📋 These 7 Americans Depend on Their Social Security Payments (AARP Article)

There is nothing so exhilarating as personal stories - right?  Everybody has one, I’m sure.  

But these people are like many others - they want easy solutions to complicated problems.

1.  Social Security is NOT a retirement program - there are NO accounts for anybody.  It is more similar to an insurance annuity where you pay in to receive a benefit - in this case, being vested gives you a benefit for several different programs  and your need for them emerges based on the rules of the various programs -

• Social Security Disability,
• Social Security Retirement and
• Social Security Survivors Benefits.

The benefit that one gets from each of these vested programs is based on your earnings of 35 years of work and paying into the system.  

The annual earnings cap is there because it also CAPS the benefit amount.  The earnings cap goes up every year based on the cost of living index -  Remove the cap, you remove the maximum benefit amount.  

Sure this can be adjusted with some tweaks to the benefits formula - it is already very progressive in nature -  and I am sure that this cap adjustment will be part of the overall Social Security reform (if such a thing ever occurs) but it is NOT gonna be the total solution.  Other changes will also have to occur - just like back in 1983 when Reagan and his Democratic Congress made the changes they did to save the system back then for an added 40 years which included raising the retirement age from 65 to 67.  

If the programs of Social Security are earned benefits then everybody that pays into the system long enough to be vested should get a benefit or would this be changed with reform?

What gets me the most about all of this is - EVERYBODY keeps talking about the problems but they don’t really acknowledge what will have to be the solutions.  They don’t look further than placing the whatever fix on somebody else.  

Everybody has different life situations.  You prepare the best you can for the time that you can no longer work but sh*t happens - to the poor, to the rich, to those young and to those that are old.  So the way I see it, we are all in this together and each will be asked to make some type of sacrifices for the good of the whole.  If not, we should just turn the whole program into a welfare benefit funded from the general fund and application for a benefit can be made  based on your personal situation.   OR we can just give everybody something like the $ 982 a month less in-kind support and services that people on Supplemental Security Income are getting now with very strict income and asset rules and regs.

We (everybody - people, beneficiaries, organizations, government) need to start talking about the solutions and not just the problems.  

Where is it that YOU will compromise for a solution?  1st step in any discussion is to understand what is being discussed and I find many people lacking in that realm when it comes to the programs of Social Security - the how it works is important to the solution.  The who gets benefits, when and how is also very important to the solution.