Ida May Fuller was the first person to ever receive Social Security Benefits. She lived most of her life in Ludlow, Vermont where she worked as a school teacher and a legal secretary. She never married, and died at age 100 in 1975. She retired in 1939 just 3 years after Social Security was created. She received the very first Social Security check, check # 00-000-001 for $22.54.
Social Security is arguably the most successful government program for social amelioration in history, and imitated by many other countries (from Japan to Israel). It not only saved seniors and the disabled from destitution, it helped lay the groundwork for the historic middle class prosperity in the USA from roughly 1945 to 1975.
Getting rid of Social Security is a cherished dream of right wing ideologues going back to the beginnings of the program in 1936. Britain and Italy both tried experiments in privatized Social Security with disastrous results.
Now, it's on a negotiating table.
Remember Ida May.
My message to the President and to the Democratic Party:
Don't Sell Us Out!
By the time she died, at the age of 100 in 1974 or 1975, Ida collected $22,888.92 in benefits. She was the earliest "investor" in the Ponzi scheme. But now, the number of recipients has ballooned to the point that the current "investors" in the Ponzi scheme stand to lose out and collect little or nothing. All because it was set up on a "pay as you go" basis instead of a "pay for yourself" system in which one collects what he invested.
ReplyDeleteirvberg,
ReplyDeleteI'll gladly take those SS checks off your hands if you don't want them.