Bernie Sanders is serving his third term in the U.S. Senate after winning re-election in 2018. His previous 16 years in the House of Representatives make him the longest serving independent member of Congress in American history.
Born in 1941 in Brooklyn, Sanders attended James Madison High School, Brooklyn College and the University of Chicago. After graduating in 1964, he moved to Vermont. In 1981, he was elected (by 10 votes) to the first of four terms as mayor of Burlington. Sanders lectured at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and at Hamilton College in upstate New York before his 1990 election as Vermont’s at-large member in Congress.
Social Security is one of the most successful government programs in the history of this great country. For more than 85 years, Social Security has succeeded in keeping millions of seniors, widows and people with disabilities out of poverty. Before Social Security, about half of America’s seniors lived in poverty. Today, fewer than 10 percent live below the poverty line, and more than 69 million Americans receive Social Security benefits.
In order to protect and expand these essential benefits, Sen. Bernie Sanders has introduced the Expand Social Security Act. The legislation would increase benefits by about $1,342 a year for seniors now making less than $16,000 annually and increase cost-of-living adjustments by more accurately measuring the spending patterns of seniors. The bill would also ensure that Social Security could pay every benefit owed to every eligible American for the next 52 years, by asking the wealthiest Americans to contribute their fair share. In addition, Sen. Sanders founded and currently chairs the Expand Social Security Caucus in the Senate to ensure that your benefits are protected and strengthened.
We must also keep our promise to the working people of this country and protect pensions. After a lifetime of hard work, including working overtime and giving up weekends, to ensure a secure retirement, workers and their families should be able to depend on their pension. That is why the Senator is an original cosponsor of the Rehabilitation for Multiemployer Pensions Act, also known as the Butch Lewis Act, which would offer federal loans to multiemployer pension plans that are in danger of becoming bankrupt. The Senator has also introduced the CEO and Worker Pension Fairness Act to help troubled multiemployer pension plans continue to provide pension benefits to workers and retirees. This bill would eliminate special CEO pension plans, raising around $15 billion over the next 10 years to strengthen the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) and our multiemployer pension system. If Congress can bailout Wall Street and foreign banks across the world, we can certainly protect the pensions of American workers.