Repeal the WEP/GPO.

My art can be viewed on Instagram @klonskyart.

Before I get into the issue of the WEP/GPO, I have some other business.

First. I’ve been getting some email responses to my posts that should really be made available for all my readers. Please post them in my substack comment section. Comments are open to all subscribers, paid or free.

And if you like a post, give me a little heart.

Then there is a few words I want to share about baseball.

We’ve changed our TV streaming package this year and I’m getting access to a lot more baseball games, including my ever-since-childhood favorite, the Dodgers.

I’d kind of drifted away from MLB in recent years and haven’t been to Wrigley Field in half a decade.

Not since the owners turned the Wrigleyville neighborhood into a suburban mall.

And, man, those ticket prices.

But I’m slowly returning to watching MLB on TV and enjoying it.

Except for the new rules that were imposed in recent years.

This season MLB and the players' association agreed to keep the stupid rule instituted I think during the pandemic that starts each team with a runner on second base during extra innings.

I’m with Roger Angell, the great sports writer who died the other day at 101 years of age.

“It violates everything in baseball,” Angell said. “You put a runner on second who hasn’t earned it, you’re trying to shorten the game. Every effort now is to shorten the game instead of letting it go on. The man on second is the first in baseball history to never earn what he got.”

I would add, except for the owners who also never really earned what they got.

Which is actually a pretty good segue to the issue of the WEP/GPO.

Which is about getting what is earned.

I’ve been writing about the WEP/GPO for years.

Today the National Education Association is calling for national action to support legislation in Congress that would repeal the WEP/GPO.

If you are the average worker paying into Social Security you probably haven’t a clue as to what I’m talking about.

But if you are a public school teacher or government worker who has or will retire on a public pension you know exactly what I’m talking about.

The WEP is the Windfall Elimination Provision. The GPO is the Government Pension Offset.

For those of us on a public pension it means that if we ever worked at a job that paid into Social Security, and whose employer who also paid into your Social Security account, that money is mostly kept from you when you retire.

Pure theft.

And it means that those of us in a public pension system who have a spouse who does or will receive a Social Security benefit and dies before you, your full spousal benefit is denied.

More theft.

Every year there are bills in Congress to repeal the WEP/GPO. President Biden ran on a platform of repealing the WEP/GPO.

Over 200 members of Congress are co-sponsors of bills to repeal the WEP/GPO.

Without massive pressure to get them repealed, it is all just posturing so that Democrats can say they were for it. It never comes to a vote.

Good for the NEA, I suppose, for organizing a lobby day to pass repeal.

But as we Dodger fans know how to say, we will probably have to wait until next year.

Or the year after that.

Or never.