Only 11 more days to the 70th anniversary of the Social Security Act...

[KansDem]

August 14, 1935

limited form of the Social Security program began as a measure to implement "social insurance" during the Great Depression of the 1930s when poverty rates among senior citizens exceeded 50%.

The law was drafted by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's committee on economic security under Edwin E. Witte, and passed by Congress in 1935 as part of the New Deal. The law included benefits for the retired and the unemployed. Social Security was not designed as a savings program. This allowed elderly Americans, hard hit by the depression, to begin receiving benefits soon after the law was enacted. Payments to current retirees were (and continue to be) financed by a payroll tax on current workers' wages, half directly as a payroll tax, and half paid by the employer.



What are you doing to commemorate this historical legislation?

edited to correct mistake in number of days...