1 Conditional or deferred awards are those suspended immediately following determination,
chiefly because of earnings of the retired worker. Since September 1965, most conditional and
deferred awards have been made primarily for the purpose of assuring eligibility for hospital insurance
benefits.

2 Conversions are awards of retired-worker benefits to disabled-worker beneficiaries on attain-
ment of age 65; transitionally insured awards are those made to persons aged 72 and over with 3 to 5
quarters of coverage.

* Excludes disability conversions and transitionally insured as well as conditional and deferred awards.

4 Currently payable regular awards plus those originally awarded as conditional or deferred that
have moved to payment status; excludes conversions and awards to the transitionally insured.
$ Data not available.

• January-November data.

7 Includes December 1958.

The average monthly amounts are as of March 1968 and reflect the benefit increases authorized by the 1967 amendments to the Social Security Act.

Less than 500.

ITEM 5. MOLLIE ORSHANSKY, DIVISION OF ECONOMIC AND LONGRANGE STUDIES, OFFICE OF RESEARCH AND STATISTICS, SOCIAL SECURITY ADMINISTRATION

DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH, EDUCATION, AND WELFARE,

SOCIAL SECURITY ADMINISTRATION,
Washington, D.C., April 28, 1969.

DEAR SENATOR WILLIAMS: The Working Paper issued last month by the Task Force for the Special Senate Committee on Aging presents much useful material and thought-provoking interpretation. The report points up sharply the growing economic disadvantage of persons with earning power limited or lacking altogether, who must therefore in large measure look to sources other than earnings for support.

The fact that aged men and women are less likely to work regularly than younger persons and that they earn less when they do work is the main reason why poverty is so much more prevalent among the aged. When families are matched by work experience and sex of the head, aged families are not so much worse off than others. For example, the poverty rate for families of all aged men in 1966 was nearly triple that of younger ones, but when the family head worked the year round the rate of poverty among the aged was only twice that of the others. And, indeed, when the family head does not work at all, the average aged family will do better than a corresponding younger family because social security and other public support programs are more readily available to older people. Among the families headed by men who did not work at all in 1966, 28 percent of the aged were in poverty, compared with 37 percent when the head was aged 55-64 and 40 percent if he was under age 55. ("Shape of Poverty in 1966," Social Security Bulletin, March 1968, Table 7.) Comparable detail for 1967 is not yet available but preliminary findings for households headed by a year-round full-time worker are compared by age of head in Table 1. Only 1 in 6 of aged male family heads in 1967 worked full-time the yearround compared with four out of five men age 25-64.

In 1965, the latest year for which such information is available, half the income of all families with an aged head came from earnings, including earnings by younger family members. Nearly a third of reported income represented payments from a public income program. Among families with head aged 25 to 64, all but 7 percent of aggregate income came from earnings of one or more family members. Among the poor aged families, three-fourths of the year's income was from a public program, most often OASDHI. Even among the younger poor families one out of very four dollars of cash for the year was a public program payment (Table 2).

For the aged poor, most of whom were already benefiting from Social Security or other public income maintenance provision, it was the amount of the payment that was critical. Such payments are almost always less than the earnings for which they must substitute. For the younger poor, there is the additional complication that in a majority of cases earnings may preclude any payment at all from public programs. In over 90 percent of the families of young men in poverty, either the man himself or some other family member had worked during 1965. Among poor families of aged men only one in three had any earnings. But whereas seven-eighths of the aged poor families with earnings also had some public program benefits, only 1 in 4 of the younger families with earnings had such benefits. It there were no earnings, some 80 percent of the young poor families and 95 percent of the older ones were receiving public income maintenance (Table 3).

These data are fragmentary, but I believe they suggest the kind of information we need to assess progress and identify the gaps. Information on the amount of payments under separate programs and the persons to whom they go is available regularly in operating statistics of administering agencies, but it is only infrequently and through special studies that it is possible to learn about other resources of recipients and to determine how the individual programs comple