Politics & Power Quote by Barbara Mikulski

Mikulski isn’t just defending a program; she’s staging a moral referendum on what a rich country owes people when their leverage is gone. The opening clause, “When one gets old and they are sick,” is deliberately unglamorous. It yanks Social Security out of the usual spreadsheet cage and drops it into the reality of fragility: bodies breaking down, fixed incomes, fewer options. That plainness is the point. It makes “count on” feel like a survival verb, not a policy preference.

Her real target is the ideological habit of treating retirement as a personal investment project. “Should be able to count on Social Security” frames the program as a baseline guarantee, the civic equivalent of a handrail. The subtext: dignity in old age shouldn’t be a reward for perfect planning or good luck; it should be a public promise.

The line that lands hardest is the paired metaphor: “the bull of political promises or the bear of the market.” It’s a shrewd double-bind argument. Politicians love to pledge protection while quietly flirting with cuts; markets promise growth while making no promise about timing. By invoking bull and bear, she borrows Wall Street’s own language to argue against Wall Street logic. Retirement can’t be a casino ticket, and it can’t be a campaign slogan either.

Context matters: Mikulski built her brand as a blunt, kitchen-table liberal in an era when entitlement “reform” and privatization were treated as brave seriousness. This quote is her rebuttal: the brave thing is reliability. Social Security, she implies, is the rare institution that should be boring - precisely because people’s last chapter isn’t the place for surprises.