Social Security Protects The Young As Much As It Does The Old

[Itsthetruth]

CounterPunch
March 3, 2005

Advice from Tommy the Cork
"Social Security Protects the Young as Much as It Does the Old"
By PAT WILLIAMS

Pat Williams served nine terms as a U.S. Representative from Montana. After his retirement, he returned to Montana and is teaching at The University of Montana where he also serves as a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Rocky Mountain West

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Twenty-six years ago, in my first year in Congress, I met Thomas "Tommy the Cork" Cocoran. He was seventy-nine years old.
Corcoran shared with me his memories of the meetings with President Roosevelt as they and others developed the outline of the nation's public retirement program. He told me something about an important but little known purpose of Social Security.

"Social Security," he said, " protects the young as much as it does the old." He related how FDR would talk privately and persuasively about how important it was to unshackle young working families from the then crushing financial burden of assuming the entire support of their retired parents and grandparents. Prior to Social Security's assurance of at least a supplemental retirement for older Americans, most of America's seniors relied on their grown children, who were already struggling to make ends meet.

What is not as clear in our national memory is that far too many young working families were also poor, in part because they had to assume the entire financial burden of their parents and grandparents.
Here in the three states of the Northern Rockies live 987,000 citizens between the ages of 30 and 55. That prime working age population makes up approximately 37% of the population of Idaho, Wyoming and Montana.

An astonishing $312 million dollars in Social Security benefits roll into our three states each and every month. Think about the spending boom created by those millions. But perhaps more important, imagine the overwhelming burden on our working families if those Social Security dollars did not exist to assist the elderly in paying their own way.


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