Social Security: The Key To Your Future (1955)
Here’s a great infomercial about Social Security. It was made in 1955. Back then, the Social Security tax rate was only 2%. It was raised to 4% in 1956, to 6% in 1961, and it is now at 12.40% plus 2.90% for Medicare, for a total of 15.30%.
… for the first time in 1951 or in 1955. Perhaps you remember taking the step Tom Reynolds is taking here, applying for his Social Security card. Tom Reynolds is self-employed, and like about 8 million other self-employed people he is covered by Social Security. He reports his earnings every year when he pays his federal income tax.
Perhaps for you, as for him, old age is a long way off and when you reach 65 you may decide to continue working. Your Social Security account doesn’t mean that you intend to retire. Once the account has been opened, the key to your future is in your own hands.
This is the key. Behind it are monthly payments that will be waiting for you when you retire after 65 or after 72, whether you retire or not. They will also be ready for your family when you die, whether you reach 65 or not.
Or suppose that this is your office, a big white barn on a mid-western farm. Suppose you’re a farm hand like Alvin Decker here or a self-employed farm operator, then you, too, probably are covered by the new Social Security law. Old age insurance will be mighty comforting when you are no longer fit for work like this. That’s why you need to get your Social Security card now.
Where? At your Social Security office or, go to the post office if there’s no Social Security office near your home. At the post office you can get an application for your Social Security card. Your card will be sent to you by mail after you fill in this application and mail it. If you work for someone else, show the card to your employer, he will need it on payday, for he must deduct from your salary 2% of your earnings as your share of the cost of Social Security. On Alwin Decker’s $50 salary this comes to $1.
If, like Millard Anderson, you earn $50 or more cash wages in a three month calendar quarter of the year from household work from any one employer, then your job, too, is covered by Social Security. You’re billing a regular monthly income to add to your savings for a happier future. That’s what this card means, in your hands and in the hands of your employer.
For the entire success of the program, as far as you are concerned, depends to a large extent on your employer’s co-operation. This booklet tells your employer how easy it is for her to do her part. It’s just a matter of filling out a brief form once every 3 months, putting the required amount of money into an envelope, and then mailing it. By this co-operation, your employer is helping to ensuring that like Millard Anderson, you will have a monthly income when you are ready to retire.
Yes, household workers, along with most other people who work for a living, are now covered by Social Security. Social Security district offices today are busier than ever before. Millions more workers are ensured today than ever before. The new workers whom these Social Security office workers are serving include self-employed architects, accountants, engineers and funeral directors, self-employed farm operators, employees of state and local governments and most people who work in private households or on farms.
If you can’t go to the Social Security office, the Social Security office goes to you in the person of a field representative from the nearest Social Security district office. He makes regular visits to a central place in small towns. You can find out when he will be in your community by writing or telephoning the district office. And if, because of age or illness, you are unable to come to him while he is there, he will be glad to call on you.
Social Security is a highly personal matter and the job of the representatives in the district offices is to maintain personal contact between you and your Social Security administration. Behind them stands an organization that keeps track of your earnings through the years. Its headquarters are here in the Candler building, in Baltimore, Maryland. The central accounting and book keeping system in this building enables the government to fulfill its part in your Social Security. More than 117 million personal records are listed here. Names, Social Security account numbers and birthdays of 915,000 people named Brown, 557,000 people named Davis, 742,000 people named Jones and more than a million people named Smith.
If you have a Social Security card, your name is here. Your name, and enough other information to identify you positively, regardless of how many other people have names identical with yours. These bookkeeping operations are as modern and efficient as mechanical ingenuity can make them. They have to be, to handle nearly three quarters of a million personal records every day. Keeping them up to date year after year, and then when you retire, figuring the amount of your payments quickly.
These are some of the reasons less than 2 cents of the Social Security tax dollar is all that it costs to administer the entire old age and survivors insurance program. Year by year, your wage credits build up; credits that earn security for you and your family. When the time comes, whether it’s 30 years from now or tomorrow, those credits will be converted into checks… checks like these, but with your name on them. And every month these checks are put into envelopes by machines and they go out to people like this. The amount of your check depends on how much you earned. The maximum any family can get is $200 a month. Alistair Steel retired and gets 117 dollars a month. Jarlyn Butcher, a widow gets $60 a month. Nancy Ferguson, dependent parent, gets $49 a month based on the earning of the daughter whom she survives and who was her chief support. And, Alice Winton, widowed mother of 2 children gets the 200 dollar monthly maximum until her children are 18.
To get checks like these one day for yourself you must do two things. First, like young Alwen Rush here, you must apply for a Social Security card. The second thing you must do for yourself, as Charles Share here is doing, is to file your claim for benefit payments. Whether you are claiming old-age retirement payments or survivor’s payments as a widow, child or parent.
Your Social Security card stands for your future security, for it identifies your Social Security account. Over the years, as your earnings are credited to your account under the number on your card, you will be building a foundation of security for yourself and your family.
As a person who is building old age and survivor’s insurance protection, or as a beneficiary, you are entitled to information, guidance and service in all matters that concern it. That service is available to you and without charge behind doors like these. Doors to more than 500 district offices throughout the nation. Behind those doors, you will find men and women like these; carefully selected and thoroughly trained. People working for you. Like Margaret Oliver, helping you to get the most out of your Social Security.
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