Since the benefit provisions were first enacted, Congress has liberalized them repeatedly and in many ways to the great advantage both of current and prospective beneficiaries. Only a very few amendments have lessened anyone's rights in any way, and in the main these have been more than offset by new rights conferred. Still, the question may fairly be asked, since past Congresses have made some changes that have diminished the rights of a few, what assurance can there be that future Congresses may not make larger changes that will diminish the rights of many? The answer to this question lies in an understanding, first, of the pattern of congressional action in dealing with fiscal obligations of the government, and, second, of the nature of the commitment undertaken in the establishment of old-age and survivors insurance.
Any program that involves future disbursements from the national treasury necessarily depends upon the action or inaction of future Congresses. Through its continuing control over appropriations and over the right to sue the government, Congress has the legal power to render ineffective even a contractual obligation of the United States. Most long-term commitments, unlike old-age and survivors insurance, require affirmative action to make funds available when the payments fall due. Yet the government's credit has not suffered from the existence of this power to act or fail to act. Clearly, the business world does not fear that the power will be abused. We take it for granted, as experience entitles us to do, that Congress will play the part of an honorable debtor.
Old-age and survivors insurance, though not contractual in nature, is "vested with the aura of a contract." The aura—the popular concept of benefits as the contributors' quid pro quo—is more important than the legal niceties in governing future congressional action. Even the most skeptical must admit that Congress is unlikely to disappoint the legitimate expectations of many millions of its constituents. Congress, moreover, has described the system as "insurance," a word which plainly imports a binding promise. The system provides its own source of funds, estimated to be enough to meet its enormous future cost, and Congress has directed that these revenues be held in trust for the payment of benefits. Both implicitly and explicitly, the system carries a commitment that the benefits provided by law will be paid, a commitment hardly less binding because it cannot be precisely defined.
There are those who say that insurance is a misnomer because the right to benefits does not rest in contract and because it is subject to legislative change. In several respects, social insurance does not conform to traditional definitions of private insurance, but in terms of the certainty of payment there does not seem a great deal to choose between them. If one thinks of the purchasing power of benefits, indeed, rather than merely of their dollar amounts, experience of recent years suggests that the advantage may lie on the side of social insurance.
Congress has deliberately created a system which in the popular mind has most of the attributes of a contractual arrangement. The residual power of amendment is primarily a power of improvement. Improvement for the many, however, may inevitably carry detriment for a few, as in the substitution of survivors' benefits for the "money back" provision, and in the expansion of coverage that automatically extended the scope of the "work clause." The future extension of that clause to uncovered occupations may meet with some objection; but its limitation to covered work, which had been dictated wholly by the difficulty of policing a broader provision in a system of incomplete coverage, had not generally been thought to imply any promise to continue so obvious a loophole in the law.
The withdrawal of benefits from deportees, though of minor importance in itself, does stand as a curtailment not readily explained as an improvement of the system. The House of Representatives, presumably at the instance of Congressman Curtis, had adopted more sweeping restrictions on the benefit rights of deportees, of persons illegally in the country, and of dependents and survivors residing outside the United States. The Senate rejected all these amendments, and the conferees adopted, in more limited form, only the relatively innocuous one relating to deportees. One may hope that defeat of the more serious encroachments, rather than enactment of this small one, will serve as a precedent for the future.
The power of amendment is limited, in the last analysis, both by Congress's sense of its own obligation and by its sense of fair play. In both respects, congressional opinion is apt to mirror that of the country at large. As long as people in and out of Congress think of social insurance as a solid commitment of the government, it is safe to predict that the cornmitment will be honored in all its essentials.