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?

Our guest blogger is Kristina Costa, a research assistant with the Doing What Works project and the economic policy department at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Since Saturday’s announcement of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) as Mitt Romney’s running mate, a good deal of attention has been focused on what Ryan’s so-called “Path to Prosperity” budget would mean for programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

But Ryan’s proposed budget path also aims to reduce federal discretionary expenditures — including money spent on defense — to just 3.75 percent of GDP by 2050. That means dramatic cuts to programs for the poor, to primary and secondary education, to public safety, and to infrastructure spending. The Ryan budget proposes spending 25 percent less than the White House’s proposed budget does on transportation programs — just $78 billion per year.

America’s national infrastructure is famously in disrepair, with a GAO study finding as many as one in four bridges nationwide “deficient” in some way. A Center for American progress analysis earlier this year concluded that meeting our national infrastructure repair and improvement needs would require at least $129 billion per year in new investment, above current levels, for the next 10 years; other reports have put that number even higher.

Infrastructure spending creates jobs in construction and other sectors — every $1 billion in federal highway expenditures in 2007 supported as many as 30,000 jobs. And national infrastructure does more than move people — it moves stuff. While freight infrastructure — rail, inland waterways, and ports — may seem prosaic in comparison to wide-open highways or advanced high-speed rail, the goods movement system is of vital importance to our economy. And, like so many better-known examples of infrastructure failure and decay, America’s freight infrastructure is in trouble.

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Our guest blogger is Joanna Venator, an intern with the economic policy team at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

In its latest unemployment release, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the national unemployment rate remained “essentially unchanged” at 8.3 percent. Twenty-seven states reported unemployment rate increases.

Though job creation remains sluggish, the federal government has been phasing out unemployment benefits since the beginning of 2012. Since January, thirty-one states and the District of Columbia have aged out of the Extended Benefits (EB) program, a federal program which provides aid for unemployed workers in states with extended periods of unemployment.

This has resulted in more than half a million people losing benefits. The last state to receive these benefits, Idaho, was phased out of the system last Saturday.

Why are these states no longer eligible for extended benefits? Is it because they no longer have high unemployment? Unfortunately, no. Many of these states have unemployment rates even higher than the national average, including some with rates over 10.0 percent.

But eligibility for EB is determined both by a state’s unemployment rate and a comparison of the unemployment rate during the past three years. States are falling out of the program not due to significantly lower unemployment rates, but instead because unemployment has been consistently high since 2009, with today’s rate an “improvement” by comparison.

The loss of Extended Benefits is a huge blow to unemployed workers. Losing 13 to 20 weeks of UI benefits is the equivalent of losing $3900 to $6000 of income on average.

Based on U.S. Census estimates of income for unemployed workers and the federal poverty level for a four-person family, a loss of $6000 for unemployed workers would push around 1.4 million people into poverty. U.S. Census data shows that UI benefits (federal and state combined) kept 3.2 million people above the poverty line in 2010.

Vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s budget — which gives massive tax breaks to corporations and the wealthiest Americans, drastically slashes funding for social programs, decimates state budgets, and still ends up ultimately raising the deficit — has garnered critics ranging from Catholic bishops to top economists. Yesterday, former President Reagan’s budget adviser, David Stockman, added his voice to the dissent.

Stockman, who was the director of the Office of Management and Budget during the Reagan administration, blasted Ryan’s budget as an “empty conservative sermon” and “fairy tale” in an op-ed published in the New York Times:

The Ryan Plan boils down to a fetish for cutting the top marginal income-tax rate for “job creators” — i.e. the superwealthy — to 25 percent and paying for it with an as-yet-undisclosed plan to broaden the tax base. Of the $1 trillion in so-called tax expenditures that the plan would attack, the vast majority would come from slashing popular tax breaks for employer-provided health insurance, mortgage interest, 401(k) accounts, state and local taxes, charitable giving and the like, not to mention low rates on capital gains and dividends.

…In short, Mr. Ryan’s plan is devoid of credible math or hard policy choices. And it couldn’t pass even if Republicans were to take the presidency and both houses of Congress. Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan have no plan to take on Wall Street, the Fed, the military-industrial complex, social insurance or the nation’s fiscal calamity and no plan to revive capitalist prosperity — just empty sermons.

Stockman’s scathing critique of the Ryan budget also notes that it preserves an unnecessarily large national security budget that currently “saddle[s] our bankrupt nation” and continues to eschew regulations for “dangerous” Wall Street banks.

Stockman isn’t the first Republican to oppose Ryan’s extreme budget plan. Reps. Denny Rehberg (R-MT) and David McKinley (R-WV) have refused to support Ryan’s budget because they recognize its draconian cuts to Medicare and Medicaid will negatively impact residents in their states. Donald Trump has referred to Ryan’s plan as a “big mistake” and a “dangerous plan for Mitt Romney” to support.

Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) 2012 budget, which passed the House in March and has been embraced by Mitt Romney, raises taxes on everyone making less than $30,000, while giving massive tax breaks to those earning more than $1 million a year.

As this chart shows, those at the very bottom of the income scale would see their after-tax income shrink by the largest amount under Ryan’s plan (and they could see their taxes go up even more, if any tax credits were eliminated in an attempt to cover some of the cost of the plan):

But Ryan’s zeal for raising taxes on the poor and middle class would be news to Wisconsin voters who first sent him to Congress 14 years ago. During his 1998 campaign, Ryan went the opposite direction, proposing to eliminate taxes “on those least able to pay.” He called for scrapping the tax code and replacing it with a new one using the following principles:

• Economic growth through incentives to work, save, and invest
• Fairness for all taxpayers
• Simplicity, so that anyone can figure it out
• Neutrality, so that people and not government can make choices
• Visibility, so that people know the cost of government
• Stability, so that people can plan for their future
• Adopt a single, low rate with a generous personal exemption
• Lower the tax burden on America’s working families and remove it on those least able to pay
• End biases against work, saving, and investment
• Require a two-thirds super-majority vote in Congress to increase tax rates

Like Ryan, raising taxes on low-income Americans has become something of a recent obsession for Republicans. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA), Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), and others argue that it’s an injustice that those who don’t make enough money to qualify for the lowest tax bracket aren’t forced to pay income taxes.

Unfortunately for Americans, the Paul Ryan who wants the tax system to help the poor isn’t running for vice president. Instead, the Paul Ryan who proposes raising taxes on 20 million working families is.