Impact on Hispanic Americans

Critics of President Bush's plan to privatize Social Security cite the negative impact it will have on the most vulnerable Americans - women, widows, disabled, children, and people of color, including Hispanics and African Americans. Congresswoman Tubbs Jones and Senator Harry Reid, strong advocates of Hispanic-Americans, cite a US Census statistic that shows that for 41 percent of elderly Hispanics, Social Security is their only source of retirement income and thus any privatization will hurt them a lot.

Background articles

Social Security privatization to hurt African Americans and Hispanics

Privatizing Social Security will be hard on the Latino community

Widows, women, and children to be hurt most from privatization

Hispanics benefit from Social Security in two ways:

1. Benefits keep pace with inflation and cannot run out no matter how long one lives
2. Social Security's progressive benefit formula ensures that individuals who earned lower wages and/or had fewer years in the workforce receive larger monthly benefit amounts, in proportion to the wages they earned and the taxes they paid, than other workers do. Since Hispanic retirees on average have lower wages and fewer covered years of employment and also live longer than other workers, they receive benefit levels that return the taxes they paid in fewer years than average retirees do, while also receiving benefits for more years than the average retiree.

Recognizing that Hispanics are the most vulnerable demographic group with regard to Social Security, the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), the largest national Hispanic civil rights and advocacy organization in the U.S., is taking a more guarded approach by merely welcoming the President's call for a public debate on how to ensure the long-term solvency of a program that has contributed so much to the financial well-being of Americans over the last several decades. Hispanics in the United States are still finding their political roots and struggling to find a home in either party. While many Hispanics favor the family values often emphasized by the GOP, they support greater involvement of government in public programs like Social Security. Hispanics supported President Bush in 2004 election in record numbers and many are already feeling betrayed.

"We are acutely concerned about the future of Social Security. And by the year 2030, the number of Hispanic elderly will triple to 11.2% of the nation's senior population. Equally important, Hispanics will make up 17.1% of all workers in 2030, making them an ever-growing proportion of those supporting the Social Security system. It is clear that Hispanics have a profound stake in this debate," stated Janet Murguia, NCLR President and CEO.

The National Committee to Preserve Social Security & Medicare says that guaranteed Social Security benefits are especially valuable for Hispanics because, "...(Hispanics) tend to have fewer alternative resources, become disabled at higher rates, and disproportionately rely on Social Security's family benefit features." Congresswoman Loretta Sánchez, writing in Hispanic Business, agrees, "Reform of the Social Security system is imperative, but privatization is not the answer. It contains an X factor - an unknown variable - that could potentially contradict a universal rule of fiscal responsibility: You should only risk funds you can afford to lose."

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