Tuesday, August 16, 2005

Happy Birthday Social Security

The most successful government program ever has just turned 70! That's right, the Social Security Act was passed passed back in August of 1935. Just how successful was it? In 1939, two-thirds of America's senior citizens lived their "golden years" in cold, hard poverty. Just a decade later, that percentage was down to half. By 1959, it was only one-third. Today, the number is less than 10 percent. Let's check out what FDR had to say back in 1935:

"This law represents a cornerstone in a structure which is being built but is by no means completed--a structure intended to lessen the force of possible future depressions, to act as a protection to future administrations of the Government against the necessity of going deeply into debt to furnish relief to the needy--a law to flatten out the peaks and valleys of deflation and of inflation--in other words, a law that will take care of human needs and at the same time provide for the United States an economic structure of vastly greater soundness." -August 14, 1935
You can click here to here an audio clip from FDR's speech in 1935. The Republicans fought it then; and they're still fighting it now. They want to turn Social Security into Social Insecurity. We need to keep on fighting for this important program; and we need to fight to make it even stronger! Learn more by clicking here.

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"It is the logic of our times
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Defend the bad against the worse."


-- Cecil Day-Lewis from Where Are The War Poets?


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