85 Fun Facts About Social Security

Which president signed the Social Security Act into law?

Franklin D. Roosevelt signed it on August 14, 1935, but retirees had to wait: payroll taxes began in 1937 and the first monthly checks went out only in 1940.

What does the acronym OASDI, the formal name of Social Security, stand for?

Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance: the title grew with the program, which began in 1935 as an old-age pension for the worker alone.

Social Security's first payout went to retired motorman Ernest Ackerman in January 1937: a one-time lump sum of how much?

17 cents. Ackerman retired one day after the program began, with a single nickel withheld from his pay, so he more than tripled his money.

The payroll tax that funds Social Security appears on American pay stubs under which acronym?

FICA stands for the Federal Insurance Contributions Act, and every dollar withheld is matched by the employer, so workers see only half of what is paid in for them.

Which president opened his second term by campaigning to let workers divert Social Security taxes into private investment accounts?

George W. Bush made it a top priority after his re-election and pushed it hard through 2005, yet the idea never became law.

For decades, Social Security cards carried a printed legend ruling out their use for what purpose?

Identification. 'Not for identification' was printed on new cards from 1946 until 1972, yet the number became America's de facto national ID anyway.

Ida May Fuller paid $24.75 in Social Security taxes; how much did she collect by age 100?

About $22,900, more than 900 times what she paid in. Fuller, from Ludlow, Vermont, received the first monthly check in 1940 and went on drawing them until she died at 100.

Which New Deal cabinet member chaired the committee that drew up Social Security?

Frances Perkins, the first woman in a US cabinet, had been set on her reforming path by witnessing the Triangle factory fire of 1911.

The Townsend Plan promised over-60s $200 a month on what condition?

Spending it all, and within 30 days: forcing the money back into shops was meant to end the Depression, and the idea drew a mass following.

What was Francis Townsend's profession before he launched his pension movement?

Physician. Out of work at 66 with no savings, the Long Beach doctor set out his pension idea in a letter to the local paper and was stunned by the flood of support.

Which two large groups of workers were left out of Social Security when it began in 1935?

Agricultural and domestic workers were left out after the Treasury said it could not collect payroll taxes from farms and private homes; Congress began bringing them in from 1950.

The Supreme Court upheld Social Security in 1937, months after the president proposed what?

Adding up to six justices. The court-packing plan failed, but that spring the Court swung behind the New Deal and upheld the old-age program 7 to 2 in the Helvering case.

Ephram Nestor paid Social Security taxes for 19 years, then lost his benefits when what happened?

He was deported, for having been a Communist in the 1930s, and the Supreme Court ruled in Flemming v. Nestor that workers have no contractual right to the benefits they paid for.

A Social Security number's first three digits once showed what?

Issuing state: numbers were handed out from the Northeast westward, so the lowest of all, 001-01-0001, went to a woman in New Hampshire.

The most misused Social Security number ever, 078-05-1120, came from a sample card sold where?

In wallets at Woolworth: the maker slipped in a sample card bearing his secretary's real number, and over 40,000 people went on to report it as their own.

In June 2011, what change did the government make to the way Social Security numbers are assigned?

Randomized them. Scrambling the digits was meant to protect the number's integrity and to stretch the supply of nine-digit numbers available in every state.

Which number, like 000 and the 900s, never begins a Social Security number?

666 has never been issued in that position, and the Social Security Administration kept it off the list even when it released previously unused numbers in 2011.

In 1936, Social Security relied on which federal agency to register America's workers?

The Post Office. Applications went out through 45,000 local post offices, 1,074 of which doubled as typing centers that made up the cards on the spot.

The Social Security Administration is headquartered just outside which city?

Baltimore. Washington had no building able to hold the mountain of paper records in 1936, so the files went to a harborside building there, and the agency later settled in suburban Woodlawn.

Starting in 1984, which group lost its exemption from Social Security taxes, despite a lasting myth that it still doesn't pay?

Members of Congress have paid in since January 1984, along with the president, federal judges and all newly hired federal workers, who until then had a separate pension system.

The Social Security Administration publishes a yearly list, drawn from its card applications, of the most popular what?

Baby names. Parents now routinely apply for a number when a child is born, a habit that took hold after a 1986 tax law required numbers for dependents, so each year's newborn names reach the agency.

By law, the money in Social Security's trust funds can be invested only in what?

US Treasury securities, mostly special bonds issued only to federal trust funds, so the program's reserves are in effect lent to the rest of the government.

