SOCIAL SECURITY: Pie from the Sky

It is an axiom in the insurance business that insurance is not bought but sold. In 1935 Franklin Roosevelt sold Congress and Congress sold the U. S. the Social Security Act, the biggest, most comprehensive, most expensive mass insurance policy ever written. Since then its purchasers, the nation's taxpayers, have had occasion to read their policy carefully and, if they have detected no outright jokers, their reaction has been such that practically every politician in the U. S. from Franklin Roosevelt down has put revision of Social Security at the top of his must list. Last week, as the House Ways & Means Committee began hearings on proposed ways & means to make the Act work better, the revisers officially got down to business.

Ways & Means' old Chairman Doughton, his spectacles quizzically pushed up on his forehead, presided over as rowdy a show as he has seen in his 28 years in Congress. The hearing room was jammed with Townsendites and other pension peddlers, for on the committee's schedule was no less a witness than Physician Francis E. Townsend himself. Far more unruly, however, were Congressmen anxious to outdo one another in doing for the old folks. Massachusetts' broadbeamed Republican Allen Treadway, whose State party leaders made an election alliance with the Townsendites, showed what was likely to happen when Congress receives the committee's report. Trying to shout down a group of Democrats, Republican Treadway and his party members made so much noise that Chairman Doughton almost broke his gavel pleading: "Order! Gentlemen, Gentlemen, we will have order!"

Old Folks. The political failure of Social Security is that after more than three years of the Act designed to eliminate the insecurity of the aged, insecure oldsters are still making and breaking politicians, still rank as a prime U. S. political problem. By & large another provision of the Act, its program of unemployment insurance, has functioned to the satisfaction of participants who have drawn out $400,000,000 in unemployment benefits since the program started operation. But for old folks, Social Security, which will not begin paying monthly old-age insurance benefits for those over 65 until 1942, is still pie in the sky. The business of the witnesses before the Doughton committee was to show how the pie could be brought down within reach without wrecking the nation's economic structure.

Altmeyer. First witness was the Social Security Board's scholarly Chairman Arthur J. Altmeyer. Chairman Altmeyer's job was to present to the committee the revisions proposed by President Roosevelt's official Advisory Council on Social Security and additional suggestions of the board, which were received and approved by the White House last month. With little elaboration, Mr. Altmeyer passed on a recommendation that the coverage of the Act be extended to seamen, domestic servants, employes of educational and charitable institutions and other groups that would add 6,000,000 to the board's present clientele of 42,500,000; that the board increase its subsidies to the States for dependent children and the blind. Then Chairman Altmeyer outlined his, and the White House's, three-fold plan to give more to the old: