{"id":580,"date":"2011-10-14T11:57:45","date_gmt":"2011-10-14T18:57:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/?p=580"},"modified":"2012-06-30T12:37:58","modified_gmt":"2012-06-30T19:37:58","slug":"social-security-an-entitlement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/2011\/10\/14\/social-security-an-entitlement\/","title":{"rendered":"Social Security (Part I) – an Entitlement?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Entitlements – a\u00a0pejorative term used frequently by Republicans and Tea Partiers<\/strong><\/p>\n

When I was around 40 and looking ahead to retirement
\nplanning, I recall talking with my Dad\u00a0about the then evident Social Security woes.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I remember telling him that I expected Social Security to be bankrupt by the time I retired and was not planning on receiving a dime from it in my retirement.\u00a0 I just accepted the fact that the system was taking a significant chunk (6.2%) out of each of my paychecks.<\/p>\n

Over 25 years have passed, as has my father, and now I\u2019m standing in his place.<\/p>\n

With utter amazement and gratitude, I am receiving monthly\u00a0payments from the Social Security program \u2013 not much \u2013 it would be very difficult to live on this income only \u2013 fortunately I also have a monthly income from a company pension \u2013 a concept that has become extinct in most companies today.<\/p>\n

Of course the age where you\u00a0draw on full Social Security increases each year, but I have been receiving checks for over a year now.\u00a0\u00a0 Medicare, Federal and State taxes are deducted just as if it were a normal income.<\/p>\n

When I was feeling a bit guilty the other day receiving money from what Republicans disrespectfully call \u201canother one of those government entitlement programs\u201d I decided to look into this issue a bit more and do the math.<\/p>\n

As some of you know, when you retire and apply for your social security benefits, you receive a complete accounting by year of your social security wages that were taxed.\u00a0\u00a0 So knowing that both you and your employer were taxed at 6.2 % rate on your Social Security earnings (for a total of 12.4%), you can determine what you (and your employer) contributed to this \u201centitlement\u201d program each year during your working years.<\/p>\n

My\u00a0SS labor record goes back to when I was 17 and worked a 12
\nhour \/ day shift as a seasonal worker on the bottling assembly line at the Heinz ketchup processing plant in my hometown, Fremont, Ohio.\u00a0\u00a0 That was the summer before leaving home for college and I needed the money badly; this was the job experience that motivated me to finish college; that was the job experience that allows me to empathize with seasonal and migrant workers. \u00a0\u00a0(The SS record did not include my part-time job the year before at the Isaly\u2019s<\/a> ice cream store in the Potter Village Shopping Center where starting salaries was $.65 an hour \u2013 I worked my way up to $.75 before leaving to work at Heinz – for over a dollar an hour.)<\/p>\n

To make any sense of all these payments made into the Social Security fund that occurred over nearly a 50 year period, one has to adjust for inflation using the official Consumer Price Index (CPI)<\/span><\/a><\/span> published by the U.S. Department of Labor (see:\u00a0 http:\/\/stats.bls.gov:80\/cpi\/cpifaq.htm<\/a>).\u00a0\u00a0 For example $1.00 in 1959 is equivalent to $7.79 in 2008 dollars.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In my case, to compare apples to apples, I had to\u00a0put everything in 2008 dollars \u2013 that\u2019s when I applied for Social Security payback (age 66) and my monthly payout was calculated.<\/p>\n

So when I made the adjustments and added the numbers, here
\nis what I found.<\/p>\n

I will have to live to be one hundred ten (110) years old to break even<\/strong> \u2013 to get out of Social Security what what I put in.\u00a0\u00a0 If I live to be 111, I win and become a freeloader on American taxpayers.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Seems to me that “Entitlement” should mean “Government’s Moral Obligation” rather than “Big Government\u00a0Charity” as some in Washington would like us to think.<\/p>\n

And there’s more….Part II<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Entitlements – a\u00a0pejorative term used frequently by Republicans and Tea Partiers When I was around 40 and looking ahead to retirement planning, I recall talking with my Dad\u00a0about the then evident Social Security woes.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I remember telling him that I expected Social Security to be bankrupt by the time I retired and was not planning […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-identifying-unsustainable-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=580"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/580\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":583,"href":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/580\/revisions\/583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}