Since I've heard a considerable amount of concern for the elderly and disabled's ability to prepare on fixed incomes, I believe "We, the People" should demand that our government give us our Social Security funds now so that all may adequately prepare themselves for a potentially volitile and possibly dangerous future. If we did protest marches or filed into the SSA en masse we could get the recognition from the government that we are serious. And since many of our cities and states are forgoing preparations (it costs too much, we'll just wait and see what happens), we must be given our savings now so that we can prepare ourselves. Afterall, there was a tax surplus this year... they're already taking more than they should from our salaries. This may just be our chance to get the government our of our pockets and do for ourselves. Let me know what you think.

-- Caterine D'Albret (d-albret@hotmail.com), December 29, 1998

Answers

The principle is sound; but of course it won't happen. For two reasons. First, if our government really thought of the money as ours they never would have taken it from us in the first place.

Second, the government doesn't save our money for us; they "borrow" the funds and use them for something else. Social Security pay-outs are made from current social security pay-ins. This is why no one reasonably expects the system to last even without y2k. At a certain point payouts will exceed pay-ins and the system will be bankrupt.

An additional factor to consider is that even if the government could be persuaded to pay us our social security "savings" what would we do with it after we had deposited the check. If we leave it in the bank it will disappear when the banking system collapses (which it almost certainly will). If we all withdraw it in cash we will force the banking system to crash because most of the money we deposit gets invested and only a small percentage of our deposits sits around in vaults waiting for us to draw it out. Right now the number of people expecting to withdraw some or all of their deposits before new years eve accounts for about four times the amount of cash that is expected to be available this year. Sorry!

-- Bob Podolsky (podolsky@clipper.net), January 28, 1999.