Before its first monthly check, Social Security was widened in 1939 to cover whom?

Workers' families. The 1939 amendments added benefits for wives, children and survivors, turning a worker's pension into family insurance a year before the first monthly checks.

President Eisenhower signed which major addition to Social Security in 1956?

Disability benefits. At first they went only to workers aged 50 to 64, but the age limit was dropped in 1960, opening them to disabled workers of any age.

Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare into law in 1965 at whose presidential library?

Harry Truman's library in Independence, Missouri, hosted the signing: he had pushed for national health insurance twenty years earlier, and Johnson handed him the first Medicare card.

Which Medicare component covers hospital, skilled nursing and hospice services?

Part A, the hospital insurance, is the piece most people get without a premium because they paid for it through payroll taxes while working; Part B, for doctors' bills, charges a monthly premium.

Retirement planners long called Social Security one leg of a "three-legged stool"; what were the other two legs?

Pensions and personal savings. The image, traced to a 1949 speech by an insurance actuary, was meant to stress that Social Security alone was never supposed to be enough.

Before 1975, how were Social Security benefits raised?

Acts of Congress, passed irregularly: beneficiaries waited a full decade for the first general increase, in 1950, and raises became automatic only in 1975.

Social Security's annual raise is tied to the change in what?

Consumer prices, as tracked by the CPI-W, the index for urban wage earners and clerical workers; the raise can only go up, so in a year when prices fall, checks simply stay the same.

Which economist led the 1981 commission formed to rescue Social Security's finances?

Alan Greenspan. His bipartisan panel reported with the retirement fund reckoned to be only months from running dry, and its rescue plan became law that same year.

Many retirees assume they are drawing down their own account; who mostly funds the Social Security checks they receive?

Today's workers. Payroll taxes collected from current paychecks are paid straight out to current beneficiaries, and only the surplus is banked in the trust funds.

Who pays both halves of the 12.4% Social Security payroll tax?

The self-employed pay the worker's 6.2 percent and the employer's 6.2 percent themselves, though the tax code lets them deduct the employer's half from their income.

The Medicare payroll tax differs from Social Security's in having no what?

Earnings cap: the Medicare tax's 1.45 percent applies to every dollar of wages, and high earners owe an extra 0.9 percent on pay above $200,000, while the Social Security tax stops at a yearly ceiling.

Workers earn up to four Social Security credits a year; how many qualify them for retirement benefits?

40 credits, or about ten years of work. Extra credits beyond that add nothing: the size of the check depends on average earnings, not on how many credits were collected.

Social Security averages a worker's best 35 years; what fills in for missing years?

Zero earnings, which drag the average down; a few extra years of work, even late in life, can push the zeros out and raise the check.

What happens to a Social Security benefit left unclaimed past age 70?

It stops growing. Each year of delay past full retirement age adds 8 percent, so someone due at 67 collects 124 percent by waiting until 70, and nothing more after that.

What happens when someone claims Social Security before full retirement age but keeps earning a large paycheck?

Some benefits are withheld, $1 for every $2 earned above a yearly limit, but the money is not lost: at full retirement age the check is recalculated upward to credit the withheld months.

In 1945 about 42 workers paid Social Security taxes for each person collecting benefits; roughly how many did by 2013?

About 3. The ratio was 41.9 in 1945, 5.1 by 1960 and 2.8 by 2013, so each beneficiary now leans on far fewer paychecks.

On what basis can someone who never held a paying job still collect Social Security retirement benefits?

A spouse's work record. Husbands, wives and even ex-spouses can draw up to half of the worker's benefit without ever having paid a payroll tax themselves.

Which private-sector employees have had their own federal retirement system, separate from Social Security, since the 1930s?

Railroad workers. Their company pensions were being slashed in the Depression, so Congress gave them a national system just as Social Security began, and it still runs alongside it.

If Social Security's trust funds run dry in the 2030s as projected, what happens to benefits?

They shrink to what taxes cover. The 2024 and 2025 trustees' reports project the combined funds running out in 2034 or 2035, after which payroll taxes would still pay roughly four-fifths of scheduled benefits.

Which statesman created the world's first national old-age insurance program, in 1889?

Otto von Bismarck's Germany got there in 1889, but the tale that America's retirement age of 65 copied his own age is a myth: Germany first set it at 70, when he was 74.

In January 2025, the Social Security Fairness Act ended two rules that had cut benefits for which retirees?

