by James Glaser
February 8, 2005

Washington is in a real pickle about what to do about Social Security and it seems to me to be getting out of hand. President Bush wants to make it 'better' than it is with his Private Investment Accounts.

Well, here is what I think. If you "make it" in America and have enough money so that you can put some away for your retirement years, then Social Security in no longer your main income. For many Americans, that Social Security check becomes 'pin' money.

However there are millions of Americans at the bottom of the economic ladder who cannot put away any "extra" money for their retirement years, because they don't have it.

I know lots of people in Northern Minnesota who have worked real hard their whole lives and their top earning years are right now and they are at $17,000 for the year. That's eight and a half bucks an hour.

There are hundreds of thousands of Americans living on Minimum Wage, which grosses them just over $10,000 a year. Those people know how to live on a little and they are the ones that SS was set up for.

Yes the President's idea of Private Accounts sounds good and I like the idea of Ownership in America, but most Americans would feel a whole lot more secure if there was a fixed number that they could count on when they retire. That is why it is called Social Security.

George Bush's Private Accounts are going to mean that a person's monthly check is smaller and that the "gain" they make on their investment will could actually give them more money. That is in theory. Right now Social Security is like an annuity you buy. You pay in X amount for your whole working life and you get a check back in your retirement years, no matter how long you live. It has worked fine for about 75 years and now those in Washington want to start playing with the system.

Yes, I do understand that years from now there will be a lot fewer workers paying in for those retired and that people live longer and that takes more money, but you know what? If we cut benefits, thinking these personal accounts will give the people more money and we are wrong, then what? Right now, if you want your own personal account, you have the right to save as much as you want and many people do.

The people on the bottom are going to stay on the bottom and if we don't have enough for them to live out their lives on their Social Security check, we will be paying for them in other ways. George Bush wants to gamble and he wants to start the destruction of the very best program our government has ever had and that is a bad idea.

If Bush is wrong and his plan doesn't work the way he says it will, millions of Americans will suffer and George will be foot note in history by then, so he won't even have to say, "sorry."

What we need to do is suck it up and put in the money needed to fix the short fall, because we will be shelling out the money one way or the other, because we don't let our senior citizens starve our freeze to death in America. It we don't come up with enough to bail out this system, we will still be giving those retired citizens money, one way or another,

So stop with the gimmicks that we know will cost us trillions of tax dollars that are done to funnel money into Wall Street and put up the money needed to fix the problem straight up. You know we would, if we were talking about some new weapons system. There would not even be a discussion about it.