EXCERPT: http://niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=ask_this.view&askthisid=0084
Important questions about Social Security
ASK THIS | January 24, 2005
The press needs to dig beyond the political rhetoric and make sure people understand what's motivating the push for private accounts, and what's at stake.
Redistribution of wealth
It's also the engine for a massive redistribution of wealth. By design, Social Security involves colossal subsidies not just from workers to retirees, but from single people to married couples, from two-earner couples to one-earner couples, from high-income earners to low, from men to women, from the able-bodied to the disabled, and from those who die early to those who die late.
Get a passing acquaintance with Social Security formulas and payment statistics, and you learn all sorts of things. For instance:
A retired couple receives more benefits than a retired single person, even if only one member of the couple contributed to Social Security;
Disabled workers collect benefits even if they've barely contributed at all.
Widows and other survivors of the retired and the disabled get benefits whether or not they contributed.
Low-income workers get a much higher percentage of their working incomes back after retirement than higher-income workers.
People who die early may not see any Social Security benefits at all, while people who live decades after retirement receive benefits the entire time. This is because Social Security is a lifetime guarantee that pays benefits to recipients until they draw their last breath – regardless of how much money they contributed.
Do most people realize that only two-thirds of Social Security beneficiaries are actually retired workers themselves? The rest are disabled workers, and survivors and dependents of retired and disabled workers.
See all that social engineering at work? Bush and his associates surely see it. They see the government taking away their money and using it in ways beyond individuals' control – often to help other individuals who aren't sufficiently self-reliant. They see a system in which, with some notable exceptions, what you get is what you need. Finding that vaguely socialistic, they want to replace it with a system in which what you get is what you paid.
If people don't fully understand what Social Security is, they can't understand why conservative anti-government Republicans want so much to change it. And they can't understand what effects changing it might have on society.
What you don't seem to understand is that now we've got it, it's almost impossible to get rid of without breaking the government bank.
If you think of a new plan and can provide some figures that show otherwise, let me know because I'm certainly open to suggestions.