Those with public pensions, such as teachers, firefighters and police whose jobs were outside Social Security: the act scrapped the Windfall Elimination Provision and the Government Pension Offset.

The 1965 law that created Medicare also created which other health program?

Medicaid, for people with low incomes, is paid for jointly with the states, unlike Medicare, so its rules differ depending on where a person lives.

Which means-tested program for aged, blind and disabled people did Congress hand to the Social Security Administration in 1972?

SSI, Supplemental Security Income, replaced a patchwork of state-run aid programs with one national payment, and it is financed from general tax revenue, not from Social Security's payroll tax.

Because touching it is said to end political careers, Social Security is nicknamed what of American politics?

The third rail carries the current on an electric railway, so touching it is deadly. The label is usually credited to House Speaker Tip O'Neill, though an aide of his seems to have coined it in 1982.

Which Russian-born novelist, a fierce critic of government welfare, nonetheless claimed Social Security in the 1970s?

Ayn Rand accepted both Social Security and Medicare in her final years, with help from a consultant who worked for her lawyers.

Which future Supreme Court justice won widowed fathers their Social Security survivor benefits in the Wiesenfeld case?

Ruth Bader Ginsburg won the case unanimously for a father whose wife, the family's main earner, had died in childbirth. Until then only widows could claim the benefit while raising a child.

Which religious community won an exemption from Social Security taxes in 1965 because its members object to insurance?

The Amish exemption at first covered only the self-employed, as an Amish carpenter with employees learned at the Supreme Court in 1982. Congress extended it to Amish employers and their Amish workers in 1988.

For about a quarter-century from 1946, Social Security cards carried which printed warning along the bottom edge?

Not for identification was dropped from new cards in the early 1970s, by which time the number had become America's de facto national ID.

When a 1986 tax law demanded Social Security numbers for them, seven million of what vanished from American returns?

Child dependents fell by seven million in the law's first year, because parents had simply been trusted on the count. Many of the missing children are thought never to have existed.

With more than 450 million issued since 1936, what happens to a Social Security number when its holder dies?

Never reassigned is the rule, and the agency says the present numbering system still has enough combinations to last several generations.

Which company's chief executive advertised his real Social Security number, then had his identity stolen 13 times?

LifeLock put its co-founder's number on billboards and in commercials, and regulators later fined the company $12 million for deceptive advertising.

On an American pay stub, the Social Security deduction labelled FICA stands for which law?

Federal Insurance Contributions Act became the name when Congress lifted the tax rules out of the Social Security Act and placed them in the federal tax code.

Which workers must pay both the employee and the employer halves of the Social Security tax themselves?

Self-employed people were brought into the program in the 1950s, and their double share is collected under a separate law known as SECA.

Under Social Security's pay-as-you-go design, where do the taxes collected from workers each year mainly go?

To today's retirees is the honest answer: a worker's taxes are not saved up in a fund of their own, so each generation pays for the one before it.

Which tax document do employers file with the Social Security Administration each year to report a worker's wages?

Form W-2 comes in six copies, and Copy A is the one the employer sends to the Social Security Administration.

Besides old-age pensions, the original Social Security Act created which other safety net, still run state by state?

Unemployment insurance was the Act's other big idea, and the Supreme Court upheld it on the very same day in 1937 as the old-age pensions.

Which company's punch-card machines tracked the first 26 million Social Security accounts in the 1930s?

IBM won the job, hailed as the biggest accounting operation of all time, and the steady government work helped carry the firm through the Depression.

Pensions for veterans of which conflict does the SSA's own history call America's first 'Social Security' program?

The Civil War pensions grew so large that by 1894 military pensions took 37% of the entire federal budget, though Confederate veterans were barred from them.

Which novelist ran for governor of California in 1934 on the EPIC plan, promising $50 monthly pensions?

Upton Sinclair took 37% of the vote as the Democratic nominee, and EPIC stood for End Poverty in California.

Which Revolutionary-era pamphleteer proposed an early old-age pension scheme in his work Agrarian Justice?

Thomas Paine wanted a 10% inheritance tax to pay yearly benefits to everyone aged 50 and over, an idea the SSA calls a forerunner of modern social insurance.

Which breakfast-named California movement of the 1930s wanted $30 a week for every jobless resident aged 50 or over?

Ham and Eggs wanted the money paid weekly in special state scrip, and its 1938 ballot measure lost only narrowly.

