Why You Should Celebrate Social Security’s 75th Anniversary

Surely, Social Security is important enough to merit multiple anniversaries.

So it is that over the weekend we celebrated 75 years of monthly benefit checks. The agency sent its very first on January 31, 1940, to one Ida May Fuller in the amount of $22.54. (That’s $372.81 in 2014 dollars for members of the Good Old Days Club.)

Aficionados may recall that Social Security’s formal 75thanniversary was held five years ago to mark enactment of the program in 1935, during the first of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s unprecedented four presidential terms.

And some sticklers out there might note that you already missed the chance to raise a glass with me in January 2012. That was 75 years after the agency’s first lump-sum payment, made to a Cleveland streetcar worker named Ernest Ackerman.

The 17¢ Ackerman received isn’t much even by today’s inflated standards, but it represented a most impressive return. Ackerman, as it happened, retired one day after Social Security began and had a nickel withheld from his check. His payment less than two years later represented a return of 240%. That was a real 17¢ too, since benefits weren’t taxed back then....