Social Security Quotes

Business and industry are already operating under heavy burdens: and that old –age insurance would cause more unemployment.

-
Allen Treadway (R-Mass), the ranking minority member of the Ways and Means committee.

The Senate Finance Committee stands between us and stands between businesses that are almost prostrate, stands between us and destruction, and we feel that we can come to you for support and for protection. You will have no taxes to pay anything with if you do not keep American industry alive, and we have a right to depend on you gentlemen to do it, no matter what propositions, impractical propositions, are brought up.

-
Elon H. Hooker, president of the Manufacturing Chemists Association. Senate Finance Committee hearings.

We are creating an enormous bureaucracy to take care of problem the magnitude and significance of which we really do not understand…. This is a problem so far-reaching, so important, and so long in duration that it should not be as an emergency measure, without the opportunity for review and consideration, so as to minimize the inevitable tinkering that will come.

-
Elon H. Hooker, president of the Manufacturing Chemists Association. Senate Finance Committee hearings.

We believe that this measure, if adopted, means at best an annuity of doubtful value for the aged of the future and unemployment benefit of doubtful value for the normally temporarily unemployed of the future--at the terrific cost of retarding the reemployment of those who are unemployed today.

-
John Harrington, general counsel for the Illinois Manufacturing Association. Senate Finance Committee hearings.

I fear it may end the progress of a great country and bring its people to the level of the average European. It will furnish delicious food and add great strength to the political demagogue. It will assist in driving worthy and courageous men from public life. It will discourage and defeat the American trait of thrift. It will go a long way toward destroying American initiative and courage.

-
Senator Daniel O. Hastings (R-DE) speaks against Social Security in 1935.
292401/01/1935 | Full Details | Law(s): Social Security Act of 1935

[Social Security is] the end of democracy.

-
The American Liberty League pamphlet. 1935.
293201/01/1935 | Full Details | Law(s): Social Security Act of 1935

Pages