Possible Solution to the Social Security WEP and GPO - Your Thoughts ???

The Government Pension Offset is supposed to take away benefits from spouses who have a pension from work from which they did not contribute to FICA. The GPO ignores any time that they were actually dependent on their spouse.  The penalty is only based on the amount of the pension.  This penalizes parents who have stayed out of the workplace to raise their kids. It discriminates agains traditional families. 

@GailL1 That is an interesting solution that is similar to the federal governments method for including military time as part of the federal retirement system.  Civil service employees can get their military time added to their federal service time by doing a backpay to the federal pension system.  For 4 years military, my wife had to pay over $4000 over time to add her military to her fed service time.  Hers was expensive because she waited until late in her fed career to add the years and that caused the payment to have compounded interest for all the years she waited.  If she'd added the years as soon as she went to work for the Fed, it would've been about $1200.  But the return on investment of paying for the 4 years was an additional 8% of pension income.

For your plan to work, the worker would have to start paying the SS taxes as soon as they started non-SS taxed work or the compounded interest for coming to the party late would be astronomical, as in several hundred thousand dollars by retirement time.  In my wife's case, if she paid the SS taxes at retirement to receive SS, her half alone would've cost $110,000 plus the 35 years interest to receive a SS check for $2900 starting this year.  Not a real good return on investment with a compounded interest cost.  If her teenage years had been admissible for SS her age 62 SS after WEP would've been about $300/mo for a grand total of about $3500 in FICA taxes paid.  She would've gotten it all back in the first year.  Like you said, WEP and GPO are justified, but I think in some cases they are implemented similar to doing surgery with a chainsaw instead of a scalpel. 

Well, now that WEP and GPO are no longer in effect, the SS Trust is going to run dry just that much sooner unless enough people go back to work to make up the new outlay.  It should have been tweaked but never revoked.  My wife was not eligible to receive any SS spousal or survivor benefits as long as the GPO was in place.  Now she is eligible to receive over $1900/mo in spousal benefits from SS.  They say WEP/GPO only affected about 3 million people.  I think that number is grossly underestimated because those are the number receiving reduced SS now.  There are probably several million more, like my wife, who couldn't receive benefits because the GPO eliminated any benefit, both spousal and survivor.  And I believe the SS payout will be much larger than anticipated because the GPO keeps people with pensions over $36K from collecting a SS spousal benefit from spouses with a monthly benefit under $4000.

I'm actually torn between applying for her spousal and not.  If we do apply, I'll use it to reduce my out of pocket taxes.  It may push me up a tax bracket and 20%-27% of it will go back to the SS and Medicare Trust funds.  I'm eager to see what this year's SS Trustee Report is going to say about when the Trust will run dry and how much the law change is going to cost.