Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor in chief of Current Affairs

Magazine. My guest today is Alex Lawson, executive director of Social Security Works and

convening member of the Strengthen Social Security Coalition. Alex Lawson, thank you for joining us on

Curate Affairs. Thank you very much for having me. We're talking today because people do not

talk enough about social security. Republicans want to kill social security, but they don't like

to talk about Social Security,

partly because I think they know that the conversation is a losing one for them.

But that does not change the fact that they are working every minute of every day,

slowly behind the scenes to destroy Social Security. And you, Alex Lawson,

are trying to prevent that from happening. I want to start, however, by asking you, let's go back

in time a little bit, and let's just reassess and think a little bit about the achievement that

Social Security represents.

And perhaps you could tell us a little bit about the fight to get it and the fact that we didn't always live in an era where we had this important benefit.

Yeah, it's a great question, great part of the story.

Back when Social Security was created,

you do have to actually look a little bit like further before that because everyone sort of

knows the story of Social Security was created in the Great Depression. At that time,

the country was facing catastrophe. And, you know, at that time, one and two seniors

were living in poverty. So 50% of seniors were living in poverty. There are poor houses in every

state in the country except for one, New Mexico, which I don't know why, but it is true that there was not one

in New Mexico. Poor houses are a concept that we don't even have in our brains anymore.

Poor houses were debtors prisons. It's where you went if you ran out of money and didn't have

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