Once again. The WEP/GPO.

My art is on Instagram @klonskyart.

In 1983, right about the time I left working in the private sector where my employer and I paid into Social Security, I became a teacher and became part of the state’s Teacher Retirement System. I no longer paid 6% - my employer paying a matching 6% - into Social Security. I paid 9.4% into TRS.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that at exactly that moment Congress was passing a law called the Windfall Elimination Provision and the Government Pension Offset.

It would be thirty years before I retired. What I didn’t know at the time was that when I retired most of the money that I and my employers had paid into Social Security would be stolen from me. And I would be denied any spousal death benefits.

A teacher colleague who just retired posted on Facebook:

Why am I agitated? Even though I paid into SS for ten years as a private school teacher and worked many part time jobs to accumulate my 40 quarters, I will receive NOTHING due to the GPO/WEP provision. Not one thin dime. My friend told me her husband, also a teacher, gets 39 cents a month!!!!!

I had hoped to use my anticipated reduced SS payment to pay for my Medicare Part B. But nope, that won't happen. I just wrote my second check to Medicare for $510.30 to pay my premium for the next three months. So that means my Part B will cost me $2041.20 for a year if the price of medicare remains the same.

As in past years, a Congressional bill to repeal the unfair WEP/GPO has hundreds of Congressional sponsors in both the House and Senate.

It has never made its way to a floor vote.

This year more than 290 cosponsors of the Social Security Fairness Act  (HR 82) made its way toward a possible full floor vote after the House Ways and Means Committee advanced the bill by voice vote last month.

When the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Rodney Davis (R-IL), secured 299 co-sponsors it triggered a process that now allows it to be considered for a floor vote under House rules.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has the authority to bring legislation on the Consensus Calendar to the floor for a vote before the full House of Representatives.

But will she?

Davis filed a motion on July 15, 2022, to place the Social Security Fairness Act on the Consensus Calendar. The 25-days-on-the-Calendar requirement for the legislation was met Tues, Sept. 22,  2022.  Davis is urging Speaker Pelosi and House leadership to allow an immediate vote on this legislation.

“Our bipartisan ‘Social Security Fairness Act’ has reached another important legislative milestone,” said Davis. “In the next few days, we will have met the Consensus Calendar requirements outlined in the House. Speaker Pelosi must allow a vote. The millions of public service workers across this country who are being unfairly punished by the Social Security Act deserve it. That’s why a bipartisan supermajority of the House is cosponsoring our bill. Let’s get this done.”

A side point. The WEP/GPO is federal law. The Illinois legislature and Governor have nothing to say about it.