A proposal for the golden years
Something I've been saying for a l-o-n-g time that needs to happen.
In his State of the Union show, Joe Biden said something that brought out a lot of booing and jeering. He said: “Instead of making the wealthy pay their fair share, some Republicans -- some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset.”
Of course, no one wanted to admit to it in that forum, but in order to maintain any semblance of fiscal integrity in this country, those Republicans are exactly right. I agree with them 200 percent. We never should have put the government in that position in the first place, but, to paraphrase something Lyndon Johnson reportedly said, I’m sure way back in the New Deal era one Democrat elected official turned to another and said, “We’ll have those geezers voting Democrat for the next 200 years.” Every two years they claim Republicans are going to push Granny off the cliff, and obviously the scare tactic has worked enough to make Social Security (and Medicare) the “third rail” of politics: touch it and you die. Even the TEA Partiers would have signs saying, “hands off my Medicare!” because they thought government should be cut elsewhere.
And you know, life is a funny thing. There are some instances where my views have changed over the last decade and a half, but after reading this from the archives the only thing I would change about my proposal is adding 15 years to each of the cutoff dates.
However, in rereading it I would also be amenable to one other option: a lump-sum payment of accumulated funds from both employee and employer payable on one’s 62nd birthday. (That may have made the So We May Breathe Free version of the Social Security proposal I did in 2012; sadly I don’t have a copy of either the book or manuscript available to me at the moment to check.) As I found out in checking with Social Security, even with my spotty income record thanks to losing several prime earning years to the Great Recession, I would still be due a nice, tempting six-figure lump sum in return for foregoing future benefits. That would make it more like what people think Social Security is: a program where you’re getting the money set aside for you. As I noted in the embedded post from 2007, that’s only true for a few years and the issue this Ponzi scheme is running into is that people long outlive their contributions. Imagine I put $100,000 into Social Security beginning with my first W-2 job way back in 1986 until now - well, at $2,500 a month I exhaust that money in just over three years. If you add in the matching employer contribution that makes the money stretch a little over 6 1/2 years. (It’s even worse for Medicare, where one decent hospital stay takes care of what you put in prior to retirement.)
You see, when Social Security was put in place the retirement age was set to 65 for a good reason: average life expectancy was only 63 years. Many thousands had their money taxed away for a retirement that never came when they died in their 50’s and early 60’s. (I think this was true of both my paternal grandparents, for example, as well as at least one of my uncles and my older brother.) And since my brother was a bachelor with no kids (and without dependent parents) the government kept it all for their general spending. If the money were truly ours, we would be able to will it to the next generation, but we cannot - so it’s really not ours, is it?
So count me in among those who would like to see these two entitlement programs ride off gradually into the sunset. (Speaking of sunsetting, the only change I would make to the overall idea of laws automatically sunsetting is to extend it to at least a 7 year period so that an election comes between when a program is authorized and when it’s sunsetted. A five-year term means a Senator could vote on it twice in one term.)
Just because we made a mistake nearly a century ago doesn’t mean we can’t rectify it. Now if we could get rid of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments at the same time, this nation would be getting somewhere.