Squared Away Blog

Created in the 1930s, Social Security’s spousal benefit – it’s half of a retired husband’s benefit – was the way to compensate housewives for the work of raising children. The world has changed, but Social Security hasn’t been modified to reflect the rise of the full-time, working mother. Today, married women frequently have earned enough to collect Social Security based on their own employment histories, rather than a spousal benefit. The problem comes when their earnings are reduced – and ultimately their Social Security benefits – because they disrupted their career paths and sacrificed pay raises to care for their children. Single motherhood has also become very common, which means that a wide swath of women have no access to…

Source: U.S. Social Security Administration poster, 1954. When Social Security was created in the 1930s, wives were mainly full-time homemakers, with their pension benefits based on their breadwinner husbands’ earnings. But wives went to work in droves after Social Security’s passage. Today, women make up nearly half of the U.S. labor force.  Yet the program’s design remains the same, with the result being a steady decline in married couples’ replacement rates – the percentage of the combined earnings of two working spouses that Social Security replaces when both retire. A study by the Center for Retirement Research found that the replacement rate for couples has declined from 50 percent for married couples born in the early 1930s to around 45…

A third of the people who receive federal disability benefits have no income other than their benefit checks. And given their serious medical conditions, their death rate is much higher than that of the general population. In such a vulnerable group, small increases in their disability checks produce big results, finds a new study funded by Social Security, which administers the federal program. For individuals receiving about $10,400 a year in average benefits, for example, an additional $1,000 per year would cut their mortality rate by up to a third of a percentage point in the first four years after their benefits start. The researchers found similar, positive results for disabled workers with families. When the combined benefits paid to…

The Internet has become a necessity in our modern society. Yet 42 million Americans live in areas of the country where the connections to technology are subpar or, in extreme cases, nonexistent. At the same time, federal and state governments are increasingly relying on people to interact with them online. This mismatch between a growing reliance on the Internet and a lack of easy access is a problem for one especially vulnerable population: people with disabilities. Without access to a fast reliable Internet connection, it can be very difficult to apply online to Social Security for disability benefits or to file the periodic reports the agency requires of people who are receiving them. In a recent report, the Urban Institute found that counties…

Conversations about the vast White-Black disparity in U.S. wealth may acknowledge its roots in slavery. But four economists have now made the case quantitatively by charting changes in the wealth gap since the Civil War. The political and societal influences on wealth accumulation between 1860 and today are multifaceted but the basic trajectory is this: The wealth gap shrank by roughly half during the Civil War era from 1860 to 1870 and dropped in half again between 1870 and 1920, the researchers said in their recent paper. The decades of improvements in Blacks’ per capita wealth, compared with Whites’, occurred despite a quick end to Reconstruction after the Civil War and the rise of Jim Crow laws around 1890 that…

Nearly 10 million seniors are having difficulty paying for housing – and the problem is growing. Housing experts typically recommend that people keep their housing costs below a third of their income. But one in three Americans over age 65 are spending more than that on their rent or  mortgage payment, utilities, property insurance, maintenance, and other housing costs, according to a new study, “Housing America’s Older Adults,” by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. If the senior housing problem hasn’t reached crisis proportions yet, Jennifer Molinsky, who wrote the center’s report, predicted that it will if nothing is done to increase the supply of housing structures that are both affordable and age-friendly to meet the needs of aging baby boomers…

The fact that the richest Americans are grabbing such a big slice of the pie isn’t exactly breaking news. What is news is that Wall Street is getting nervous about it. Moody’s Investors Service, a private watchdog for the federal government’s fiscal soundness, has concluded that inequality has reached the point that it threatens a system already being strained by increases in the federal debt. But Moody’s also noted that inequality is contributing to slower economic growth, which further aggravates inequality. The high level of U.S. inequality today “sets us apart” from Canada, Australia, and several European countries, Moody’s said in an October report, “Widening Income Inequality Will Weigh on U.S. Credit Profile.” Moody’s central concern is how inequality w…

The Greek poet Hesiod, circa 700 B.C. Saving for retirement is a modern-day imperative, but even the ancient Greek poet Hesiod – quoted in a new study – advised us not to tarry: Do not put off till tomorrow and the day after; for a sluggish worker does not fill his barn. So what about procrastinators, who place more importance on today’s enjoyment than on preparing for the future?  The new study asked whether people with this personality trait make different decisions about retirement saving than non-procrastinators and found that they do. Up to one in five people were procrastinators in the study’s data base of more than 155,000 workers at numerous employers.  The researchers identified procrastinators in the sam…