Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic

dimensions of our lives and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolfe. Today we're going to

have two segments, one on the Social Security system and the mess that it's in, and the second one

on that train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, which demands much more analysis than it's

gotten.

And then we'll turn to the way the United States deals with its colony in Puerto Rico.

We have a graduate of the University of Puerto Rico here to discuss with us what all that means.

So let's get to it.

The Social Security system is like a window onto U.S. capitalism, and it's a window we should look through because it'll teach us a lot about

how this system works. You may have noticed that President Biden in his State of the Union

message accused Republicans of wanting to cut social security

benefits, which traditionally the Republican Party has tried to do. And he is saying that he will

defend it, and that's what the Democrats usually say, and we're going to see whether any of that is true. But the fight

has been going on for a long time. Many young people in America rightly worry or suspect that

that program won't be there when they get old enough to be qualified for it. You know, the whole idea of Social

Security, which was won by the American working class during the Great Depression. Yeah,

at a time when the government had a lot less money going for it than it has now, we were

able as a nation to say we could and we would honor the people who have given

a lifetime of work at the job, using their brains and muscles to produce what the country

needed. At home, raising families, maintaining households.

Yeah, we thought if you've done that for 30 or 40 years, the minimum respect owed to you

is to not make you either destitute as an elderly retired person or a burden on your children's families. And so we created social security. But the people

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