To ensure retirement security, let's start by expanding Social Security.NHUnionLeader [View all]

by Martin O'Malley

Nearly a century ago, during the depths of the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt joined forces with John Winant, New Hampshire’s Republican governor, to establish Social Security.

With Gov. Winant acting as the program’s first chairman, they sought to deliver President Roosevelt’s promise that — after a life of hard labor — no elderly American should be forced to languish in poverty.

Today in America, we have lost sight of this goal. The fallout from the financial crisis and the legacy of trickle-down economics has cut deeply into public pensions and families’ retirement savings. We are facing a national retirement crisis, as nearly one in three Americans — and more than one in two under the age of 30 — now has no retirement savings at all.

This is not our American Dream. As a nation, we must act to ensure the retirement security of American families. And we should start by expanding Social Security benefits — not cutting them or merely “enhancing them” — to provide a foundation for a more secure retirement to all those who have worked hard to achieve it. >>>

http://www.unionleader.com/article/20150825/OPINION02/150829657/1068/news0606