LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Social Security
built 654 days ago
Social Security is the only program that is designed to protect workers with lower lifetime earnings and non-earning years. When determining retirement benefits, more credit is given for the first dollars of a worker's average lifetime earnings than for higher levels of earnings... creating a bias in favor of the lower-wage worker. Workers are also hurt less by years with no earnings because benefit amounts are based on a worker's highest 35 years of wages.
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When Social Security was first created, it was intended to be a supplement for retirement income. Today it has become the main source of income for many retirees. Statistically, more than half of your income during retirement may need to come from your employer-sponsored retirement plan, investments, savings, and continued employment.
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Unlike private accounts, Social Security has no hidden fees or extra charges that can deceive workers and divert money needed for their retirement. The newspapers are filled with stories about Wall Street investors playing fast and loose with people's money, even in supposedly “safe” mutual funds. Special deals abound, and practices such as market timing put money in the pockets of speculators at the expense of long-term investors. Placing trillions of dollars more at the mercy of these industry practices, with little ability to effectively monitor how they're treating worker's money, is a disaster waiting to happen.
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There are really only two useful things anyone needs to know about this Social Security ruckus, and as you might imagine, Bush knows neither of them--which is to say, he's lying about them both. The first is that this whole wiggy idea that there's something seriously wrong with Social Security, that it's going "broke" or "bankrupt" or is in some general "crisis," or is, God help us, a "Ponzi scheme," is the result of one of the most startling propaganda campaigns in recent memory. You know that you are in the presence of some obscenely rich people when it can be opined that a system as cash-flush as Social Security is "bankrupt." As Diana Zuckerman noted last year, "I suppose there are some folks who aren't impressed by a program with an annual surplus of more than $100 billion and 'end of the year assets' of more than $756 billion, but even they can't call it bankrupt. . . . A more accurate description of [it] is to say that it is rolling in money, that it has an enormous surplus that is growing every year, and will be for years to come."
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March 2, 2005 – Support for adding private investment accounts to the Social Security system has been declining steadily since the first survey by the Pew Research Center last December. Americans favoring the proposal has dropped from 54 percent to only 46 percent. The youngest Americans, those under 30, are the only ones who have increased their support. The new poll was released today.
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Unlike most other government programs, Social Security (like Medicare) is funded through explicit taxes that are not supposed to be used for any other purpose. These taxes are based on a worker’s earned income and deducted from his or her paychecks. For that reason, Social Security taxes are often referred to as “payroll taxes.” These payroll taxes are in addition to any income taxes that the worker must pay.
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Social Security