Size of cash and near-cash transfer programmes (unemployment benefits, means-tested assistance, universal child benefits). Architecturally distinct from forced-saving schemes — see condition welfare_architecture.
General government spending as share of GDP, excluding transfers already captured under fiscal.transfer_expansion to avoid double-counting.
Financial-sector regulation — banking separation, capital requirements, cross-border activity rules, derivatives oversight.
Ease of hiring/firing, collective-bargaining scope, minimum wage rigidity, temporary/permanent contract regulation.
The Social Security Act of 14 August 1935, signed by President Roosevelt, established the national old-age pension insurance system financed by federal payroll taxes (Title II OASI), joint federal-state unemployment insurance (Title III), and grant-in-aid programmes for needy families, dependent children (Title IV ADC, later AFDC), and the blind. Coverage initially excluded farm and domestic workers but expanded over subsequent decades. The intended effect was to provide automatic income security against the unemployment, disability, and old-age risks starkly revealed by the Great Depression — establishing the foundational social-insurance architecture of the modern American state.
Per invariant 3, reforms are scored by what they did on each channel-separated axis, not by the party that enacted them. This fingerprint is how the policy-match engine finds historical analogues.
Explicit links are curated by the author. Inferred links are hypotheses in the library that test the same axes this policy moved — the framework's answer to "what does the data say about a policy like this?".
Ranked by axis-fingerprint overlap with this policy. Direction match bolded — those are the closest historical analogues. Shape of the match is what drives policy-outcome comparison, not the country or party label.