Mitt Romney’s recent decision to pick Congressman Paul Ryan as his running mate has brought Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security to the forefront of national dialogue. As a child, Paul Ryan received survivor’s benefits from the Social Security Administration, a fact that has been much discussed in the media lately. “It was a tough time for our family, and Social Security was there to help us when we needed the help,” Ryan told the Associated Press in 2005. Yet Ryan has focused his Congressional career on slashing entitlement programs and privatizing Social Security.
Paul Ryan and I have a lot more in common than he would probably like to admit. My father died when I was eight, leaving my mother with seven children, five of them under 12 years old. My father had been a high earner who paid significant amounts into the Social Security system before his death, like Paul Ryan’s father. Although my mother ran her own small business, she could not support our family on her own. In the 1970s she received $1500 a month in Social Security survivor’s benefits for our family of eight. Despite this government aid and my mother’s income, our house occasionally faced foreclosure, we ate canned food without labels from discount bins at supermarkets, and the family would cram into one room to sleep on nights when the utilities were cut – this was before Minnesotahad established a cold weather rule. But our Social Security benefits ensured a modicum of stability. Without those benefits my mother would not have been able to provide for our basic needs. With them, she created a home where esteem and self-actualization, to borrow terms from Maslow’s Hierarchy, were possible.
Today, five of us are college graduates. Three have post-graduate diplomas, and five own their own business. One of my siblings has traveled to over 100 countries. Paul Ryan used his Social Security benefits to attend college.
The survivor’s benefits paid to us as children have been repaid many times over by the taxes my siblings and our corporations have paid as adults, and by the jobs our small companies have created. Over my career, I have paid Social Security taxes for at least 750 employees. The Federal government invested in me, and it invested in Paul Ryan, and those investments have returned manifold interest.
Despite his personal enrichment from Social Security survivor’s benefits, Paul Ryan is building his career on dismantling our national entitlement programs. Since 1935, our government has helped widows like my mother, and Paul Ryan’s mother, rear their children after a family tragedy. If Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan win the election, where will American families turn?
