Social Security: Let me out
    by Al Paschall

     I am one of those lucky people who like my jobs.  I’ve got a couple of them that come with several dozen bosses and several hundred thousand readers who don’t always agree with me but I’ve got a lot of freedom.  I better enjoy them because the Federal government is going to make me put in another 25 years at the grindstone.

     I got a dose of age last week.  I called the hot line that will get you your own Social Security statement dating back to the first year that you ever worked chronicling how much you earned and how much the government is going to give you every month when you turn 62, 66 or work until you are 70.

     Since I started out in high school working in the newspaper business the earnings of my early years were a bit lean.  Adjusted for inflation nearly thirty years later and they aren’t all that much better now.  That’s why what I have banked in Social Security ought to be working harder for me instead of the government of the United States.

     Except that’s what it does.  The American coin of the realm slogan, ‘in God we trust, all others pay cash’ was never truer than in the Social Security system.  It’s called a $4.7 trillion trust fund because Congress uses it every day for highways, funding for the arts, space shots and their interminable political investigations of each other.  So the trust part is that we have to trust that the next generation in Congress will pay us what this generation of Congress has already spent.  Figure its kind of a $4.7 trillion IOU, written in pencil on a wet piece of paper.  Could be hard to read in 25 years.

     In 1935 when Social Security was invented America was in the midst of the Great Depression.  Since its infancy the country had never seen such massive economic hardship.  President Roosevelt moved a plan to help the poorest of the elderly.  Even in those bleak days that meant about 1 in 15 working Americans got some small relief.  As the program matured, especially during President Johnson’s reign of the Great Society, it gave new meaning to even Washington largesse until today, as we age, about one in 6 Americans get some form of Social Security cash assistance each month.

     In Pennsylvania that ratio is closer to 1 in 5 residents.  For the last statewide accounting period available from the Social Security Administration, December 1998, more than 2.3 million Pennsylvanians were getting an average benefit of $741 a month from the Federal Government hitting a record of nearly $1.8 billion a month.  If that number doesn’t stagger you consider that just Social Security payments in the state of Pennsylvania alone in 1998 were roughly equivalent to the entire state budget for the same fiscal year.  And it’s getting worse.  If unchecked by 2015 Social Security will pay out more benefits than it takes in and 10 years later the system could only pay out 72 cents on the dollar.  That’s in today’s dollars and what will today’s $3 a gallon milk cost in 2025?

     Undoubtedly in this presidential election year the Social Security trust has moved to the top of the rhetorical hit parade with either candidate making little difference in their approach.  Gore says “prescriptions for everyone” while Bush says, “no one should be without prescriptions.”  Ignoring the fact that 23 states already have prescription drug plans for seniors most of them funded by lottery profits.  And neither candidate will have the courage for the true answer because politically it would loosen the Capital Beltways’ grip on our aging population.  That’s the kind of power that could only be wrestled from their cold dead fingers.

       -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Some days" © Calvin-Graham Enterprises, distributed at no charge to selected newspapers in the the Commonwealth Of Pennsylvania by the Lincoln    Institute of Public Opinion Research, Inc., 453 Springlake Road Harrisburg, Pennsylvania 17112.  Receipt of distribution is permission to publish as bylined op-ed only.  Not available as letter to the editor.   The Lincoln Institute is a non-profit, non-partisan educational foundation dedicated to promoting the ideals of free market economics and individual liberty through the conduct of public opinion research.  The opinions expressed in "Some Days" do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the institute its officers or directors.