Today marks the 77th anniversary of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signing the Social Security Act into law, creating arguably America’s most successful social program. “We can never insure one hundred percent of the population against one hundred percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life, but we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against the loss of a job and against poverty-ridden old age,” FDR said on that day.

Today, as this table from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows, Social Security is keeping more than 20 million Americans out of poverty:

As CBPP’s Kathy Ruffing noted, Social Security is “the single most important source of income for its elderly beneficiaries, contributing on average two-thirds of income for recipients over age 65. For more than one-third of them, Social Security constitutes 90 percent or more of income…Without Social Security, nearly half of elderly Americans would live below the official poverty level; instead, fewer than 10 percent do.”

Conservatives — aided by a media content to misinform about the program’s finances — love scaremongering about Social Security, despite the fact that it is exceedingly easy to secure its solvency for decades to come. Any talk of cutting its benefits ignores the very real impact that it has on elderly, disabled, and young Americans.

Following the rise of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) to the vice-presidential slot on the Republican ticket, most of the discussion has focused on the content and consequences of the budgets he engineered for the House GOP. But Ryan has also been a vociferous critique of the Federal Reserve and its Chairman Ben Bernanke. Given the Fed’s considerable power to effect the health of the economy and the level of employment — and its ongoing reticence to sufficiently act on that power — it’s worth calling more attention to Ryan’s views on monetary policy, which are every bit as radical as his views on government taxation and spending.

Ryan has repeatedly (and wrongly) predicted inflation. Throughout the recession Ryan reacted to monetary stimulus by repeatedly warning that inflation is just around the corner. That inflation remains at near-historic lows while unemployment has hit near-historic highs has apparently left the vice-presidential nominee undeterred. Ryan even called on the Fed to raise interest rates to combat this predicted inflation, even though increased rates would add one more drag on the already struggling economy.

Ryan wants to end the dual mandate. In 1978, Congress passed the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act, which directed the Fed to concern itself equally with keeping prices stable and unemployment low. Ryan sponsored a bill to repeal Humphrey-Hawkins and direct the Fed to concern itself solely with inflation. This reinforces the point that Ryan wants to put a thumb on the scales in favor of price stability and ignoring the need to lower unemployment. But Ryan’s argument is also based on bad history: As The Atlantic’s Matthew O’Brien notes, the period since the passage of Humphrey-Hawkins has been one of both unusually low inflation and unusually low fluctuations in the level of inflation.

Ryan is a hard-money crank. In 2009, Ryan called for the U.S. dollar to be benchmarked to a commodity standard. This is essentially a gold standard, except the gold is replaced by an alternative basket of commodities. It would also carry all of the same problems. It would shackle the Fed’s ability to assist the economy in a recession or depression. It would also drive interest rates up or down depending on how prices of those benchmarked commodities behave, regardless of whether such rate changes make sense in the context of the overall economy.

Ryan’s monetary policy hails from Ayn Rand. ThinkProgress has already reported on Ryan’s professed infatuation with the radical right-wing novelist, and how her stances have influenced his budget policy — an infatuation he has since tried to disavow. Yesterday, Slate’s Dave Weigel caught a linkage between Rand’s writings and Ryan’s monetary views as well. In 2005, Ryan told the Atlas Society, “I always go back to, you know, Francisco d’Anconia’s speech, at Bill Taggart’s wedding, on money when I think about monetary policy.” That speech is from Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, and features one of her protagonists praising gold as “objective value,” and condemning paper money as the destruction of value and the tool of “looters.”

As economist Mark Thoma wrote, “I don’t understand why someone with such a clownish views is lauded as a policy wonk.” But the Republicans’ presidential candidiate, Mitt Romney, has also shown a good deal of sympathy with Ryan’s views — views which, as O’Brien dryly notes, basically boil down to worrying that “the Federal Reserve will try to bring unemployment down.”

Our guest blogger is Michael Linden, Director for Tax and Budget Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Now that Mitt Romney has selected Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) to be his running mate, Ryan’s budget plan moves to the center of the presidential campaign. Ryan’s budget is a near-pure distillation of right-wing economic ideology. It would slash basic economic investments, end the Medicare guarantee, decimate the social safety-net, and dramatically cut taxes for the richest households.

If you find it hard to believe that the Republican Party’s budget chief would put forth such a callous plan, you are not alone. When the plan is described to ordinary voters, they literally do not believe that a lawmaker would propose such a plan.

But now that the budget chief is also running to be the Vice President, it’s time for Romney to answer some basic, but critical, questions about how his vision and his running mate’s vision fit together. Here are five:

1. You want to amend the Constitution to require balanced federal budgets, but haven’t explained how to achieve that goal. Ryan’s budget plan, meanwhile, doesn’t balance for at least 30 years. What parts of Ryan’s budget would you change to make it comply with your call for a balanced budget amendment, or is that about how long you think it’ll take to balance the budget?

2. You’ve criticized President Obama for including cuts to Medicare as part of the Affordable Care Act, but Ryan’s budget plan contains the very same cuts. Does that mean Ryan also “robs” from Medicare? (Today, Romney indicated that the answer may be “yes.”)

3. Ryan’s original budget plan included a proposal for privatizing Social Security. Is that something you support?

4. In the past, you’ve criticized Obama for not embracing the Bowles-Simpson deficit commission’s recommendations. But Ryan actually served on that commission and he voted against the plan. Was Ryan wrong to vote against Bowles-Simpson?

5. You’ve proposed an overall spending cap. But even if you adopted all of the enormous spending cuts in Ryan’s budget, you still wouldn’t comply with the cap because you’ve also called for $1.8 trillion in additional defense spending above Ryan’s levels. What else would you cut in order to hit your proposed target?