Legislation to repeal the Windfall Elimination Provision and the Government Pension Offset is nearing the finish line in the House.
Just over a week after it was filed, a discharge petition for the Social Security Fairness Act has reached the 218-signature threshold needed to force the bill to a floor vote.
Thirteen House lawmakers added their signatures to the petition on Thursday, after Reps. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) and Garret Graves (R-Pa.) gathered advocates outside the Capitol building to urge their colleagues to push their legislation forward. …
Don’t get excited. This has no hope of passage in the Senate in this Congress.
17 comments:
Good. These provisions are in place for very good reasons. Is there an estimate of the cost involved in elimination of the offsets? It must be tremendous. And I am a GPO offset person.
These legislators have time to repeal WEP and GPO but properly funding and strengthening SSA is a step too far? This is a clear example of motivated federal employees pushing legislation that benefits a small percentage of retired federal employees.
Beneficiaries affected by the GPO had an average monthly non-covered pension of $2,690, which was nearly $865 more than the average Social Security retired worker benefit of $1,825 in 2022.
Spot on. However, it is election season, so any and all meaningless measures have hope of swaying the marginally informed voter.
Fund the operations of the agency and ensure the future of the trust fund. It's not hard.
Uhh, the prime mover of this was state and local employees (and their survivors) whose governmental employer declined to join the social security system. As of 2021, about 5.9 million state and local government employees, or 27%, did not have Social Security coverage through their government employment. The majority of these employees work at the local level, and most are police officers, firefighters, and teachers. A number far larger than old school CSRS federal employees covered by these provisions.
@9:26 Estimate is $196 billion over 10 years, so assuming that rate would be pretty consistent, it's about $20 billion a year. Then again, pensions as a concept are dying so I imagine the costs of eliminating (or savings of maintaining) the GPO has been and would continue to decrease over time. As to WEP, that's largely due to someone having tax exempt employment, so usually state/local public employees. That's probably pretty consistent cost/savings-wise.
@1052 WEP and GPO don't apply to survivors.
There are 63 co-sponsors in the Senate as well.
However, it is no coincidence that they waited this late to push for a discharge petition. The same thing happened two years ago, but the Congress "sadly" didn't have time to consider it.
And, even if a bill passes in the Senate, they'll alter something so it has to go to reconciliation. Which, there is no time to do in light of all the other work that Congress failed to do timely this term.
So, just a bunch of men and women playing political games and theatre without any intention to actually do anything while simultaneously trying to avoid blame. Sort of like the so-called "notch babies".
Now, all that being said, I don't support changes to WEP. GPO, on the other hand, could be adjusted to be a bit more fair in the actual implementation. Other than that, don't mess with it.
Leave them in place. There is a reason for it and that is so high earners with generous pensions do not game the system.
If you want to help raise the cap in FICA taxes, get rid of the lump sum death payment, no more benefits for step kids, no more divorced spousal benefits, no more combined family max cases….
@115 Clarification. WEP doesn't apply to survivors who file on the person who had the WEP PIA/pension. GPO applies to SSA survivor benefits but doesn't apply if the survivor was not the worker who earned the pension.
What is proper funding @9:46? Enough so the Commissioner can open more offices when they are not needed and force more people back to the office who will quit?
@1052 WEP and GPO don't apply to survivors.
Some employees at SSA need additional training. This is one of the many reasons why the agency is not highly rated.
The GPO adjustment is calculated by subtracting two-thirds of the value of the noncovered-work pension from the pensioner's spouse or survivor benefit. (From SSA's own web page) Hence teacher gets non-FICA pension, spouse is FICA guy, he dies, spouse gets GPO'd.
Firstly, the employees are not given a choice whether they want to have their payroll deductions go to their SSA account or an alternate pension when they work for a government agency. They have to go with the alternate pension whether they want it or not. The WEP is ridiculous. It's the only circumstance where SS benefits you've earned are actually TAKEN AWAY because of other work you've done. It's not fair, it makes no sense, and it should never have existed in the first place. It's especially ridiculous where the alternative pension is a lump sum pension, which could be gone very quickly and a monthly amount from your ongoing social security benefits will then be reduced because of it forever (or almost forever). Where is the safety net there?
Sure they have a choice. If they want their retirement systems to be covered under Social Security, they should petition the state's Social Security commissioner's office to include them as covered under the state's Section 218 agreement with SSA.
I'll tell you a little secret, though. None of the unions want their members to be covered as they like not having to pay the extra taxes, so it seldom ever happens.
And, you apparently have no idea how Social Security benefits are computed. If you did, you would understand that there is a bias built in to the computation towards low earners. To the computations, people with non-covered pensions look like low earners when they categorically were not. WEP simply removes that bias for people with non-covered pensions. Nothing is taken away except the illusion that a person is a low-income earner. Nothing more, nothing less.
I do agree GPO could be implemented more fairly. However, I'll never support totally eliminating either offset.
@ 3:53 8:10 am here. I am well aware of the so-called bias to favor low earners. However, by the same logic there are many people who might not have worked much in their lives because of inherited wealth and investment income, and yet their SSA benefits aren't reduce even if they benefit from the low-earner's bias, despite maybe having made fortunes in investment income. However, people who were hardworking their whole lives get their benefits reduced if they did work for a State government that had an alternate pension. I don't know really if federal employees ever have any options to avoid the GPO, but I can assure you that State employees have to take the alternate pension plan which very often results in no additional contributions than they and their employer's share of SS withholding contributions.
Also, you ignore a key point of my problem with the WEP. Many of these alternate pensions are nothing more than some investment account that the substituted SS withholdings went into that may have grown a little or a lot depending upon market performance. In the end the worker takes whatever is there and there is no defined ongoing benefits the worker will receive. Often the worker may need to take the whole pension as a lump sum distribution, after which the worker will have nothing left to show for it except for an ongoing reduction in the SSA benefits for whatever number of years SSA calculated his life expectancy to be, because SSA will impute a monthly ongoing pension out of the lump sum amount the worker receives from his alternate pension. This will often result in workers having very small actual ongoing total monthly income to live-off of the rest of their lives, thus totally negating the idea of SS benefits being a safety net. The WEP makes no sense from any kind of a fairness standpoint.
@440AM SSA has a chart to determine how much the proration is for WEP and GPO. WEP proration https://secure.ssa.gov/apps10/poms.nsf/lnx/0300605364
GPO https://secure.ssa.gov/poms.nsf/lnx/0202608400
Someone who is age 62 that gets a lump sum of $100,000 would have that prorated to be $507.61 for life unless the lump sum shows what period the lump sum is to be paid for. So a person could lose half of the 507.61 from their RIB PIA. The first bend point is about $1200 so one won't lose more than $600 off their PIA.
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