Wait. You Weren’t Born Yet?

By Maggie Ross

Jim McArdle was my high school history teacher. We called him McArdle, or sometimes just McArd.

McArd was trying to teach a bunch of rez kids history. I don’t know how much he thought we were actually absorbing. We were teenagers. He would be up there talking about government, elections, presidents, Social Security, assassinations, and whatever else he thought we needed to understand about the world we were inheriting.

One day, he was teaching us about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He asked a question that he had most likely asked every time he taught this lesson, “Where were you when JFK was assassinated?”

We all sat there staring at him and then one of my classmates said, “McArd, we weren’t even born yet.”

There was this moment on his face. You could almost see him doing the math. He had just realized that this event burned into his memory, something he could remember happening, was simply history to the kids sitting in front of him.

Fast forward a few decades.

Now I am teaching high school history on a different Indian reservation. And without realizing that I had fallen into the normal practice of asking the same question. My lesson that day was regarding September 11, 2001, and the attack on the Twin Towers. I tried to make the lesson real for my students, probably feeling pretty good about myself as a history teacher, when I ask: “Where were you when the Twin Towers fell?”

They looked at me. “Ms. Ross, we weren’t even born yet.”

Wah-wah-waaaah.

I had become McArd. Suddenly I understood that look on his face all those years ago.

That’s the funny thing about teaching. You don’t always get to see when the lesson lands. Sometimes it lands twenty minutes later. Sometimes it takes twenty years.

And apparently, sometimes it takes 500 years and a rabbit hole on Social Security.

Sorry, McArd. I got there eventually.

Because lately I’ve been thinking about something else McArd tried to teach us.

Social Security.

I remember him trying to convince a classroom full of rez kids that decisions being made about Social Security were going to matter to us someday. He wanted us to understand that what Congress was doing then could affect us when we reached retirement age.

Retirement? We were teenagers! Retirement might as well have been the year 2526.

Well. Here we are.

And somewhere in the back of my mind, one piece of those lessons survived all these years. I remembered something about Congress borrowing money from Social Security. I remembered that money not being paid back. I even remembered something about the interest.

At least, I thought I remembered it.

So, 500 years later, one of McArd’s rez kids finally decided to do her homework. Did Congress actually take the money from Social Security and never pay it back? I went looking. And the first thing I discovered was that I had several different pieces of history stacked on top of one another.

In 1981, Social Security really was in trouble. The Social Security Administration’s own chronology says President Ronald Reagan created the National Commission on Social Security Reform because of the “continuing deterioration” of the Old-Age and Survivors Trust Fund. Later that same month, Reagan signed legislation allowing the Social Security trust funds to borrow from one another temporarily. That was one kind of borrowing.

Then came the 1983 reforms. The commission delivered its recommendations in January, and Reagan signed the Social Security Amendments of 1983 in April. The reforms stabilized a system that had been facing an immediate financing crisis. But something else happened afterward. Social Security began accumulating large surpluses.

And this is where the story starts sounding much more like the one, I remember hearing.

According to a later account by Charles Blahous of the Hoover Institution, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had served on the Social Security reform commission, said that policymakers did not initially anticipate just how large those surpluses would become. By the late 1980s, he was raising alarms about what would happen to the money.

In a 1990 Senate debate quoted in the Hoover piece, Moynihan used language that was anything but mild. “There are no reserves,” he said. “They have all been embezzled. They have been spent.” Senator Harry Reid jokingly suggested calling it the “Social Security slush fund.” Moynihan then said what existed instead were Treasury IOUs and that the money had been spent as general revenue.

Now, that does not mean the federal government literally embezzled Social Security money. Moynihan was making a political argument. The trust funds held Treasury obligations. But suddenly I understood why my memory sounded the way it did.

Maybe what I remembered as “Congress took the money” was the language people were using at the time to describe the federal government spending cash generated by Social Security surpluses while issuing Treasury securities to the trust funds. That is a considerably messier sentence than: They took our Social Security money.

Try explaining the first version to a classroom full of teenagers. McArd probably had about fifty minutes.

And then I found something else that complicated my memory even more. For years, I had understood the 1983 reforms as a deliberate plan to build up a large reserve so the Baby Boom generation could help prepay its own retirement.

But the Hoover article cites Robert Myers, executive director of the Greenspan Commission, saying that wasn’t actually how the commission approached the reforms.

“It just developed,” Myers said of the large trust-fund buildup. “It wasn’t planned.”

The same article cites a 1997 Congressional Research Service analysis saying there was little evidence that the large surpluses were deliberately intended to advance-fund Baby Boom retirements. The primary goal was to keep Social Security from falling into another insolvency crisis.

Which means my rabbit hole had now produced a new problem. I had started out trying to determine whether my memory was right or wrong. Instead, I discovered that the history itself was being argued about while it was happening. There was the accounting explanation. There was the political explanation. There was what lawmakers said on the Senate floor. There was what newspapers told the public.

There was whatever version McArd managed to translate for a room full of rez kids. And then there was what survived in my head forty years later. Somewhere in all of that was a lesson. Maybe McArd wasn’t really trying to make us memorize the mechanics of the Social Security trust fund. Maybe he was trying to teach us that decisions made far away from us could still reach all the way into our lives. Washington probably felt very far away from our classroom. Retirement felt even farther.

But McArd understood something we didn’t yet understand. Someday gets here.

One day you are the kid rolling your eyes because your history teacher asked where you were when Kennedy was assassinated. Then one day you are the teacher asking where everybody was when the Twin Towers fell. And then one day you are sitting there reading forty-year-old Social Security documents because something your high school history teacher said has been rattling around in your brain for most of your adult life.

I still haven’t proven every piece of what I remember. I haven’t yet found the answer to my memory about the interest. And maybe I won’t. Memory is funny that way. But the bigger thing McArd was trying to teach us? I think I finally got it. History isn’t just a collection of things that happened before you were born. It is a series of decisions that keep moving forward until one day they arrive at your door.

So, McArd, you may have thought we weren’t listening. We were. Some of us just needed 500 years to get there.