WITH A LONG history of involvement in the evolution of the Social Security program, Nancy Altman and Eric Kingson are the right analysts to explain the program and demonstrate conclusively that, with careful tending by Congress, Social Security will be there for future generations: a critical part of retirement finances for the vast majority of the American people and, for many, the only retirement support. They argue that Congress should be strengthening and expanding Social Security—and they show how this can be done and the bill paid.
The book makes clear that Social Security is not an entitlement program but a social insurance program with premiums paid through payroll taxes. Its $2.8 trillion trust fund represents the full-faith support of the American people to provide essential insurance coverage for all our people against the universal hazards of death, disability, and old age. It compares how our system stacks up against those of other advanced industrial societies. (We are distinctly less generous to our senior citizens than other developed nations.)
Primarily through the death and disability provisions, Social Security also provides the largest amount of support to children of any federal program, keeping millions of children above the poverty line. Indirect support—helping people not have to bear the full financial burden of caring for elderly parents whose financial independence is assisted through both Social Security and Medicare—increases the number of beneficiaries further.
After an in-depth description of Social Security, Altman and Kingson turn to the well-financed, determined opponents of the current system. These include Peter G. Peterson and his Peterson Foundation and the Fix the Debt group, including some members of the Simpson and Bowles Commission. Together with the Koch brothers, whose father—like George W. Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush—was a determined opponent of both FDR and his Social Security program, these entities have spent more than $1 billion to mislead the American people about their major social insurance system. Thanks to these determined opponents, along with the Heritage and Cato Foundations, “political and media elites have lost an understanding of the conceptual underpinnings that have led to Social Security’s popularity, and have been convinced to see Social Security as a problem rather than the solution that it is.”
These billionaire-led opponents of Social Security promote several assumptions to undermine the public trust in the longevity of the system, particularly among younger Americans. These include assertions that Social Security is going bankrupt, spends more money than it takes in, is under threat from a demographic tsunami, and inferior to investing on one’s own. Altman and Kingson explain how each of these assertions is false or misleading.
Opponents came close to persuading policymakers and media analysts to change the system to cut benefits for the middle class, means test Social Security, or convert Social Security away from an insurance model toward a private savings model. Happily the tide appears to have turned. Those who believe in the centrality of Social Security as a social insurance program for all, as Franklin Roosevelt and his Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, designed it to be, seem to have grabbed hold of the public debate. Even with a Republican Congress, there is serious talk of genuine improvements to Social Security.
The book concludes with extensive consideration of proposals to strengthen the financial underpinnings of Social Security and make expanded benefits possible. Most important, the book provides a solid basis for the public debate that is essential for policy modifications that will strengthen this most important, most popular federal government program.
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