Social Security "fairness". Not so fast.
I’m 76 years old and retired from teaching for nearly thirteen years.
I got my first Social Security card when I was twelve.
I still have the original somewhere.
I have always worked at a job ever since I was able.
At 14 I had a newspaper delivery route where I delivered the Los Angeles Daily Mirror to offices on Beverly Boulevard and then hawked the rest to cars on the corner of La Cienega and Melrose.
When I was seventeen I was a soda jerk at Will Wright’s on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood.
Over the years I worked as a welder and an automobile tire maker. I built semi truck trailers in Union City, California. I made Schwinn bikes before they moved to Japan. There was the time I made juke box machines at Rock-O-La in Chicago and 96” steel plates at U.S. Steel on the South Side.
And other jobs where I paid into Social Security each paycheck. So did my bosses.
When at the age of 38 I became an Art teacher, I was enrolled in the Illinois Teacher Retirement System and no longer paid into Social Security.
What I was not aware of at the time was that Congress during the Ronald Reagan administration had just passed two laws that would have a big impact on my retirement 35 years later.
By being a member of the Illinois Teacher Retirement System I would be punished by having two thirds of my Social Security retirement benefits stolen in retirement and I would no longer be eligible for marital death benefits.
That amounted to over twenty years of contributions into Social Security just taken away.
It was just so Ronald Reagan.
Last Sunday, President Joe Biden, with labor leaders and politicians looking over his shoulder, signed the Social Security Fairness Act.
Having already passed the House and the Senate, the bill repealed the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) and Government Pension Offset (GPO).
No longer would teachers, fire fighters and some other public employees have their retirement savings stolen by the federal government.
So, for the years that I have left I - and for over two million other public employees - we will start to get what we earned.
As will future retirees.
But what about the benefits that were stolen for the past thirteen years since I retired?
It’s just gone. Poof.
I was told the other day by someone that paying for the stolen back Social Security payments now would cost the government billions.
But didn’t Biden just okay sending $8 billion dollars to fund Israel’s genocide?
So they got the money.
It is just that retired teachers and fire fighters and other public employees are not that high a priority.
I’m glad Congress passed the repeal and that Biden signed the bill.
But maybe you can understand why I’m not dancing.