Heads up on 2005 Social Security reform
When the 109th Congress convenes, Social Security reform
will be high on the administration’s agenda. That’s
a good thing. For the past two sessions of Congress, NEA has
had as a top legislative priority the repeal of the Social
Security offsets—the Windfall Elimination Provision
(WEP) and the Government Pension Offset (GPO).* When lobbying
on this issue, NEA members have been told by some Congressional
representatives or their aides that they could support repeal
of the offsets but only as part of a major Social Security
reform package.
NEA will again be working with Reps. Buck McKeon and Howard
Berman as they re-introduce the Social Security Fairness Act.
Because of effective lobbying and letter writing by NEA members,
police officers, firefighters and federal workers, this bill
had 301 cosponsors when Congress adjourned. Only 247 of those
representatives have returned. The others either retired or
were unseated in the 2004 elections. We need every returning
cosponsor from the last Congress to sign on to the new bill
and the support of 51 newly elected members just to break
even with where we were at adjournment. For the Missouri delegation,
that means we need to thank Reps. William Clay, Roy Blunt
and Jo Ann Emerson for their past support and urge them to
sign on to the bill for this session of Congress. We also
need to make sure that newly elected Reps. Russ Carnahan and
Emanual Cleaver understand the importance of this issue to
Missouri teachers and add their support.
In our zeal to repeal the Social Security offsets, we need
to be cautious. Two so-called “reform” measures
are simply unacceptable. The first of these is imposing mandatory
Social Security on everyone. Such a measure would undermine
existing public pension funds, making it difficult or impossible
for them to fund pensions of current retirees.
The second measure is “privatization,” the seemingly
innocent concept of allowing the individual to invest a portion
of his or her Social Security contributions in an individual
retirement plan. Besides being incredibly costly (an estimated
$2 trillion) the very people who rely on Social Security the
most would be left as potential victims for financiers and
investment managers more than willing to capitalize on this
new source of investors.
My version of Social Security reform is simple. Repeal the
WEP and GPO, returning to public pension retirees their fair
share of monies they have contributed to the system. Fund
this repeal and insure the solvency of the Social Security
system by increasing the estate tax on multimillion dollar
estates and removing or increasing the income cap on Social
Security contributions. Certainly those individuals making
more than $90,000 a year or individuals with hefty estates
to leave to their heirs will not suffer if these changes are
made.
And I’ll just bet they’ll have plenty left over
to add to their own 401K funds or investment portfolios!
*For more information on this issue and for direct links
to your Congressional representative, go to the NEA Web site:
www.nea.org/lac/socsec/.
by Martha Karlovetz
MNEA-Retired President |
