so please welcome eric larson to the festival of books! [applause] >> very good to be here again. >> let's start with the question raised by the title of our session here, and that is: is social security a manufactured crisis? >> the short answer is, yes, there is no existential crisis that social security faces in the sense it will not exist in x number of years if something drastic isn't done. but there's two crieses we talk about. number one is a fiscal crisis. will it we have enough income or revenues to support nit future years, and the second crisis is a political crisis, and i define that as a crisis in terms of whether the, for lack of a bert term, the governing class in this country wants to support social security anymore, and the degree to which there is sufficient popular support, mobilized popular support for it, that it has to continue. so i'll address the fiscal crisis first because that's the one that is in the media all the time. to define this agent more closely, social security deps on two sources of income. payroll taxe

it's my great honor to be here today with eric larson -- eric laursen, author of "the people's pension: the struggle to defend social security." through the use of television magic, we are here with c-span on booktv, so hello from tucson, arizona. i would like to thank the city of tucson for sponsoring the station a big thanks to everyone who helped the tucson festival of books come together. we'll be talking for about an hour here in the first 40 minutes will be q&a with mr. larsen and myself and then questions from the audience. hang on to your questions until then. when they get wrapped up because southwest of the student union so he can autographed copies of this book. if you turn off your cell phones now, that would be great. let's get introductions out of the way. eric laursen is an independent financial literal activists and in addition to writing "the people's pension," he has cowritten understand the crash and is written for a wide variety of publications the village voice and the "huffington post." please