Social Security Reeducation
Are you like me?

Have you been thinking and telling people for years that you won't ever receive a penny from Social Security?

Did you say that, just like me, because you heard someone else say it and never looked into it?

Well if you answered yes to all of those questions you need to be reeducated about Social Security just like I have been. Here is a good place to start, Stop Sweating Social Security -- the End Is Not Near:

I used to be a Social Security doom-monger. Like everyone else my age, I knew the familiar drill: Social Security is a demographic time bomb. Life expectancies are increasing. The baby boom generation is getting ready to retire. Every year we have a smaller number of workers supporting a larger number of retirees.

Politicians were eager to feed my fears. Bill Clinton urged us to "take action now to avert a crisis in the Social Security system." Al Gore made the Social Security "lockbox" a centerpiece of his presidential campaign. And George W. Bush insisted earlier this month that Social Security was "headed toward bankruptcy down the road." As a result, most young people today are convinced that Social Security will be gone by the time they retire.

But what if something that "everybody knows" turns out to be a political myth? What if Social Security isn't in trouble at all?

Ten years ago Social Security trustees predicted that the system would become insolvent in 35 years, meaning 2029. Five years later they were still predicting that insolvency was 35 years away ? doomsday had been postponed to 2034. Today, they're predicting that insolvency is 38 years away, in 2042.

What happened? Why does the insolvency date keep getting further away? How could the trustees have been so continually wrong?

How could this be? Well it's always easier just to take someone's word for it and if that premise is repeated often enough we just start to believe it. Unfortunately I did. That has all changed now and the sooner we all realize that Social Security has, and if left untouched by Bush, will continue to do exactly what it was intended to do. Social Security was not created to be your retirement program. It is a social insurance program that everyone puts into and if you reach retirement, become disabled or a family wage earner dies - otherwise known as survivor benefits - you then collect on that insurance policy. Before Social Security, being old all too often meant being poor. Many men and women at that time faced what was termed ?the stark terror of penniless, helpless old age.? Today, thanks largely to Social Security, people know that they will have a dependable foundation of income when they retire; only about 11 percent of older Americans now fall below the poverty line. (Excerpts in italics are from, A Brief History of Social Security (.PDF).) That is why Social Security was created, not to be gambled in the stock market, so that no one had to retire in that terror again. Now that is a terror war worth fighting.

Here is the single best resource to use to get educated about Social Security, The Social Security Network.
- posted by Mom/Dad @ 11:19 AM