Latest news with #FranklinDRoosevelt
Yahoo
22-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Growing share of retirees lean heavily on Social Security, AARP says
Social Security is facing a growing number of challenges that threaten to undermine the retirement program's stability even as more retirees today say they urgently need the monthly payments compared with 20 years ago, according to a new AARP survey. About two-thirds of retirees said they substantially rely on Social Security for retirement income, or plan to do so, according to the survey, which polled more than 1,200 retirees as well as more than 2,000 younger Americans. When the advocacy group for older Americans asked the same question in 2005, about half of retirees indicated a heavy reliance on their monthly checks. The surge in retirees who largely rely on Social Security income to make ends meet comes as the program faces key challenges, from recent staffing cuts to a long-term financial crunch that could cause payments to be slashed starting in 2034. The AARP survey, conducted to mark the 90th anniversary of President Franklin D. Roosevelt signing the Social Security Act on August 14, 1935, underscores both the ever-growing importance of the program as well as its vulnerabilities. "More than three-quarters of people in the U.S. — 78% — are worried that Social Security won't provide enough to live on during retirement," AARP CEO Myechia Minter-Jordan said in a conference call to discuss the group's findings. "That's an increase from five years ago, when 74%" expressed concern." Confidence in the future of Social Security is also declining, with only 36% of Americans today saying they believe it will continue to pay out reliably and at the same level, a dip of seven percentage points from 2020, the study found. At the same time, 96% of Americans said they believed Social Security is important, with little difference between age groups or political party affiliations, AARP said. "We're concerned that faith in the system ... is waning," Minter-Jordan added. "We're concerned about their confidence that they will be able to receive benefits that they have paid into over time." Americans in their 30s are the most pessimistic about the future of Social Security, although confidence in the program's outlook tends to rise as people approach retirement age and get closer to claiming their benefits, the study found. "Younger people have always underestimated how important Social Security will be to them in the future," Bill Sweeney, senior vice president of government affairs at AARP, said on the call. He added, "Receiving Social Security changes how people view the program. They realize how important that inflation-adjusted treatment income is." The Social Security Administration didn't immediately respond to a request for comment about the survey's findings. Social Security filings at a record Meanwhile, Social Security Administration data shows that Americans are filing for benefits at a record rate in 2025. This comes as experts are pointing to rising concerns about the program's reliability and future solvency, given job cuts at the agency and other changes. Wealth inequality is also a growing issue among retirees, with some white-collar workers heading into their golden years with hefty retirement savings thanks to corporate 401(k) programs with company matches. But about half of all private-sector workers lack access to corporate retirement accounts, creating hurdles for saving for retirement, a recent Pew Charitable Trusts study found. Last year, a record 68 million retirees, disabled people and survivors of deceased workers relied on Social Security, a 42% jump from two decades ago, data shows. The number of Social Security beneficiaries is forecast to swell to 82 million by 2035, AARP said. Despite the retirement program's importance, many Americans lack a grasp of the basics of Social Security, the new AARP study also found. For instance, only 24% of those surveyed correctly identified 70 years old as the age at which individuals can maximize their Social Security benefits. And about one-third of respondents said the potential insolvency of the Social Security trust funds would lead to a complete cessation of benefits, which is false. If the trust funds aren't shored up and they run out of money, which is currently forecast to occur in 2034, monthly benefits would be reduced by about 20%. Detroit lawnmower gang still going strong after 15 years Video shows father being detained by ICE while dropping child off at preschool Fed Chair Jerome Powell speaks at Large Banks Conference amid Trump criticism Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
CBS News
22-07-2025
- Business
- CBS News
Growing share of retirees lean heavily on Social Security, AARP says
