Who will be positively affected by the windfall tax elimination?

TinaM

TinaM

Member
I became a teacher at 45 after working in the private sector for 27 years. When I retired at 60, I was getting a small pension from State of California. When I applied for social security at 62, I only received 50% of what was owed me because of this horrible law signed in place by Reagan.

Now, Biden has repealed that law and we are expected to get back pay for the whole year of 2024. Will be awesome! Will help a lot for those of us on a limited income and prices and expenses keep going up every year.
 

TinaM said:
I became a teacher at 45 after working in the private sector for 27 years. When I retired at 60, I was getting a small pension from State of California. When I applied for social security at 62, I only received 50% of what was owed me because of this horrible law signed in place by Reagan.

Now, Biden has repealed that law and we are expected to get back pay for the whole year of 2024. Will be awesome! Will help a lot for those of us on a limited income and prices and expenses keep going up every year.
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Congress had to pass both of these changes to SS. That was true when Reagan was president and Biden was president.
 
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It's a travesty.

What it does is exploit a provision for the working poor to the benefit of those with exempt pensions. It's another nail in the coffin that will bankrupt Social Security.

So now 3% of recipients will go untaxed, while 97% will still pay taxes on 85% or more of theirs. Why are some animals "more equal" than others?
 
dilettante said:
It's a travesty.

What it does is exploit a provision for the working poor to the benefit of those with exempt pensions. It's another nail in the coffin that will bankrupt Social Security.

So now 3% of recipients will go untaxed, while 97% will still pay taxes on 85% or more of theirs. Why are some animals "more equal" than others?
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FYI, this recent change chopped approximately 6 months off the time before the SS trust fund will run out of money to pay all of us our full benefit.
 
Nathan said:
The WEP provision is a blatant ripoff and punishment for being a public employee.

It's too bad that the back pay is only for the past year, and not a full back pay to the date of retirement.
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It would have never passed if the back pay was for more than a year. For those of us who had more years in private industry than public this is totally fair. There’s other threads on this topic.
 
Nathan said:
The WEP provision is a blatant ripoff and punishment for being a public employee.
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Not at all. Many public employees didn't have their income hidden from FICA, and thus paid their share.

If it's a "ripoff" then where is the equivalent relief measure for the 97% of recipients who pay higher income tax rates on Social Security?
 
I don’t understand most of the posts that talk about the tax laws but I know one thing. I became a teacher at 45 and the whole special ed department at my school was second career teachers like me. In the past 6 years, all but one have since retired. Why should we lose 60% of our social security just because we had a second career? I definitely paid in to both the private school pension and social security for a total of 42 years. In my opinion, it’s my money.

Every little bit helps when you are on a fixed income. Many seniors are really getting the shaft when it comes to medical expenses and being able to live comfortably with prices going up everywhere. Some people are not home owners, some people can’t go back to work.

I don’t understand why people are against this law being repealed. We won’t run out of social security funds if the tax laws for the top 2% is changed.
 
WEP and GPO were put in place because workers who had the luxury of income hidden from Social Security who then took another job gave them a second dip were exploiting a provision meant to boost SS for low-income workers. This was incredibly unfair and extremely unpopular.

What Biden has done is extremely unfair, a cynical way to buy votes on the backs of 97% of SS recipients and especially the poor.

It's all well and good to say this drain on SS would be washed away if unicorns suddenly spring from Heaven, but that doesn't change the unfairness of the special treatment.


Politicians Voted Away Your Money To Government Bureaucrats
 
It was a bipartisan bill and effort to pass this legislation and make it a law. It righted a 41 year old injustice.

The teachers in Louisiana have small pensions and when their spouses died their SS was gone sinking the teachers into poverty, some were losing their homes and some were working retail in their 80’s trying to survive. This is one of the reasons it was a bipartisan bill.

There’s plenty of ways to make SS solvent without robbing public employees and teachers. The easiest and fairest method is to not have a limit on how much people pay into it when working or to raise the cap. The highest earners should pay their fair share. You don’t penalize the people that make the least amount of money.
 
No, the best thing will be to take those earnings that were concealed from Social Security and factor those into the bendpoint selection.

The only "robbing" going on is the double-dippers now taking twice their share.
 
Nathan said:
The WEP provision is a blatant ripoff and punishment for being a public employee.

It's too bad that the back pay is only for the past year, and not a full back pay to the date of retirement.
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I agree Nathan. And from what I understand from a reply in another thread, recipients had to have paid into SS from another job. It's not like they never paid into the program at all, like some are trying to make it seem. And it's also not like they had a choice...they were not given a choice. My cousin who has taught school in Puerto Rico for at least 35 years, after moving there with her husband decades ago, will benefit from this. I'm very happy for her.
 
OneEyedDiva said:
I agree Nathan. And from what I understand from a reply in another thread, recipients had to have paid into SS from another job. It's not like they never paid into the program at all, like some are trying to make it seem. And it's also not like they had a choice...they were not given a choice. My cousin who has taught school in Puerto Rico for at least 35 years, after moving there with her husband decades ago, will benefit from this. I'm very happy for her.
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Yes you have to either qualify for SS by having 40 quarters or qualify for spousal benefits.
 
So this is one of the threads, Matrix must have been warning members against political discussions lest they end up being banned, as I see several politician names in multiple posts. And not just new members.
 
Nathan said:
And so the "double dip" fallacy lives on, in the minds of the uninformed. People have a right to receive that which they have paid into, it's that simple.
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No, it's not "that simple" and it is not a "fallacy." It is pretty clear who is uninformed.
 
My wife taught for 15 years in Michigan where she paid into Social Security. When we moved to New England, our state did not participate in social security. She taught in here for another 14 years. Then she retired at her full SS retirement age.

The government calculated her monthly Social Security benefit based solely on the 15 years she had paid into the program. Fair, right?

They then paid her HALF of that calculated benefit. I guess I don't get how this is fair. :unsure: Maybe I'm just a bit dim.
 
Tommy said:
My wife taught for 15 years in Michigan where she paid into Social Security. When we moved to New England, our state did not participate in social security. She taught in here for another 14 years. Then she retired at her full SS retirement age.

The government calculated her monthly Social Security benefit based solely on the 15 years she had paid into the program. Fair, right?

They then paid her HALF of that calculated benefit. I guess I don't get how this is fair. :unsure: Maybe I'm just a bit dim.
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Exactly what happened to me. It’s not an entitlement. We paid into it.
 
People are lucky to get half, many get even less than that.

The working poor can get 90%, and this is what the double-dippers get now - robbing everyone else. What makes you more entitled than those who paid in for every dollar they earned?
 
dilettante said:
People are lucky to get half, many get even less than that.

The working poor can get 90%, and this is what the double-dippers get now - robbing everyone else. What makes you more entitled than those who paid in for every dollar they earned?
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Don’t understand your question. I paid into social security for 20 years and private pension for 15 years. I was supposed to get $900 a month social security but only get $450. How is that fair.
 
How it is fair that you now get twice the benefits of other people who made the same amount of income and paid FICA on all of theirs?
 

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