Las Vegas Sun

March 19, 2024

Letter to the editor:

Social Security must evolve to stay alive

Regarding J.J. Schrader’s letter to the editor in Monday’s Las Vegas Sun, headlined “Congress has run the biggest Ponzi scheme”:

Mr. Schrader’s claim, that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, may be true as Social Security exists today, but it does not need to be. The world has changed and so must Social Security.

Social Security is not just a retirement program. Social Security was and is a collection of self-sustaining insurance programs based on the mortality tables of 1935; over the years it was transformed into unsustainable entitlement programs through congressional actions and misactions, court decisions and government fiscal policies.

I well remember the Social Security Act being debated, enacted and later “adjusted” over the years. At the time, living to enjoy retirement at age 65 seemed as far-fetched as ultimately seeing Jules Verne’s predictions of the year 2000. I also remember that the greatest fear in the 1930s was the loss of the family breadwinner in industrial accidents. The Social Security Act grew, in part, to take away worries of something happening to the head of the family, and some items were tacked on to get the bundle of laws passed.

The final push, resulting in passing the compromise law, came from partisan fighting over long-term storage of accumulated premiums. (Please take note of this.) Claims were that either lock boxes or interest-bearing accounts for these savings would “eventually contain all of the money in the world.”

My gullibility says that a complete review of all facets of the Social Security law, coupled with revisions according to today’s mortality tables, could save the presently failing entitlement programs.

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