HuffPost : Social Security finished Elderly Poverty : Between 1925 and 1932 in Connecticut, New York and Wisconsin, nearly half of elderly people lived on less than $25 per month, which was "insufficient subsistence income."

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Excerpts :

A third in Connecticut had no income at all, the rate may have been close to 80 percent. But by 1974, elderly poverty had fallen below 15 percent and by 1995 it had dropped to 10.

"Our analysis suggests that the growth in Social Security can indeed explain all of the decline in poverty among the elderly over this period," concluded Gary Engelhardt and Jonathan Gruber in a 2004 National Bureau of Economic Research report on the program.

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"Most people, unless they were well-to-do, had two options," said University of Pennsylvania historian Michael B. Katz. "One was living with their kids, the other was the poorhouse."

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Huffington Post
Jim DeMint: '69.5 Million Americans' Are Dependent On Government
By Ryan Grim
Marchr 4, 2013

Jim DeMint: '69.5 Million Americans' Are Dependent On Government

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