Travis Hornsby got a few things wrong about Social Security in his Monday column.
He regurgitates many of the same attacks on the popular government program which, despite being disproven time and time again, come back during every Social Security debate.
The first is the implication that Social Security has been an extraordinary burden on our government finances. Actually, the 76-year-old program has remained fairly stable throughout its existence, running surpluses, which were put in a trust fund.
The issue is with abnormal fluctuations in population; when the massive baby boomer generation retires it will put a strain on Social Security's ability to maintain its flow of benefits.
The second popular attack is the insistence that when Social Security was created, it was only meant to provide temporary relief at the end of a person's life, since the average life expectancy was only 66. This statistic is misleading, because the extraordinary infant mortality rates during the early decades of Social Security skew life expectancy averages. Judging the fiscal prudence of Social Security based on modern life expectancy averages is flawed as well because for those on the bottom half of the income distribution, life expectancy after retirement has hardly increased at all. This is especially true for lower- to middle-income Americans, many of whom occupy more labor-intensive jobs. For the last 76 years, Social Security has been there to provide financial stability and dignity to American workers who have given so much. Amid an era of growing inequality and uncertainty, we should be forthright in defending the things our government does to benefit the common man.
Ford Dwyer is a political science and history junior at UF. He is the editorial director of the UF College Democrats.
