Action Alert #97 – A Glimmer of Hope from the Right
On October 3, first term Louisiana Republican Senator John Kennedy spoke on the floor of the Senate about why they need to get rid of the Government Pension Offset and the Windfall Elimination Provision. Here are the links to his web page and the You-Tube video of his presentation:
Web page: Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) Calls On Congress To Uphold Social Security Promise For All
Floor speech:
Repealing the GPO and WEP is not a partisan issue. The current co-sponsors of the Senate Social Security Fairness Act, in addition to Sherrod Brown, who introduced it, are four Democrats, four Republicans and one Independent. (Collins, Murkowski, Heller, Kennedy –Republicans; Baldwin, McCaskill, Menendez, Murphy—Democrats; and Angus—Independent). Check out progress on co-sponsors for both the House and Senate from the links on our home page, ssfairness.org.
We need your Senator to sign on to this bill:
S.915 The Social Security Fairness Act of 2017
It doesn’t matter who is representing you in this situation. The case for supporting the nation’s retired workers from a populist point of view can be made to anyone on either side of the aisle.
At a time when Congress is cutting back funding for the Social Security Administration the offsets make up a logistical nightmare for the agency. When workers move to a non-affected state before they begin to collect Social Security, staff in that new state may not understand how the offsets are supposed to work, thus a large, but unknown, number of retired eligible public employees have not been affected by the penalties.
Another little-known aspect of the penalties is that, if you are one of the few people receiving some of your spousal benefits, when you get a cost-of-living raise in your pension, you are supposed to report that to the SSA, so they can reduce your spousal benefit. The state teacher pension gives you a $9 raise for the year. You tell Social Security, and they subtract $6 from your Social Security spousal benefit. How cruel! And who knew?
The GPO and WEP hurt middle class retirees when they have already lost their main source of income and they are a nightmare for the SSA to administer according to the law.
TELL YOUR SENATORS AND REPRESENTATIVES TO SIGN ON TO REPEAL THE GOVERNMENT PENSION OFFSET AND THE WINDFALL ELIMINATION PROVISION!