"It goes back to 1963. A statistician named Mollie Orshansky, working for the Social Security Administration, was asked to come up with a mathematical equation for determining who was poor by government standards. Not even she thought the formula would stick for generations. Yearly income [...]

"The Census Bureau released a new unofficial count of poverty in America on Monday, showing about 16 percent of the population live at or below the poverty line. Ray Suarez discusses the new numbers with The Brookings Institution's Ron Haskins and the Institute for Women's [...]

"But as women's careers and earnings have taken off, their contributions have swelled Social Security's coffers. "Men and women are living longer, and women's contributions to the system have paid for that," Mulligan says. "When Social Security was founded, people weren't expected to be retired [...]