Editors at National Review Online criticize one of Congress’ latest bad ideas.
As Congress was rending itself over the government funding deadline, and the entire political press was focused on the spectacle of it, lawmakers passed a different bill that communicates the fundamental unseriousness with which our elected leaders approach government spending.
The Social Security Fairness Act checks all the boxes of bad legislation: innocent-sounding name, bipartisan support, backed by government unions, unfunded increase in spending, and passed in a lame-duck session right before Christmas.
The bill repeals two amendments to the Social Security Act that sought to prevent windfall benefits for government employees with pensions. Their income is excluded from Social Security taxes since they receive government pensions, but when it comes time to calculate retirement benefits, their incomes look much lower than they actually were. Because Social Security benefits are supposed to be progressive, they then receive excessive Social Security payments on top of their government pensions.
Congress made the two amendments to address this issue more than 40 years ago, when data quality was much lower than it is today. There’s a case for reforming them to better match modern data, and Representative Jodey Arrington (R., Texas) introduced a bill to do that, at a ten-year cost of $24 billion.
Instead, Congress has passed the Social Security Fairness Act to repeal the amendments entirely, reverting to the same windfall benefits problem. That will cost almost ten times as much as Arrington’s bill, nearly $200 billion over ten years. And it will bring the insolvency date for the Social Security trust fund, currently in 2033, six months closer, at which point beneficiaries will receive an automatic benefits cut of about 25 percent under current law.
It’s bad enough that both parties have promised to not address the country’s entitlements problem. They don’t have to also work together to make it worse.