Social Security is facing a growing number of challenges that threaten to undermine the retirement program's stability even as more retirees today say they urgently need the monthly payments compared with 20 years ago, according to a new AARP survey. About two-thirds of retirees said they substantially rely on Social Security for retirement income, or plan to do so, according to the survey, which polled more than 1,200 retirees as well as more than 2,000 younger Americans. When the advocacy group for older Americans asked the same question in 2005, about half of retirees indicated a heavy reliance on their monthly checks. The surge in retirees who largely rely on Social Security income to make ends meet comes as the program faces key challenges, from recent staffing cuts to a long-term financial crunch that could cause payments to be slashed starting in 2034. The AARP survey, conducted to mark the 90th anniversary of President Franklin D. Roosevelt signing the Social Security Act on August 14, 1935, underscores both the ever-growing importance of the program as well as its vulnerabilities. "More than three-quarters of people in the U.S. — 78% — are worried that Social Security won't provide enough to live on during retirement," AARP CEO Myechia Minter-Jordan said in a conference call to discuss the group's findings. "That's an increase from five years ago, when 74%" expressed concern." Confidence in the future of Social Security is also declining, with only 36% of Americans today saying they believe it will continue to pay out reliably and at the same level, a dip of seven percentage points from 2020, the study found. At the same time, 96% of Americans said they believed Social Security is important, with little difference between age groups or political party affiliations, AARP said. "We're concerned that faith in the system ... is waning," Minter-Jordan added. "We're concerned about their confidence that they will be able to receive benefits that they have paid into over time." Americans in their 30s are the most pessimistic about the future of Social Security, although confidence in the program's outlook tends to rise as people approach retirement age and get closer to claiming their benefits, the study found. "Younger people have always underestimated how important Social Security will be to them in the future," noted Bill Sweeney, senior vice president of government affairs at AARP, said on the call. He added, "Receiving Social Security changes how people view the program. They realize how important that inflation-adjusted treatment income is." The Social Security Administration didn't immediately respond to a request for comment about the survey's findings. Meanwhile, Social Security Administration data shows that Americans are filing for benefits at a record rate in 2025. This comes as experts are pointing to rising concerns about the program's reliability and future solvency, given job cuts at the agency and other changes. Wealth inequality is also a growing issue among retirees, with some white-collar workers heading into their golden years with hefty retirement savings thanks to corporate 401(k) programs with company matches. But about half of all private-sector workers lack access to corporate retirement accounts, creating hurdles for saving for retirement, a recent Pew Charitable Trusts study found. Last year, a record 68 million retirees, disabled people and survivors of deceased workers relied on Social Security, a 42% jump from two decades ago, data shows. The number of Social Security beneficiaries is forecast to swell to 82 million by 2035, AARP said. Despite the retirement program's importance, many Americans lack a grasp of the basics of Social Security, the new AARP study also found. For instance, only 24% of those surveyed correctly identified 70 years old as the age at which individuals can maximize their Social Security benefits. And about one-third of respondents said the potential insolvency of the Social Security trust funds would lead to a complete cessation of benefits, which is false. If the trust funds aren't shored up and they run out of money, which is currently forecast to occur in 2034, monthly benefits would be reduced by about 20%.
Washington Post
18-07-2025
- Business
- Washington Post
How Trump dominates and corrupts the private sector
After six months, with seven times that much time remaining, Trump 2.0 seems as transformative as the New Deal was, but different. Franklin D. Roosevelt's legacy was the institutional architecture of the welfare and regulatory state. Donald Trump's legacy will be a demonstration: How a purely transactional politician, untethered from any political philosophy and uninterested in norms of self-restraint (e.g., unforced respect for the separation of powers) can exploit this architecture for unconstrained executive power.
