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Originally Posted by ElDiabloJoe
Ronald Reagan did two things that I heartily disagree with (with the benefit of hindsight, of course): 1) closed the mental hospitals, and; 2) enacted the WEP and GPO to social security.
Passage of this bill, the Social Security Fairness Act and signature by a president (both Biden and Trump have said they supported the Act) will return fairness to social security by eliminating the WEP and GPO.
Currently, if you earned 40 credits, AND you earned a public pension, they greatly reduced your social security - usually by 70%!! If your benefit was $700, you are getting $145/month simply because you paid into two different systems.
This Act does NOT give people with public pensions double-dipping access to social security UNLESS they also have earned their social security via 40 credits like everyone else.
This Act gives full credit that is due to anyone who worked their full 40 credits - as it should be.
Currently, someone with a government pension, even though they worked 10 years before and 10 years after in the private sector or otherwise worked enough to earn their 40 social security credits, has that social security benefit drastically reduced simply because they also worked in public service. Mostly it's cops, puddle-monkeys, and teachers.
Is it fair if you worked for IBM until you were 35 or 40, and then went and joined a police department for 20 years until you were 55 or 60 to only get what you earned from the police force, but get 70% of your social security benefit taken because you did that?
The other thing it does is protect mostly women. If your spouse worked for a city, county, state or the feds, your spousal benefit from their social security would be normally be negative or zero dollars. You did not get a thing even though the spouse earned their 40 credits.
This Act gives the rightfully earned fair benefit to those who earned it, regardless of whatever other career path they may have chosen over time.
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On GPO, you are entirely correct. As to WEP, it is a bit more complicated. Social Security benefits are “weighted “ so that low income wage earners get a higher replacement ratio for earnings lost due to retirement than a high income earner. In assessing the return ratio someone who has a short record of covered earnings, but enough to be insured, is indistinguishable from one who had a long record of low wages. Both get the higher weighted replacement ratio. The replacement ratio varies from 50% for someone who worked for minimum wage for their working lifetime, to 29% for someone with maximum covered earnings for a lifetime.
Where WEP went wrong was for the people who worked for both covered and exempt earnings, but for low wages in both. They got screwed.