Podcast: Nancy Altman wrote the book on Social Security. Three of them, actually.

Welcome to the first edition of the RetirementRevised.com podcast!

The plan is to serve up interviews with the smartest people I can find on the retirement and aging beat - policy experts, researchers, economists, journalists and authors, financial planners and other top thinkers in the field. The podcast will be a weekly feature for paid subscribers to the RetirementRevised.com newsletter, and I’ll be tossing a few out for free, too (like this one). Probably once a week, we’ll see how it goes.

I’d love to have your feedback and ideas for future podcasts - drop me a note in the comments field on this page, or here.

This week . . .

My guest this week is Nancy Altman - one of the most knowledgeable people in the United States on Social Security. You may have heard of Nancy’s work as a progressive advocate for Social Security expansion - she heads up Social Security Works, one of the key grassroots group pushing for expansion as part of an overhaul that also would restore 75-year solvency to the program. But Nancy also wrote the book on the history of Social Security and why it should be expanded. Correction, she actually has written three authoritative books on Social Security. Nancy has been involved with Social Security policy since the 1980s, having served as a staffer on the Greenspan Commission, which crafted the last major Social Security reforms.

She also is a major mover/shaker on the latest proposals to expand Social Security, but I also wanted to chat with her about the program in the broader context of our current approach to retirement security. We discussed the evolution of the Democratic Party's approach to Social Security reform; the current proposal on the table in the House; the state of right wing privatization strategies; and the proper balance between private saving and Social Security.

Learn more

For further reading on some of the topics discussed on this podcast, check out Nancy Altman’s books. She also blogs at Huffington Post. I mentioned a study by the Urban Institute study on older workers and the risks posed to them by a higher retirement age; here’s a link to my recent column on that study.

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