President Obama’s budget proposal to reduce scheduled increases in Social Security benefits is already under fire. In a continuation of Wednesday’s Rewrite segment, msnbc’s Lawrence O’Donnell imagined what Frances Perkins, the architect of Social Security and first female Cabinet member, would say about the president’s push to change the formula for calculating Social Security’s cost of living adjustment.
When the Social Security Act was passed in 1935, the highest concentration of poverty in America was among the elderly. At its signing, President Franklin Roosevelt said, “We can never insure 100% of the population against 100% of the hazards and vicissitudes of life but we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen, and to his family, against the loss of a job and against poverty-stricken old-age.”
O’Donnell pointed out that today, children are the age group most likely to be poverty-stricken, not the elderly. “President Roosevelt and Frances Perkins knew Social Security would change over time and they knew it would have to be changed,” he said in Thursday’s Rewrite.
In a speech in 1962, Perkins said of the Act, “Thousands and thousands of new problems arose in the administration which had not been foreseen by those who did the planning and the legal drafting. Of course, the Act had to be amended, and has been amended, and amended, and amended, and amended.”
It would not come as a shock to Perkins or Roosevelt that the benefits calculation formula would change as the years went on, but there were some principles that both Perkins and Roosevelt considered imperative in the design of Social Security.
“He didn’t want it to be a welfare program,” said O’Donnell, citing a comment FDR made to Perkins in a private meeting. Roosevelt said, “We put those payroll contributions there so as to give the contributors a legal, moral, and political right to collect their pensions and their unemployment benefits. With those taxes in there, no damn politician can ever scrap my Social Security program.”








