Over the past several weeks, there has been much written in your paper, including many letters from people and their thoughts, on keeping the Social Security system solvent for future generations. Personally I would like to advance a thought of my own and that is to use means testing to collect payments.
It is a fact that the richest 10 or 15 percent of us do not need Social Security as those people have many sources of wealth from savings accounts, stock ownership, real estate ownership and ownership in businesses. They should be made to pay into the system but get no benefits from it.
To some this may sound like a form of stealing, but if the richest of us don’t contribute to the system, it runs a danger of going broke many years down the road.
The Social Security system is a great one and President Franklin Roosevelt did a nice thing in putting money into the pockets of people who needed it the most. It is a great distributor of the wealth of the nation and keeps many if not most people out of extreme poverty. It has been a sort of unwritten contract between us and our government for the past 70 years that when we can no longer work, we will receive a guaranteed income in the form of a monthly check.
Many young people today are concerned and even fearful that Social Security will not be there for them when they retire. To that I would just say that Social Security will still be there for them, but that they have to save money on their own so that they will have a decent standard of living in their old age. Social Security will not meet all of their needs because it was never intended to do so in the first place.
