John,

Last night, the top ten Democratic Presidential candidates finally shared a stage.

Yet despite Elizabeth Warren’s splashy release of her plan to expand our Social Security system, retirement security didn’t come up at all.

Rather than spending our time re-hashing whether voters will care that Medicare for All means they pay the government for health care instead of greedy insurance corporations, there was the opportunity to have a fresh debate about a subject that’s critical to a large bloc of voters.

As New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait put it:¹

We’ve got our work cut out for us. Chip in $7 to help put Social Security and retirement security where it belongs: at the front of the conversation.

Sen. Warren is far from the only candidate to offer a strong proposal to expand our Social Security system. Bernie Sanders has a great bill, which Sens. Kamala Harris and Cory Booker have co-sponsored. But I follow this stuff pretty closely, and I have no idea where Julián Castro, Pete Buttigieg and Andrew Yang stand on Social Security.

If these debates are really about giving Democratic voters the information they need about who the best candidate is to take on Trump—who has called cutting our earned benefits a “fun second-term project”—then we deserve to see candidates debate the real question: What's the best way to expand Social Security?

We win by keeping up the pressure. Chip in $7 to hold the media accountable!

Thanks,

Michael Phelan
Social Security Works

¹ http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/09/warrens-plan-to-boost-social-security-is-how-to-beat-trump.html