- In addition to providing retirement benefits, Social Security provides valuable life insurance and disability insurance protection
- More than 48 million beneficiaries receive monthly checks; about one-third are nonelderly
- A 30-year old worker earning $27,000 has life insurance protection for his wife and two young children with a present value of $380,000
- That same family has disability insurance protection with a present value of over $365,000
- Social Security is the nation's most effective anti-poverty program
- Disregarding Social Security, 46.8 percent of those age 65 and over have incomes below the poverty line.
- Social Security provides at least half the income for two-thirds of the elderly.
- Social Security is the only source of income for 22 percent of all the elderly, for 40 percent of elderly African-Americans, and for 29 percent of unmarried elderly women.
- Social Security is the nation's largest children's program
- Of the 5 million children who live in households where some of the family income comes from Social Security, more than 3 million receive Social Security benefits in their own right, as the result of being the child of a worker who has died, become disabled or retired.
- Included among those 3 million are thousands of children who lost parents in the terrorist attack of September 11, and children of fallen and disabled U.S. soldiers.
- Social Security is the nation's largest disability program
- 6.4 million disabled workers receive monthly Social Security benefits.
- Included among those 6.4 million, are thousands of wounded U.S. soldiers
- 72 percent of the private work force has no long-term disability insurance other than Social Security
- Social Security has a proven track-record in times of national emergency.
- Social Security was among the first insurers on the scene after 9/11, and has provided the victims' families the most immediate, largest, and most sustained support.
- About 650,000 Social Security beneficiaries lived in the area hit by Hurricane Katrina; the Social Security Administration immediately drew on its vast administrative resources to ensure that those beneficiaries cut off from homes and bank accounts nevertheless continued to receive their checks on time.
- Social Security is fair to all Americans
- African-Americans benefit from Social Security's progressive benefit formula, since their median income is considerably lower than that of European-Americans; about 13 percent of the U.S. population is African-American, but 23 percent of the children receiving survivors benefits and 17 percent of the disabled workers receiving disability benefits are African-American
- In addition to earning valuable retirement benefits, young workers and their families are insured against disability and death (see above)
- Social Security provides a package of benefits that cannot be purchased privately.
- Social Security is extremely efficient
- 99 cents of every dollar collected is paid back in benefits.
- Social Security's projected long-range shortfall is easily addressed
- The current political fight is about ideology, not economics.
- The current projected shortfall has nothing to do with the aging baby boomers
- The Battle for Social Security (John Wiley & Sons, 2005) sets forth the ideal, pain-free (for almost everyone) way to strengthen Social Security