterans Administration (VA) and Federal Housing Administration (FHA) regulations, in conjunction with underwriters' guidelines, delivered over 98 percent of these new, tax-favored mortgages to young married couples. By the late 1950s, moreover, a growing segment of elite opinion came to worry about "overpopulation" in America. Advocates of population control indicted the favorable tax treatment given to children as one cause of America's dreaded "three-child family system".
