Social Security
Social Insecurity
Social Security is a program created to help ensure that people with setbacks would be able to live life in a reasonably comfortable way. It was created in 1942 by Franklin Roosevelt after the Great Depression. Its idea came from Europe as they have been under a similar system for quite a long time. The government in Europe believes that every citizen deserves to be equal. Social security is a pay as you go system. However, because of the baby boomers quickly approaching retirement age, what once was 12 people giving to 1 person receiving, it is now at a ratio of 3 to 1. According to David Broder in his May 21, 2006 article in the Washington Post, “Bailing the Future out of Debt,” at the rate of payout the reserve of funds will be gone by the year 2040, and will leave many people without a way to survive. President Bush and Congress are trying to determine the best way to fight the problem. It has been several years, but no agreement has been reached on the most effective way to fight this problem. There have been several proposed ideas: increasing the income that can be taxed to be used toward social security, creating individual savings plans for each person to ensure that they have their own money to rely on later in life, and increasing the age in which a person may start receiving their benefits.
President Bush was put into a difficult situation, in which the results are inevitable but someone needs to fix it. Getting social security back on its feet has been a top priority for him ever since he was elected president. So far in the attempt to make changes, neither side has gotten anywhere, the only place this topic has gone is backwards. As stated by Steven Thomma in his October 2006 publication Democrats hope to make Republicans pay for proposed Social Security changes, “The more he[Bush] spoke about it, the less popular it got.” Thomma is referring to the “privatization” plan Bush proposed in which young...
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