WEP and GPO are Anti-family Policies

Do your Senators need a good excuse to vote for S.597? Do they want to support families?  Please copy and paste the “Urgent Call”(below) onto these email addresses of the legislative aides of Senate leadership and send them to your own Senators, also!

Target Senators in Leadership:

Chuck Schumer:  meghan_taira@schumer.senate.gov
Mitch McConnell:  Tiffany_ge@mcconnell.senate.gov

Target Senators on the Senate Finance Committee:

Ron Wyden: isaiah_aking@wyden.senate.gov
Mike Crapo: molly_carpenter@crapo.senate.gov
Charles Grassley: james_rice@grassley.senate.gov 

Urgent Call to End an American Anti-Family Policy!

The WEP and GPO hurt traditional American families!

The Government Pension Offset penalizes parents who take time off from paid work to raise children, work in a family business or care for others. This means that they earn neither a pension nor Social Security during those years. Social Security spousal and survivor benefits were designed mainly to support these spouses during periods of unemployment. When this group returns to work and begins to earn a public pension not coordinated with Social Security, the GPO usually totally eliminates all the spousal benefits paid for by their husbands or wives. The GPO punishes more than 700,000 retirees, mostly elderly women.

Workers pay into their public pensions at different rates from agency to agency across the country. There is no way to justify one standard national penalty against these differently generated pensions. The result is that the more you pay into your public pension, the more money the GPO will deduct from your Social Security benefit when you retire.

The Windfall Elimination Provision cuts your own retirement earnings. Often parents who work for public agencies also need extra earnings for their family’s support. Those who take a necessary additional job that pays into Social Security lose a significant amount of their earned Social Security benefit because of the WEP. 

Both laws hit retirees from low-income jobs harder than retirees with larger incomes and larger pensions. Both provisions cause many retired public workers to rely on public assistance for the elderly.

These clumsily written, indefensible laws have been in place for 40 years, and they have cost retired public servants billions of dollars in earned Social Security benefits. The yearly cost of repeal is only 14 billion dollars of the 1.2 trillion dollars Social Security spends every year on all retirees’ benefits. That’s an increase of only 1.2% to correct what is a gross governmental policy error.

Social Security needs other reforms, but there is no excuse for not repealing the WEP and GPO now. Please support S.597. Get rid of this embarrassingly bad legislation! 

Stand up for families!  Vote for Social Security Fairness NOW!