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15 Tax Review 1 (1954)

handle is hein.tera/tafoutaxt0017 and id is 1 raw text is: TA X REVIEW J -NUARY 1954 Vol. XV, No. 1 Published by The Tax Foundation, Inc., 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York 20, New York 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Reappraising Social Security Survey of Program's Weaknesses Represents Sound Approach to Real Improvement. by Howard Friend S OCIAL SECURITY in the United States is now undergoing one of the most searching re- examinations, both in the public eye and in the national Congress, perhaps the most searching to which it has been subjected since its establishment 19 years ago. Out of this reexamination should come vital and far-reaching decisions. The decisions to be made, in fact, very readily could spell the difference between a social security system that will be a strengthen- ing influence-or one that will do a great damage to the institution of American living for many decades. Manifestations of this reexamination are numer- ous. President Eisenhower has asked for extensive changes in the Federal Social Security Act. The special Subcommittee on Social Security of the House Ways and Means committee has completed a six-month-long, fact-finding survey. The subject is high on the 1954 action calendar of the full Ways and Means Committee. Thus the national governmental stage for legislative action is set. But more significantly, there is a growing mani- festation of widespread, real public interest in the social security problems and what they mean. People, as never before, are talking social security. For the most part, they are interested in what social security will do for them; they are concerned about what it might do to them. The findings of the Social Security Subcommittee should have a significant influence on any action Copyright 1954 by The Tax Foundation, Inc. that may be taken by Congress. Created to make a fact-finding survey of public assistance and old age and survivors' insurance phases of the program, the Subcommittee is headed by Congressman Carl T. Curtis of Nebraska. Helping to carry out the work of the Subcommittee was an employed staff headed by Karl T. Schlotterbeck, formerly of Brook- ings Institution. Original Purposes and Status With respect to the work of the Subcommittee, or any other reexamination of the system, one im- portant point should be made-and emphasized: The social security program is a social-political experiment carrying a tremendous impact upon the American public. It has both its good features and its weaknesses. To review it carefully for the pur- pose of discovering and revealing its shortcomings is not to attack or destroy it. On the contrary, such a reappraisal represents the only sound approach to any real improvement of social security in the long-range interest of the country as a whole. Charges have been made that the purpose of the Curtis Subcommittee study was to wreck the pro- 1

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