Left of Social Security

To many Libreals, Social Security is part of the safety net that helps keep our country secure.  It provides a way to ensure that the elderly and disabled are, at least partially, taken care of financially.  Their philosophy is based on the principle that a society is only as strong as its weakest members.  By providing money that will boost the income of those who don’t have enough income to live on because they have a disability or have reached the point in their life where they can’t work anymore, it increases their purchasing power and helps the incomes of those who pay the taxes that fund Social Security.

If the Libreal plans for Social Security are boiled down, it comes down to ensuring the future of the program by protecting the funds and ensuring that they are available for Social Security and disability payments, and that the money isn’t taken for other programs.  The biggest change that the Libreals have proposed is combining the accounts for Social Security and disability.

The money for both programs is kept in separate accounts and taken as separate pieces in income taxes.  When one program seems to be running short for a month, it has been common practice to shift money between the two.  There are some in Congress who want the practice to stop and who insist that if the program cannot sustain itself with the funding it has it should be cut.

The Democrats have proposed an alternative: rather than collecting separate payments for separate accounts, collect one payment for everything and place it in the same account.  This would remove the need to transfer money between the two, and since the money is handled by the same department, could reduce some of the redundancy in the programs.  Because both of the systems are built on the principle that people who can work pay in and people who can’t take out (with the assumption that they will be taking money when they can’t work), it makes sense to them to unify the two and put the money for both in the same pot.

The Conservatives have argued against this from the traditionalist point of view.  They insist that the system was set up as two different pots for a reason, and that when they were set up it was intended that they were to each be self-sustaining.  While I am sure they enjoy the thought of less government involvement that combining the two accounts would likely bring about, they argue that if one is not sustainable then they should not take money from the other to prop it up.  If one system lacks the funding to continue, then the eligibility criteria be changed to ensure that it has the money that it needs.

In a sense the Conservative plans of privatizing the retirement portion and the Liberal plan to combine the accounts both hope to ensure sustainability of the Social Security program.  While they both go about it in a different manner, everyone agrees that the system itself is important.  Just not how to keep it going.