Which Republican nominee attacked the new Social Security Act during the 1936 election campaign and lost in a landslide?

Alf Landon, the governor of Kansas, argued the law treated Americans as lacking the foresight to save, and he carried only two states against Roosevelt.

Edwin Witte, often called the father of Social Security, built his career at which state's flagship university?

Wisconsin economists in Madison developed the 1934 proposal for a federal pension, and Witte ran the staff of the presidential committee that turned it into a bill.

The very first Social Security field office opened its doors in October 1936 in which Texas city?

Austin came first, and by mid-1937 another 150 field offices had opened and taken over the job of assigning numbers.

Which state received the lowest Social Security area numbers, starting at 001, even though Maine lies farther northeast?

New Hampshire was apparently put first so that number 001-01-0001 could be offered to its former governor, who headed the new program and declined the honor.

A long-running myth claims the two middle digits of a Social Security number secretly record the holder's what?

Race is not coded anywhere in the number. The middle pair is officially called the group number, but that only refers to numerical groups running from 01 to 99.

Which federal agency adopted the Social Security number as its own official identifier for individuals in 1962?

Internal Revenue Service adoption made the number a taxpayer ID, and in 1969 the Defense Department adopted it in place of military service numbers.

Since a 1983 law, every new Social Security card has had to be made of which material?

Banknote paper was required to make the cards harder to counterfeit, and a later law asked the agency to prototype a tamper-resistant plastic version.

Until a 1994 law restored its independence, the Social Security Administration sat inside which cabinet department?

Health and Human Services gave up the agency after Congress voted unanimously for independence, and Bill Clinton signed the act in the White House Rose Garden.

The welfare program AFDC, created by the original Social Security Act, was replaced in 1997 by which successor?

TANF, short for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, is more restrictive than the old program and caps most families at five years of benefits for life.

Before Congress renamed it, the bill that became the Social Security Act carried which word in place of 'Social'?

Economic was swapped out during debate in Congress; the newer phrase had first been used in America by reformer Abraham Epstein and his lobbying group.

People born from 1917 to 1921, caught by a 1977 fix to Social Security's inflation formula, are said to fall in what?

The notch exists because Congress phased out an accidental double adjustment for inflation over five years instead of ending it overnight.

In Social Security's benefit formula, what are the dollar thresholds called where the replacement rate steps down?

Bend points split a worker's average earnings into three slices, replaced at 90, 32 and 15 percent, which tilts the formula toward lower earners.

Social Security runs the largest system of appeal hearings in the United States, decided by which officials?

Administrative law judges hear claimants whose applications were turned down, and most of their caseload involves disability claims.

Which Supreme Court justice wrote the 1937 opinion that upheld Social Security's old-age benefits?

Benjamin Cardozo wrote for a 7-2 majority that Congress may tax and spend for the general welfare, and he also wrote the companion ruling handed down the same day.

Which Republican, later wartime ambassador to Britain, did Roosevelt pick as Social Security's first chairman?

John Winant ran the new program until 1937, and in 1941 he took over the London embassy from Joseph P. Kennedy, staying through the rest of the war.

Which cabinet officer serves as managing trustee of the Social Security trust funds, with the job of investing them?

Treasury Secretary is one of six trustees; the panel also seats two other cabinet members, the program's commissioner and two appointees from the public.

Which federal agency tracks the consumer prices that decide each year's Social Security cost-of-living adjustment?

Bureau of Labor Statistics figures now set the raise automatically, where once every increase in benefits needed a special act of Congress.

Which European country's totalization agreement with the United States was the first to take effect, in 1978?

Italy led the way, and such agreements spare people who work in two countries from paying into both pension systems on the same earnings.

Which professionals in private practice were the last brought into Social Security, in 1965, after lawyers and dentists?

Doctors were left out when other independent professionals joined in the 1950s, and came in through the same law that created Medicare.

Social Security retirement benefits are suspended once a recipient spends more than 30 continuous days where?

In prison after a conviction, a retiree's own payments stop, though a dependent spouse or children can go on receiving theirs.

Which candidate made a 'lock box' for Social Security part of his campaign in the 2000 presidential election?

Al Gore borrowed the idea from Senate proposals of 1999 that would have blocked any bill adding to a Social Security deficit, none of which passed.

Which rule, abolished in 2000 for people past full retirement age, used to cut the benefits of seniors who kept working?

The earnings test was lifted by the Senior Citizens' Freedom to Work Act, though it still applies to people who claim before full retirement age.