Al Jazeera
10-07-2025
- Politics
- Al Jazeera
Trump didn't start the war on the poor – but he's taking it to new extremes
'A budget is a moral document,' as numerous human rights activists have said over the decades. If that is true, then the so‑called 'One Big, Beautiful Bill' represents a grotesque example of the immorality of US leadership in 2025. It is a budget that slashes Medicare and Medicaid by $930bn over the next decade and could leave as many as 17 million without healthcare insurance. The cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) – a food aid scheme for Americans living in deep poverty – will render about 1 million vulnerable people ineligible for the basic human right of not starving. The US social welfare system – one that President Franklin D Roosevelt and Congress introduced with the Social Security Act of 1935 and President Lyndon B Johnson extended with Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 – is on its way to an emergency room. This is one of the steepest rollbacks of social welfare programmes in the US since their inception in 1935. Many will attribute it to Project 2025. But the disdain for social welfare in the US has always been present – because the US cannot be the US without millions of Americans who must work on the cheap, so that a select few can hoard wealth and power, and mega-corporations can hoard resources. That the US has had a mediocre and begrudging social welfare system for the past 90 years is nothing short of a miracle. While much of the Western world and other major empires either established or modernised their social welfare systems in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the US persisted with limited government intervention for citizens. Only radicals within the US labour movement typically advocated a national social welfare policy. Until the Great Depression of the 1930s, only individual states – not the federal government – provided limited economic relief to unemployed people or their families. US Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins played a critical role in persuading Roosevelt to pursue what would become the Social Security Act of 1935. Once enacted, this provided the elderly, the unemployed, disabled workers, and single mothers with federal assistance for the first time. But both of the bill's champions were aware that there would be opposition to the federal government assuming responsibility for providing benefits to Americans, even with unemployment at 25 percent. Leading business tycoons such as Ford Motor Company founder Henry Ford expressed their disdain for federal social welfare. 'No government can guarantee security. It can only tax production, distribution, and service and gradually crush the poor to pay taxes,' Ford said. Alf Landon, a millionaire oilman who served as Republican governor of Kansas and ran against Roosevelt in 1936, also opposed the Social Security Act, on the grounds that the tax burden would further impoverish workers. 'I am not exaggerating the folly of this legislation. The saving it forces on our workers is a cruel hoax,' Landon stated in a 1936 speech, also fearing that the federal government would eventually dip into Social Security funds to pay for other projects. Even when Congress enacted the Social Security Act in August 1935, the compromises made served to racialise, feminise, and further limit social welfare provision. The bill excluded agricultural workers like sharecroppers (two‑thirds white and one‑third African American, who were overrepresented in this work), domestic workers (in which Black women were overrepresented), nonprofit and government workers, and some waiters and waitresses from welfare benefits. It took amendments in the 1950s to rectify some of the racial, gender, and class discrimination embedded in the original legislation. Johnson's War on Poverty in 1964-65 prompted resistance and helped catalyse a new conservative movement. Johnson sought to add Medicare and Medicaid to the Social Security regime, provide food assistance via programmes such as Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) and SNAP (originally Food Stamps), and expand Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). Republican and future US President George HW Bush ran unsuccessfully for Senate in Texas in 1964 against a pro‑Medicare Democrat, calling Johnson's plan 'socialised medicine' – a Cold War‑era slur equating it with communism. Racial segregationist Strom Thurmond remarked of social welfare programmes, in general – and Johnson's Medicare and Medicaid plans, specifically – 'You had [the poor] back in the days of Jesus Christ, you have got some now, and you will have some in the future,' a pitiful excuse for refusing to reduce poverty or extend federal assistance. The entire conservative pushback against what Republicans termed 'entitlements' grew from the expansion of the welfare state under Johnson. So much so that when Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, 'his administration slashed Medicaid expenditures by more than 18 percent and cut the overall Department of Health and Human Services budget by 25 percent'. Those and other austerity measures in the 1980s resulted in one million fewer children eligible for free or reduced‑price school lunches, 600,000 fewer people on Medicaid, and one million fewer accessing SNAP – according to one study. I can speak to the effect of such cuts directly. As a teenage recipient of AFDC and SNAP during the Reagan years – the second eldest of six children (four under the age of five in 1984) in the New York City area – I can say that the $16,000 in annual state and federal assistance between 1983 and 1987 felt like a cruel joke. It barely covered housing, offered minimal healthcare via underfunded public clinics, and still left us without food for a week every month. If this is what they call 'entitlements', then I was clearly entitled to almost nothing. In the past 30 years, leaders who opposed the federal social welfare apparatus have celebrated their victories with disturbing heartlessness. Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole declared gleefully in 1995 that he 'was there, fighting the fight, voting against Medicare… because we knew it wouldn't work in 1965'. During his 2008 presidential campaign, the late Republican senator John McCain proposed $1.3 trillion in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid, along with a huge 'overhaul' of Social Security to balance the federal budget. Fiscal conservative Grover Norquist infamously said he wanted to 'get it [social‑welfare programmes] down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub'. US Speaker Mike Johnson claimed last week that Trump's budget would usher in 'a new golden age'. Budget priorities that ultimately harm those in poverty, restrict access to healthcare, and force people to work for food aid or medical care are nothing short of monstrous. Ninety years – and 44 years of tax breaks later – the greed and callousness of conservatives and the far right have precipitated yet another round of tax cuts favouring the uber wealthy and mega-corporations. It is only a matter of time before those whose grandparents once benefitted from Social Security and New Deal‑era welfare will seek to gut what remains of America's Swiss‑cheese safety net. The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.
