Women and Social Security: a few facts
This is the first post in a series I am writing as a blogging fellow for the Strengthen Social Security Campaign, a coalition of more than 270 national and state organizations dedicated to preserving and strengthening Social Security.
Do you have a mother?
Is she over 65?
How is she set financially?
How would she fare if she was entirely on her own?
Now answer that question and take her Social Security out of the equation. How would she fare if she was entirely on her own?
You may not realize it, but Social Security is the single most effective program to keep women out of poverty in their retirement years that the nation has ever created.
Here are some facts about women and Social Security that you may not know, but should:
- 26% of women aged 65-69 are reliant upon Social Security for virtually all of their income (90% or more) and that number climbs as women age.
- Although women are more reliant on Social Security to provide their basic needs in retirement, men receive benefits that are about 25% more than those of women. The average benefit for a woman is around $12,000 per year, while for men it is about $16,000 per year.
- This is especially important for women, because far more American women than men -- 11% versus 7% -- lived in poverty in 2009 (the last year for which complete numbers are available.)
- It becomes even more important for people who live alone. When older people live alone, the likelihood that they live in poverty jumps dramatically, to 17% for women and to 12% for men.
- Minority women are hit especially hard, with more than 20% of African-American, Hispanic and Native American women 65 and over living in poverty. The poverty rate is 8% for non-Hispanic white females in this age group, and 15% for Asian women.
- Without Social Security, one half of all women over 65 and two-thirds of women over 65 who live alone would live in poverty.
- 3.1. million children received Social Security survivors benefits after losing the support of a parent to death or disability, and those benefits lifted 1.1 million of those children out of poverty.
Since Social Security became the law of the land in 1935, it has frequently been the only thing standing between women and the proverbial poor house, and that is not a pattern that shows any signs of changing any time soon.
While the gender-iniquities that were part of the program at it's inception have been righted, much of the labor performed by women is uncompensated. Women still sacrifice large amounts of our prime earning time providing care for young children, aging parents and eventually young grandchildren. This negatively impacts the amount of monthly benefit they receive in retirement.
Schemes to divert Social Security contributions into so-called "individually held private accounts" would hit women especially hard, because returns on such accounts would depend on volatile markets and would not have COLAs built in to safeguard against inflation or provide spousal and dependent benefits. And that uncompensated labor that already impacts women's benefits in the current system? Privatization schemes would devastate any hope for economic security in retirement, because without the shared risk pool that Social Security represents, many women -- especially those who took a time out of the work force to raise families and take care of aged or ailing family members -- would quickly outlive their assets and be destitute.
Women are not worthless, nor is the labor we provide to our families, not merely free-of-charge, but at great detriment to our own best interest -- and the older I get, the crankier I get about the fact that we are discounted, dismissed and disrespected with distressing frequency. Who can forget Alan Simpson firing off a condescending email to Ashley Carson, the executive director of the Older Women's League, sneering that Social Security had "become a milk cow with 310 million tits" and finishing with the admonition to "Call when you get honest work!"
Instead of dismissal and disrespect, why not look at Social Security and ways to strengthen it through women's eyes? Not only because we tend to be especially bent on equitable, mutually beneficial solutions, but because a system that works well for American women will be a system that works well for all Americans.
Sources:
Women and Social Security: Key Facts published by the National Women's Law Center, January 2011
and
The National Jobs For All Coalition website.
Many thanks to John or offering me his megaphone to spread the message and to Blue Gal for helping me navigate the site the very first time.
get smaller benefits because of lower incomes, they have a tendacy to live longer. The so-called journalists were asking about cuts in entitlements but never addressed lifting caps. The only talk show host I have heard mention lifting the cap is Ed Schultz. Let's start calling and emailing these so-called news shows and offer them some simple solutions.
When COLA is talked about, we need to be talking about the real costs of living to help lift people out of poverty.
two years? Already dead and buried.
one of the most underhanded things the government does is rig the inflation index, and obummer is doing it too.
I'm talking about the real costs of living increases. The one you are talking about doesn't reflect the real increases we deal with everyday.
If we do it your way next year, Yahoo! Checks will double! I'm with you.
Problem with all these facts and statistics and stuff is that for a large percentage of our leadership, a woman's viability to our society begins and ends at their mandate to give birth. Whether these women live to an age where they may require Social Security is not even a concern.
Curious to see how far to "the middle" Obama and our Democrats in office will go to appease these cretins.
Hopefully humanity will one day learn to be humane.
women collect less from social security because they earn less, which speaks to wage discrimination, a whole other problem. do not be too quick to give women all the credit for uncompensated labor, their are at least some of we men who are acquainted with housework, diapers, bottles, laundry, cooking, dishes, brooms, dustpans, and mops.
my dear departed worked from age 17, (i had her beat by 4 years, having worked since age 13) and her social security contributions are now going to the kids in the form of survivors benefits, we would be even worse off without these benefits; i never forget for a moment that it was her labor which paid for the checks we receive.
Take your hands off my social security. It's mine, not yours.
Cut wasteful military spending.
End oil subsidies.
End the AF-Pak occupations.
End the ridiculous tax cuts for the rich.
Stop outsourcing.
"Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob"
-= Franklin Delano Roosevelt =-
"You may not realize it, but Social Security is the single most effective program to keep women out of poverty in their retirement years that the nation has ever created."
However the single most effective way to keep women out of poverty in their retirement years is to teach them to stop getting involved with men who are deadbeats.
