Opinion/Stead: They paid into Social Security for years but still cannot get full benefits

A crusade simmering for 50 years is finally coming to an end and it likely affects many older people on Cape Cod.

I get a magazine called The Voice, a publication for retired Federal, state and local government retirees. In its current issue, they admit that the decades-long fight to end the Social Security Windfall Elimination Provision may be reformed, but not eliminated. So what is the WEP exactly?

Let us go back to 1982 for an answer.

Social Security was in danger of being in default. It needed more funds badly, and quickly. This was perhaps the first warning that modern medicine and increased longevity were making the program untenable — back in the day, a lot of payees wouldn’t live much past 65 but as lifespans got longer the system was having to pay out more and more. So it became important to collect more money to meet that obligation (deficit spending was viewed differently back then).

But there was a big fat pot of money available right away — federal, state and local government workers. U.S. Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, D-Chicago, was chair of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee and he realized that none of these systems were paying into Social Security. In 1983, he was the architect of the laws that made government workers part of the Social Security system.

You would have thought they were being led to the stake and burned. I worked in a federal agency when the law was passed. Managers offered payroll loans for those who were burdened with the sudden extra payment of the employee share of Social Security. But we all muddled through and no bankruptcies were declared.

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But the federal government could not compel states to participate, much less municipalities, so Rostenkowski found himself a stick. If your government job did not pay into Social Security, then the amount of Social Security you received would be reduced with an offset. It did not matter at all to millions of government retirees who were receiving their pensions, but for those who worked in the public and private sectors and collected both it was different. You were, and are, penalized on your Social Security by having your pension offset by a deduction. Eventually, states gave in and began to collect Social Security from their employees and the addition of millions of employees contributing did a lot to save the system from possible bankruptcy.

At this time there are only about a half dozen hold-outs. Guess who one of them is.

Massachusetts still does not collect Social Security taxes from state and local government employees so all government retirees here are subject to the offset. This has been called evil for decades, to have the money you earned on which you paid Social Security taxes lowered because you also have a pension from a non-participating state. I have always wondered if the problem is that Massachusetts does not want to have to pay the employer share. But whatever the reason, Massachusetts pensioners have their checks reduced.

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This has been a Holy Grail for the Massachusetts Retirees Association for all these decades. Every year, we heard the good news that the WEP would be repealed. This time Sen. Ted Kennedy filed the repeal bill, they would say. Ok, so nothing happened, but now that Sen. John Kerry was personally involved, well … nothing happened.

In recent years, there may have been another unholy alliance. One of the other hold-out states is Texas, and there is not a whole lot of legislation jointly filed by U.S. Sens. Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren and their Texas counterparts. But no matter what the prestige of the filing Senators, there was one inescapable fact — you had to convince 40-plus other Senators that we were special enough that we should not be penalized for not funding an obligation that their constituents did. There was a brief opening when the Texas teachers union actively joined the fray during the Obama years, but again it came to nothing.

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And now, the magazine of the Massachusetts Retirees has said in an editorial — the bill is a dead end. As the editorial says, “Do we continue to chase rainbows in support of full repeal legislation that has no viable path forward to becoming law or do we choose to focus on the passage of WEP reform legislation, which does have a realistic path to become law in 2022?”

A full repeal would allow a retiree to collect both their government and full Social Security benefits, which they paid into. Reform legislation could or might allow a similar retiree to collect a larger Social Security benefit than they do now.

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It is significant that the organization representing these retirees now says the repeal will never happen so let's reform it.

So a "hackarama" dream has died and will be replaced with a possible compromise. Of course, we could join the other 40-plus states that do collect Social Security on employee wages, but that might mean the state would have to pay an employer share. But to all my fellow retirees, we will be getting that half a loaf and that is always better than none.

Cynthia Stead is a columnist for the Cape Cod Times and can be contacted at cestead@gmail.com. 

This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Full Social Security benefits for government workers not likely