Irish Times
02-07-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
De Valera's acrimonious relationship with US President Roosevelt's man in Dublin during Second World War
The requirement that students must unlock social media profiles when applying for US visas reminds us that Irish sentiment is out of step with the White House when it comes to international affairs. The new American ambassador, Edward Walsh, is not the first to find himself at odds with Irish opinion makers – during his 1984 presidential visit, TDs and senators listened to Ronald Reagan's remarks on Central America in stony silence. Such challenges do not compare, however, to the acrimony between Éamon de Valera and David Gray, then US president Franklin D Roosevelt's man in Dublin during the second World War. Before Germany surrendered, Gray had been told by the State Department Ireland would not be invited to participate in the inaugural conference of the United Nations in San Francisco. De Valera's courtesy call on the German minister, Eduard Hempel, to express his condolences after Hitler's death caused outrage in Britain and the US, but at home it reinforced the perception that neutrality was administered impartially. READ MORE The extent of Ireland's co-operation with the Allies remained secret, and Winston Churchill's personal remarks about de Valera's policy on VE Day – the Irish government had stayed out of the war 'to frolic' with the Germans 'to their heart's content' – incensed public opinion. De Valera's dignified response on radio won him admiration, and identified neutrality with Irish independence. Following his visit to Hempel, a gesture his senior officials saw as grotesquely ill-judged, the taoiseach received fiercely critical letters from Irish-Americans. One serviceman in the Philippines wrote, 'I have a mother in Ireland, I also have brothers fighting this war, but I guess Dr Hempel means more to you. Have no more time, got to fight the Jap.' Other letter writers wrote of 'great embarrassment' and feeling 'ashamed'. On the other hand, the tactful British representative in Dublin, John Maffey, thought that de Valera's pose as the elder statesman in his reply to Churchill – skilfully working on 'all the old passions' – represented a setback for Britain's approach to Ireland. Gray arrived in Dublin in February 1940, three months before Hitler's tanks rolled over the Netherlands, Belgium, and then France. Like Roosevelt, the inexperienced American representative had no sympathy for Ireland's neutral stance – even though the US stayed out of the war until Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor in December the following year. Gray could not understand the diplomatic balancing act de Valera had to perform to avoid antagonising the two nearest belligerent powers. As one of his critics put it, the American representative 'brandished the big stick too much'. Relations between the two deteriorated when Frank Aiken went to Washington in April 1941 in an effort to ease the supplies squeeze enforced by Churchill. De Valera's close cabinet colleague, responsible for co-ordinating defensive measures, did succeed in purchasing two ships, but only after a fraught meeting with the president. According to an Irish source, Aiken insisted that Ireland had to contend with a twin threat of 'aggression' – from Britain, and Germany. The pro-British Roosevelt thundered 'nonsense' and pulled the tablecloth to land his lunch on the floor. Furious with the reception Aiken received during his visit, de Valera believed Gray had misrepresented him to the president. But their relationship reached a critical point in February 1944 when the American envoy asked de Valera to recall the German and Japanese representatives. The taoiseach saw the 'American note' as an ultimatum and rejected it as undermining Ireland's neutrality. When Hitler took his own life in April 1945, Gray demanded the keys of the German legation before its records could be destroyed ' – de Valera rejected this too. T he cessation of hostilities in Europe did not mark the end of this period of testy US-Irish relations as Gray stayed in Dublin until 1947. Sceptical about the benefits of joining the UN, de Valera told the Dáil in June 1946 that Ireland 'was losing nothing' by not applying for membership. 'But all changed in a matter of weeks,' his biographer Ronan Fanning writes, 'as the cold war deepened'. Soviet efforts to have their Eastern European satellites admitted as members of the UN led to the British and the Americans supporting the applications of neutral European countries. However, the Soviet Union used its Security Council veto to reject Irish membership – ostensibly because diplomatic relations had not been established. This refusal caused little upset in Dublin, creating, as one leading civil servant put it, 'neither surprise nor disappointment'. A Soviet spokesman later stated at the UN general assembly that states such as Ireland and Salazar's Portugal could not be regarded as 'peace-loving' because they had 'supported fascism' during the war, and, he said, they maintained 'particularly friendly relationships' with Franco's Spain, 'the last offshoot of fascism in Europe'. Ireland finally became a member of the UN in 1955.
