Why Expanding Social Security Is Crucial to Addressing Inequality in America in 2014

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http://www.alternet.org/why-expanding-social-security-crucial-addressing-inequality-america-2014



In coming decades, America will face an economic crisis of epic proportions as tens of millions of citizens lean toward poverty as they reach their senior years. What is done about it will define what kind of country the U.S. will become.

Poverty increasingly will have an older, non-white and female face. The results may be unlike anything the nation has experienced since the 1930s Depression, when the middle and working classes were gutted by economic collapse. Then Congress responded by creating the first federal safety nets that are still relied on today, starting with Social Security.

What’s unfolding now is that much of the 76-million-member Baby Boom generation—all demographics—has not saved enough for their retirement, making Social Security and Medicare their primary means of support. Only 20 percent seniors, with incomes of more than $58,000 a year, will not rely on Social Security as their primary income source, the National Academy of Social Insurance found last fall. Women and communities of color will be especially hard-hit, experts report, citing long-time wage and savings disparities.

“Two-thirds of working Americans cannot maintain their standard of living in retirement—and that assumes they work until 65,” Syracuse University’s Eric Kingson, co-director of Social Security Works, testified in Congress last fall.

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1. K&R

[LuvNewcastle]

2. This article is really about raising benefits for people already on Social Security.

I thought that "expanding" SS was about giving benefits to younger people. Alternet gave the article a rather confusing title, at least it was for me.