Posted on 08/14/2025 3:15:31 PM PDT by Nateman
I seem to recall reading somewhere that FDR bragged about how long his Social Security program would last. I've been (so far) unable to find any of his quotes on this.
Even later on. I just watched the 1953 noir film The Big Heat with Glenn Ford. Twice a mixed drink served in a bar was 35 cents and each time the big tip of 15 cents rounded it up.
Lobby poster card saying was:
Somebody Made A Mistake.
They Forgot To Kill Me.
From an old article from 1964...
https://www.ssa.gov/history/ssa/usa1964-2.html
“Self-Supporting
The program is designed so that contributions plus interest on the investments of the social security trust funds will be sufficient to meet all of the costs of benefits and administration, now and into the indefinite future—without any subsidy from the general funds of the Government. Both the Congress and the Executive Branch, regardless of political party in power, have scrupulously provided in advance for full financing of all liberalizations in the program.”
From a different article, you were supposed to retire at 62, but the average life span was 57 years meaning very little would be paid out.
Then came penicillin.
As late as c. 1975, Michelobs were still just $0.75 at the Fort Know O-Club. You gave the barmaid a dollar, and that was a nice 33% tip!
You have to temper that with the fact that in some communities teenagers are shooting each other and leaving this earth before they ever had a chance to contribute even a penny to Social Security. So make the longevity than 80 years for recipients longer and the contribution of others less.
Tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect.
If Americans had not made the unfortunate decision to eat right, stay active, and treat their personal health as a primary concern, then maybe the life expectancy would not have risen so far, and people today would not be in the third or fourth decade of their retirements collecting from Social Security. Average life expectancy in 1935 was LESS than 65 years of age.
Very few of the original applicants for Social Security payments lived long enough to collect back much more than they had put in to begin with.
Ask me what vile evil monster came to power in 1933 and died in office in April 1945 my first answer would be Franklin D Roosevelt. Most people would pick Hitler, but not me. Our country is still being destroyed by policies implemented by Roosevelt while Hitler's impact on the US was diminished a long time ago.
“This country was ruined by Franklin Delano Rooooosevelt!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKhQNxl0HgI
The Progressive dreamers who originated the idea and passed it on to the FDR government still don't know.
The allocation of risk has once again become a matter of pressing concern on the public agenda. The paradigmatic shift that Bryce Steward and Meredith Givens, writing as precursors of the Council’s Committee, had noted—from an emphasis on individual responsibility and private initiative to a stress on societal dynamics and public obligation—has come under steadfast criticism for at least two decades. That governmental entities are best positioned and/or normatively called upon to ensure that certain costs associated with ordinary as well as extraordinary, private as well as public, issues—from aging to deindustrialization—not be borne by individuals and families alone may be more strongly contested in the United States today than ever since the passage of the Social Security Act. Attention to individual autonomy and choice, markets for risk, competition among risk-managers, and efficiency has grown commensurately. Proposals to introduce private accounts into Social Security echo strains heard elsewhere among policymakers: in calls to increase the reliance of Medicare on risk-bearing private plans or introduce health savings accounts on a generalized basis in the workplace, in legislation that effectively reduces individual bankruptcy protections and in resistance to the regulation of certain financial instruments intended to manage risk.
Seventy years ago, the Council appointed the Committee on Social Security to bring social science to bear on the reallocation of risks impelled by the economic dislocations of the Depression. In July 2005, the Council established a working group on the Privatization of Risk to explore current trends in risk allocation. Its analysis provides a lens through which to read the shifting bases of citizenship in the contemporary regulatory state.
I'm guessing sometime after Nationalized medicine is forced on US and before the Global health laws are in place.
FDR..worst president ever because of his social programs.
FDR, like Clinton, would give the opposite speech the next year at the same stadium.
I don’t think he cared.
That’s what I thought, too.
Still, this fact should incite the state (in the developed world) to do its best to foster and support traditional families and to encourage them to have more children.
Though families may not be as closely responsible for providing for the elderly, it’s the younger people doing so, via their taxes. And helping families to have more children will provide the taxpayers of tomorrow🙂
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