Social Security

... fastest-growing poverty group in the United States...so we're going to have to spend a lot of money on the elderly," says Phillip Longman, author of Born to Pay: The New Politics of Aging in America and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.

While 2008 will go down as a year of hope and change in American politics, the collapse of Wall Street and bursting of the housing bubble will probably mean that fear and anger take center stage in the 2010 elections. If so, the most coveted swing voters may soon be the Busted Boomers - individuals 50 and older who placed supreme faith in the financial markets and now find their long-held dreams of a comfortable retirement eviscerated.

"It won't be smooth sailing," predicted Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which wants tough controls to bring down deficit spending and reform expensive programs like Social Security and the Medicare ...

In his second inaugural address, President Bush offered a vision of an "ownership society"

On January 11, 1944, in his annual State of the Union Address, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called for an economic bill of rights. The rise of totalitarianism, he said, had taught the lesson that "necessitous men are not free men" because the miserable and the desperate "are the stuff out of which dictatorships are made." According to Roosevelt, "In our days these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of

On December 5, 2008, the New America Foundation’s Next Social Contract Initiative hosted a three panel discussion about the future of social policy after the economic downturn. David Gray, Director of the Workforce and Family Program at New America, opened the event with preliminary remarks. Karen Kornbluh, formerly of the New America Foundation, policy director in the office of Senator Barack Obama and the primary author of the 2008 Democratic Party Platform, delivered the keynote address. She was followed by a series of

NEW AMERICA FOUNDATION HOLDS A CONFERENCE ON SOCIAL POLICY AFTER THE ECONOMIC PROBLEMS DECEMBER 5, 2008 SPEAKERS: MICHAEL CALABRESE, VICE PRESIDENT, NEW AMERICA FOUNDATION LEN NICHOLS, DIRECTOR, HEALTH POLICY PROGRAM, NEW AMERICA FOUNDATION … more

Compared to the $1 out of every $7 in payroll now distributed in the United States to Social Security and Medicare, workers could see $4 out of every $10 going to support those benefits, Phillip Longman, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, warns in his book The Empty Cradle. LINK (subscription required)