It is not possible to abolish Social Security Benefits! The political pressure on any group, or coalition wanting to abolish this great institution would be too great. However, we must think in terms of modifications needed to make it possible for a modern day version to exist.
First of all, the Social Security Administration was born in 1935! For anything to exist in the human service field for this long without major revision is truly remarkable. This plan was born when “one size fits all” legislation was in its heyday! It is no longer possible to conjure up this type of legislation, no matter what the issue. With the technology of today, we no longer have to dream up solutions where one size fits all. We can now enact legis-lation that calls for the agency concerned to formulate a proper response to the individual needs and go forward.
In 1935 it was thought we could have this provision with no taxes on this type of income. The general thought was you pay taxes while working and are relieved of this burden when you retire. This concept got lost years ago! Social Security recipients don’t pay much in taxes, but why should they pay any? If we were truly interested in laying out the best circumstance for a person to retire into, we would eliminate taxes on income after age 65.
One of our problems in todays world of economic benefits for the various classes of citizens, is that we have responded to the pressure groups and enacted separate incomes for Veterans, American Indians, Welfare Recipients and a wide variety of other classes. And, we need not fail to mention the billions enacted to grease the wheels of the business community. These tax write offs for the rich and business sectors amount to more billions than the dollars devoted to the poor, the elderly, veterans and others.
Another of our problems is the Social Security estimate that they have another 25-40 years (depends on whom you listen to) before they go broke and will not be able to send out checks. We have had several studies of the SSA fund and they generally agree the number of payors is badly receding, while the number of recipients is increasing beyond our ability to pay at some point in the future.
So what can be done to meet our obligations to retiree’s, veterans, American Indians, welfare groups and the many others. It seems a natural to me that we find a way of consolidating all of these funds under one administrative group. We then need to figure out a way of devising how much each of these groups should receive.
One prominent commentator suggests that we take all taxes and junk them for a 2% tax on all income. His math showed a substantial increase in monies coming into the government and a great reduction in our overall taxation per person. His ideas seemed to make a lot of sense.
We have a great need for finding out what income a retired worker should have, what a disabled veteran should have, a welfare reciepient needs, etc. etc. One way to do this is to enact a level of income – let us just say $25,000 per year is the least anyone should receive. By consolidating all funds, consolidating administrations, tightening up all around, it would seem rather easy for us to make such a program work. We should actually save on administrative costs as thousands of government positions are closed.
Once we have determined what our baseline for income is (in this case the above noted $25,000), we need to find out what other needs the disable veteran, Indian, welfare worker, etc, etc. has and work to find a solution to those needs. If we repeat this process enough we will find a fairly large segment of the population is now happy with the US government and willing to make the adjustments necessary to live within their income dollars.
Should Social Security Benefits be abolished – absolutely not! Should social security and the myriad of other programs be consolidated into one manageable program? You better believe it!