You're one of those people who think women cannot survive without a man? BTW, legal trumps moral. You can only try to legislate morality.
but i have to tell you, my daughters don't want much to do with guys, they see them as just a complication; they are not much impressed with the quality of the aspirants, shall we say? smart girls, get it from their parents.
appear to have gotten lost in your emotions. If I thought that women could not survive without a man I would have written it.
I'm guessing that you equate legislating with teaching. If so, I say nonsense.
country. That doesn't make what you gather true. You tried to be snide. You didn't succeed.
My father was most assuredly not a deadbeat. My parents were married for 27 years and the divorce was mutual. My mother ended up in poverty because she was clueless about money. When she got married, wives were supposed to just let hubby handle all that (let's hear it for the postwar home-and-family-only scam) and when she ended up on her own she had no resources.
Sounds like you've been ingesting the typical right-wing crapdoodle about women, and urping it up at the rest of us.
but your dad was a deadbeat if he didn't teach your mother about money within a 27 year span.
What the hell was he doing?
one hand.
receives about $900 a month in SS benefits AFTER they take out $200 for Medicare. She receives no other benefits. This is not fair and the lack of COLA has created many problems for her in the simple act of buying groceries and paying utility bills.
by Medicare. It comes from the same $900/month. GROSSLY UNFAIR.
You can thank our pals Dubya and Obama for those. First the Medicare Modernization Act from Dubya, which essentially ended our collective bargaining for drug prices, and started the inexorable price hikes in prescription drug prices. Then the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" (which doesn't particularly protect patients, nor make care affordable) from Obama, which involved a backroom deal with big pharma to make sure that we kept their profits shored up -- and all supposedly to get Republican support for a bill they didn't vote for *and* are trying to repeal.
Those fuckers sold out the elderly. I don't really see how you can see it any other way.
receives about $900 a month in SS benefits AFTER they take out $200 for Medicare. She receives no other benefits. This is not fair and the lack of COLA has created many problems for her in the simple act of buying groceries and paying utility bills. She also pays about $4,500 a year in Rx bills from the $900 that is NOT COVERED under Medicare. Grossly unfair.
a pity she was duped. Luckily she has at least one loving child who can help her out.
Hopefully you know better than to trust the same scammers that she did.
They cover only some durable supplies, like test strips for a glucose meter but with a relatively small co-pay. Does your mother have "Medicare Part D" coverage? That is through a private insurance company, and they have what is called a "donut hole." Do you know about that? If she has that, it is the private insurance company that is ripping her off, not Medicare itself. You can thank Bush #2 for that. As Medicare costs $96 dollars a month, I'll bet she does have a Part D drug plan if she's paying $200 a month. Many times, canceling the Part D private prescription insurance and paying cash for meds is much cheaper. Many pharmacies sell a 3 month supply of commonly prescribed drugs for less than $10. A one month's supply is less than $4. I hope this helps you.
by Medicare. It comes from the same $900/month. GROSSLY UNFAIR.
My mother-in-law is in the same boat. Not quite the same sum, but very much the same boat.
Here's the AFL-CIO's take on it:
http://www.aflcio.org/aboutus/thisistheaflcio...
That's a pretty rotten deal, no matter how you look at it.
my mothers only income. She brings in about $300/ month from savings for a total of about $1,300 month, before taxes. Without Social Security she would rapidly have to burn through her life savings, and would then be destitute were she not living with children.
I doubt that they will ever stop trying to eliminate social Security until about 10 million protestors show up in DC and bring the place to a standstill....leave the sociopaths a message that even they cannot ignore. I also expect that the wrath of their supporters will be terrible to behold, once those poor sods figure out just how badly they have been abused by those who have so thoroughly manipulated them; the rage among the teabaggers is only the smallest hint of what these assholes will unleash against themselves.
My parents divorced when my mother was 49 and she never remarried. She was absolutely, utterly clueless about money, never buttoned down and got a real job, and lived hand to mouth and paycheck to paycheck for the nearly 30 years remaining in her life.
We begged her not to apply for Social Security when she was 62, so she'd get more money, but she wouldn't listen. So that pitiful check, which was half my dad's benefit, was about her only income for the rest of her life. And without that and Medicare she would have been dead, and I mean that literally.
I firmly believe that no one who doesn't have to worry about money should be allowed to do anything that would mess with this lifeline. Millionaire politicians need not apply.
Of course, the irony is that while my parents were married my mom "didn't work" in that no one paid her a salary or benefits. That's the way things were supposed to be for good little wives who got married in 1949. So after 27 years of good-little-wifeyhood, she was left with no resources. If the Repugs are so big on family values, what about valuing people who stay home to raise families?
doesn't really believe that women have full personhood. They're something like 2/3 or 3/5 of a person, and therefore not to be worried about. I know some extremely neandrethal GOPers, all of whom seem to have a serious streak of mysogyny running through them. That's on top of them basically not giving a damn about anybody in the world except themselves.
is 84 and lives in a small 2 bedroom apartment with her husband, my stepdad, who is 88. He worked 40 years in the malt factories of Milwaukee and in a union so they have his pension plus both of their SS. He is totally disable from lung disease secondary to smoking and working in those dusty grain elevators for decades without a respirator, which the union forced the companies to make available. He didn't wear them and thus did not/will not bother the company to compensate for his illness (how libertarian of him-and I agree). If he passes before her, my mom will only have Medicare and her $900/ month SS. My wife and I are prepared to move into a larger place to take her in. That's the plan.
"Someday somebody related to some of these sufferers, these victims, these collaterally damaged souls, may try to kill you. And I have to tell you, I think you’ll have it coming." - Christopher Cooper
larger of the two payments. If your Dad's check is bigger, then she would get that amount upon his passing. Small comfort, but perhaps some comfort.
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