Word: socialism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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RAISE THE RETIREMENT AGE--but not for everybody. Life expectancy has increased greatly since Social Security payments started in 1940, but the age for retiring with full benefits is still 65. Next year it is scheduled to begin increasing gradually to 67 by 2027. It could be raised further to 70. But raising the earliest age for retirement with partial benefits from the present 62 to 65, as many ardent reformers propose, would be a mistake. Miners, laborers and other manual workers have enough trouble continuing their exhausting toil even to age 62. For many, staying on the job until...
STOP SHORTCHANGING WORKINGWOMEN. Social Security is a rare if not unique institution that pays cash for housework and mothering. It pays a wife a benefit at least equal to 50% of her husband's, even if she never worked outside the home or paid a penny of Social Security tax. But women who worked on and off at low-paying jobs, as all too many in the generation nearing retirement age have done, receive pensions no higher than the stay-at-home moms. In effect, the Social Security taxes these workingwomen have paid earn them nothing...
...pension she would otherwise get. But much more should be done. The National Organization for Women advocates an income-splitting approach for married women: if a couple makes, say, a combined $60,000 a year, husband and wife would each be credited with $30,000 of earnings for Social Security purposes. This arrangement would be costly and no doubt difficult to sell to male legislators. But it sounds fair--a partial remedy for the discrimination that still keeps the pay of even many highly skilled professional women below that of men doing the same...
...another decade or so, and the stock market soars even further into the wild blue yonder, then this program could be softened. Some ideas: restore full COLAs; do not increase the "normal" retirement age beyond 67, and set the earliest at 60; grant income tax deductions equal to Social Security levies to people with somewhat more income--maybe as much...
This program, which borrows ideas from Ashcroft on the right to NOW on the left, can hardly be called partisan. Nor can it be called self-serving. If it had been in effect years ago, I would have paid Social Security tax on much more of my 1995-97 income. And my proposed means test would bar me from collecting much, if any, future pension benefits...