MISSOURI WATCH: THE UNSOCIABILITY OF INSECURITY

A family loads its sparse furniture in the back of a horse-drawn wagon, readying for a trip that will take them to an unknown but hopefully friendlier environment. ...

A middle-aged woman forages in a garbage can, searching for discarded scraps of food to help feed her children. ...

A weather-beaten man stands in a long line that has formed in front of a company rumored to be hiring a janitor. ...

A small child, suffering from lack of nourishment, sits on the lap of his mother as both wait for the local physician to see them.

Scenes in war-torn Bosnia? Politically disrupted Russia? Darkest Africa? Communist China? A Third World nation?

No, the scenes described above were those seen every day in virtually every small town and city in America at the start of the 1930s. These were the scenes of America during the Great Depression, that awful interval of nearly 10 years in which the vast majority of the nation's citizens suffered horribly from the economic collapse that no one would have predicted and no one seemed to be able to reverse.

The scenes are accurate ones. I know. I saw them.

It is from this panoply of poverty that a desperate nation led by desperate leaders fashioned a system which is today called Social Security, which includes OASI (Old Age and Survivors Insurance), DI (Disability Insurance) and Medicare, the latter the most recent component. For purposes of clarity, we will eliminate Medicare from this discussion, since its fate may eventually hinge on some later form of health care.

Social Security is up for grabs. Again. The program is caught in the desultory mood of the American public, where it is not so much rejected as unappreciated and therefore undefended. Some, however, declare loudly that Social Security taxes taken from workers' pay checks amounts to money down the drain. An advisory committee, formed to end the system as it's known today, has come up with three alternate plans that differ only in how completely they would junk a program that for 60 years has allowed millions of Americans to live reasonably well in their old age.

Social Security happens to be important to Missourians of all ages and Missourians who live on farms or in suburbs, Missourians who increasingly find their family expenses exceeding family income. There is no government program that impacts the lives of a majority of Missourians more than Social Security.

A friend who is an Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri at Columbia, Dr. Harold F. Breimyer, was among the group that drafted the first Social Security law and, more importantly, understood the need for such a program in a nation staggering from economic collapse. In the early 1930s, there were hundreds of thousands of Missourians, hard-working and frugal, who found themselves in poverty as their lifetime savings were wiped out in failed banks and savings and loans. If you will permit a personal note: my father owned a newspaper in a small Northwest Missouri town which started the decade of the 1930s with three banks. Within two years, all of them had failed, taking with them the life savings of the town's residents. When the last bank failed, my father lost the money he had deposited for a load of newsprint that was on its way to Northwest Missouri. Despite these problems, my family was better off than most other families in the town, or in Northwest Missouri, for that matter. Similar scenes were taking place all around the state. And all across America.

The Social Security program devised in the mid-1930s had two great pluses. One, it was universal and portable. A person changing jobs, or shifting in or out of his own business, could carry his eligibility with him. Two, it had the financial backing of the federal government.

Those who were the architects of the new program knew what that "backing" meant. They were not misled by the folderol of relying on a trust fund. In the final analysis, the program rests on the willingness of successive generations to honor past commitments, in exchange for a promised continuation of the program when they have need of it.

Such moral grounding is the warp and wood of all private insurance, and as a matter of fact, all financial paper rests on faith and trust. Most of the proposals to revamp Social Security today involve some sort of privatizing or conversion from insurance-and-annuity to a savings account, or both. Much of the sentiment for putting at least part of Social Security tax collections into private investment arises from today's bull market psychology. Did we learn nothing from the collapse of Wall Street and the bond market?

It was the default of private investment that gave rise to Social Security in the first place. Today's wild pledge that any dollar invested will multiply itself should remind anyone with a long memory of the false-promise 1920s.

Social Security is an insurance annuity. That and only that. In no way does it build up an estate. The annuity principle makes it possible to provide a higher guaranteed income to retirees than could be received under any other design.

The major flaw that has developed in Social Security has nothing to do with its basic structure. It's statistical, actuarial. We are living longer than they did when the law was enacted. Adjustments will have to be made. The date (age) for commencing OASI payments will almost certainly have to be advanced. In the judgment of Dr. Breimyer, all Social Security income should be subject to federal income tax, since the tax is graduated, with low-income recipients below the lowest tax bracket spared from paying a tax.

We'd feel better about remedies for Social Security if Harold Breimyer were around to offer advice and remind reformers why the program is still important after 60 years.

~Jack Stapleton of Kennett is the editor of the Missouri News and Editorial Service.