Golden Anniversary

The 50th anniversary of Social Security is an appropriate moment to pause, evaluate its contribution, appraise its condition, plan its part in the nation’s future.

As to the past, Social Security has brought peace of mind to 46 million beneficiaries. Before its establishment, many of them would have lived their last years in the poorhouse, or on the poor farm, or in humiliating dependency on relatives or charities. That peace of mind has been further facilitated over the last 30 years by Medicare, which provides for about half the health-care costs of older Americans.

As to the present, Social Security is functioning well--serving 36.7 million Americans, including 22 million retired workers who are receiving back substantially more than they contributed.

As to the future, the surplus in the funding seems assured for most of the next 50 years, and the enormous popularity of Social Security seems to assure support for whatever proves necessary to maintain its effectiveness in perpetuity.

So the anniversary is cause for celebration.

But the celebration needs to be matched with a fresh commitment to Social Security because there are some who are eager to dismantle it, anxious to exploit discontent with its payroll tax to win support for alternatives, and there are others who argue that the cost, now 6% of all personal income, is beyond what the United States can afford.

The hard realities of the economics of the last 50 years demonstrate that there is no secure substitute for, no realistic alternative to, the federal Social Security program. Tempting options, suggesting lucrative returns if individuals were allowed to divert their Social Security contributions to private investments, fall apart on close examination because they are constructed on premises that are at best optimistic, at worst illusory, and that fail the crucial requirement that the system be universal. To argue that the United States cannot afford this system is to argue that no society can contrive an income-protection plan for its senior citizens. Of course it is affordable.

The present system is basic, not a mere supplement, to the livelihood of most older Americans. For one-fourth of the beneficiaries Social Security provides 90% or more of their income. For two-thirds it provides more than 50% of their income. About 60% of the aged would be living in poverty today without the program, Robert A. Rosenblatt and Jonathan Peterson, Times staff writers, found in their report Monday on Social Security. Even with Social Security, 14% of older Americans are classified in the poverty sector.

Despite the popularity and demonstrated effectiveness of the program, there has been an erosion of support that has resulted in some skepticism about the future of Social Security among younger workers. That erosion needs to be halted. There are proposals to freeze or delay cost-of-living increases in Social Security as a means of reducing the federal budget deficit. That would be unfair--a failure to recognize that the benefits at best provide minimum support. There also have been findings that cost-of-living increases may have been excessive. If there are inequities in the basis for calculating the cost-of-living increases, these should be corrected directly and not attacked with the clumsy instrument of a freeze.

The challenge is to be sure that benefits keep pace with need in the entire system, not just in Social Security’s retirement benefits. Improvements clearly are needed for the separate Medicare program that provides health services for 30 million older Americans. And care must be taken to maintain the adequacy of the Supplementary Security Income program, financed directly from the general fund, that helps more than 4 million destitute aged Americans, about half of them Social Security recipients. There are gaps in the protections afforded by these important programs that need to be fixed.

“The establishment of sound means toward a greater future economic security for the American people is dictated by a prudent consideration of the hazards involved in our national life,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt told Congress early in 1935, when he first presented the Social Security plan. He reflected a deep concern about the economic hazards faced by individual Americans, then caught in the Great Depression. Congress responded quickly to his words. Eight months later, on Aug. 14, 1935, he signed Social Security into law.