Before the year ends, the president’s deficit commission will bring forth a plan for cutting the deficit. While commission co-chairs Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles have announced that everything that costs the government money is on the table—wars, hunger programs, agricultural price supports, entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, and thousands of other programs—only Social Security has risen to the top. That’s largely because of the public relations machine created by billionaire investment banker Peter G. Peterson and a mainstream news media that has just begun to pay attention to Social Security. (Peterson is a CJR funder.) If anything, Peterson’s message has gotten through. A Gallup poll found that more than half of current retirees expect their benefits to be cut, and sixty percent of all Americans believe that Social Security won’t be able to pay benefits when they stop working.

The stories and columns that have appeared border on the wonkish and the elliptical, and have failed to tell ordinary Americans what’s at stake. What does all this talk mean for them? CJR went to the metropolitan area of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, to find out. This is the fourth of a series of posts that discuss how possible changes in Social Security will affect the area’s residents. The entire series is archived here.

Twenty-nine-year old Laurie Cooper is a self-reliant, hard-working woman who wants to be a firefighter, and she’s trying to become one. “It’s hard to get the job. Every white American good old boy wants the job,” she told me. “People come from three hours away to apply for these jobs. Even if you pass all the tests and get on the lists, they may have only have two openings.” Hoping to boost her chances, she is studying at a junior college for an EMT certificate, and works as a volunteer fire fighter in Bondville, a town of about 500. The night before we talked, Cooper was fighting a barn fire. “I like being that person who can take care of people in their traumatic state,” she said. “There are so many reasons I want to be a fire fighter. It’s very emotional.”

Even though she’s on call 24/7, Cooper has a day job in Champaign. She’s the building manager at the First United Methodist Church and makes about $37,000 a year keeping the church and its grounds tidy and ship-shape. You name it, she does it—from changing light bulbs to fixing motors and pumps. Cooper started at the church in 2003 as a custodian with no particular skills; but she knew how to clean. Her predecessor recognized her drive and told her to buy a tool belt and some basic tools and get to work. When he left two years later, she got his job. “I was scared to death,” she recalled. “I had never dealt with a budget or talked to a board of directors.” Now she meets with them monthly.

Her income has increased by about $5,000 since she started, and she says she doesn’t see herself earning more than $40,000 or $42,000, or staying at the job too many more years. To supplement her income, she does odd jobs for older members of the church. The church provides health insurance and a pension plan, to which she contributes nine percent of her salary. She now has about $21,000 in the account. If she continues to have employment that offers a pension plan, like municipal fire departments, she’ll be better off than most workers her age. Employer-provided pensions are becoming rarer, and Cooper told me she knows she has to save. “I have saved a lot of money by being frugal,” she explained.

Still, Social Security will be crucial to her future financial security. At sixty-seven, her normal retirement age, the Social Security Administration estimates that her benefit will be about $1500 a month. Who knows whether that will be adequate to live on in forty years? But it will be a floor that Social Security guarantees to everyone.

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