There’s a great essay about the successes and failures of the New Deal in the most recent Dissent. I liked the way she framed the two-tiered nature of reform and the ways in which reforms can disproportionately benefit some of those who need it least. I’ll quote at length:

Second, particularly common to welfare-state programs—in the larger sense of welfare that includes health care, education, and attempts to alleviate poverty—is a two-tier structure that provides the least for those who need the most. These tiers are often counter-intentional, counter-intuitive, and irrational, because they produce one level of generous and honorable benefits for those least in need and another that is stingy and disreputable for those whose need is greatest. This inequality is constructed in several ways:

• the neediest are often excluded altogether from the better programs;

• programs provide more benefits to the prosperous than to the poor;

• payments to the relatively prosperous are disguised, sometimes intentionally, as with the New Deal Social Security Old Age Pensions, so as to be unnoticeable, while payments to the poor are extremely public and thus, both stigmatizing and resented. Only the latter are typically called redistributive.