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Seventy-five years ago on August 14th, 1935, Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Social Security program. The nation was still recovering from the Great Depression and there was wide agreement that the elderly were entitled to financial assistance after aging out of the workforce. Since then Social Security has remained an immensely popular social safety net program, helping senior citizens avoid homelessness and live independently from their families. Despite its popularity the program is regularly targeted by politicians, economists, and pundits as being unsustainable and calls to drastically change it are common. In recent weeks alarmist messages about the imminent failure of social security have been spreading. House Minority Leader John Boehner announced his call to raise the retirement age, and Dick Armey penned an op-ed in USA Today openly calling for the privatization of Social Security. The media watchdog FAIR reports that on August 5th CNN’s Wolf Blitzer announced, “Social Security reaches the final tipping point”. Meanwhile, the Economic Policy Institute recently released its report entitled, “Social Security and the Federal Deficit: Not Cause and Effect”, finding that social security is financially sound and fully funded through 2036. It effectively de-bunks often repeated assertions that social security is running on borrowed money and driving up the federal deficit, and it recommends lifting the cap on taxable income for the program.

GUEST: Monique Morrisey, Economist at Economic Policy Institute

Find out more at www.epi.org.