Social Security

What issue did Bob Ball say we couldn’t win and therefore wanted off of the front page? Who said “every good principle can be carried too far?” Find out in the third in a series of podcast interviews, when Academy CEO William Arnone sits with Founding Member Larry Thompson. Thompson is a former U.S. government official and former Senior Fellow at the Urban Institute in Washington, DC. Listen now. ​

In the first of a series of podcast interviews, National Academy of Social Insurance CEO William Arnone interviews Founding Member Nancy Altman about the early days of the Academy. Altman is co-director of Social Security Works and author of The Battle for Social Security: From FDR’s Vision to Bush’s Gamble (John Wiley & Sons, 2005). Listen now. 

Sunday, August 14 is the 81^st anniversary of our Social Security system.  While few of us were alive to celebrate the system’s first anniversary in 1936, even fewer have living memories of the social problems that gave rise to it. At the time, half of all seniors were living in poverty, individual retirement savings plans like 401(k)s were 40 years away, and depression-era workers were having a hard enough time providing for themselves and their children, let alone supporting their parents and grandparents. What are we to make today of a program that was created in an almost unrecognizable industrial economy?

Thoughtful commentary on how we got from there to here

In a recent issue of the Boston Review, Elizabeth Anderson, Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, wrote a provocative analysis ("Common Property: How Social Insurance Became Confused with Socialism", 7-25-16) of the origins and evolution of social insurance worldwide and in the United States. Her article includes key points that are critical to an understanding of the positioning of social insurance in our economic and political system, and in our culture. She poses a fundamental question: Why does the U.S. lack a comprehensive, universal social insurance system?