| My Opinion: |
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| Mr. Bush Keep Your Cotton Pick Hands Off Social Security!!
Here is one of the many stupid remarks made by our so called President that makes me angry. Bush abandoned his usual format of rehearsed panel discussions and spoke at a podium at West Virginia University at Parkersburg. He also visited the nearby Bureau of Public Debt to make the symbolic point that Social Security is not a trust fund with money set aside for recipients, but a pay-as-you-go system facing huge shortfalls in the future. I do not know where he get his ideas, for this fund was set up long before he was even a thought in his mothers mind. During a presidency greater then his can ever hope to be. It most certainly was set up as a Trust Fund. The money deducted from the working publics wages to be set aside, and placed in this trust for the recipients, when they retired. This trust though like any trust is only as good as those to whom it is entrusted. What does this say for elected officials we pay to manage our government, and this trust. When other people entrusted with a fund, such as a labor union retirement fund, were caught taking from or mismanaged it they went to jail. Why should these government servants of the public be any different, they pick our pockets, and make the rules to their liking. When Bush entered office we had a surplus, which should have went to pay back Social Security, at least a large part of it. He has in the first four years managed to start a war, spend the surplus, run us deep in debt, change laws to give him more power, and place all our security eggs in one basket. Yet the people (by a very small majority) gave him another four years to screw us even more. By 1986 I was 50 years old, out of work and having a hard time finding a job. Because when an employer took one look a me with my back and neck, he was not about to hire me. No company at that time wanted to hire anyone that might have, or looked like they might develop a back problem. They did not come right out and say so, but just found some other excuse not to hire me. For the next 10 years I worked at teaching, driving, and other odd jobs until I just could handle it any more. The pain was to much if I tried to do any lifting or pulling. There was nothing wrong with my brain, hands or legs. I could do work that did not require physical strain. I had worked 11 years for one company and was entitled to partial retirement, and of course I had my Social Security retirement too. I believed I could not take either one until I was 65. I was living with my son who was having a hard time supporting both of us. It was close to my 61st birthday in 1997 when I checked to see when I could start my plant retirement. I found that I could start at 60 at a lower amount, my son said any thing would help. Well it wasn’t much help it only amounted to $102 a month. For Social Security it was 62 also at a lower amount, which they never did tell me what the maximum was for 65. In addition they deduct payments each month from my Social Security for medicare, which I have paid in to all my working years. A medical program that requires a co-payment for nearly everything, when I can not live on what I get in the first place. I have been receiving Social Security now since 1998, and can not live on my own with what I get each month. Only by living with my son and pooling our resources can we both get by. Especial since the cost of living has been steadily going up, and now with the gas prices it is costing my son so much for gas, that he said It was hardly worth driving to work. I don’t think I will be here to see who the next president is, what worries me is what my son will have when he retires if we don’t have Social Security. Copyright by Gordon K. Glatz |
| Hands of Social Security |
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