Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: aladin who wrote (30363)	2/18/2004 7:31:58 PM
From: Lane3	Respond to of 793721

A lot of arguments for same sex marriage/civil unions ignore the concept of dependency. Yes, there are still some dependent spouses out there and will continue to be. We can't ignore them. They are the reason we have a lot of the laws we have--the assumption that spouses are dependent. And the assumption that people married once in their lives. We don't have that any more. I don't know what the proportion of dependent spouses are still out there, but it used to be nearly all and now it is something well less than half. We have all sorts of couples with all sorts of arrangements. One size does not fit all, yet our marriage laws continue as though it does. That's now we got into this problem of the marriage tax, which is the flip side of assumed dependence--an assumed dependency that was outgrown by society until the tax laws no longer worked for the majority. I do not want to ignore dependent spouses. I want us to recognize that they are but one constituency, that there are a lot of other arrangements out there, and our approach to marriage needs to be revisited to recognize the others. This initiative for gay marriage is just the trigger. The knee-jerk reaction to gay marriage is to shut them out. I think we should take this opportunity to look at the rest of marriage and whether our laws still make sense. Survivor benefits are the easiest to deal with, I think. Employees pay into Social Security. When one half of a married couple dies, the pension benefits pass on to the survivor if the one who dies was an earner. This makes sense for couples with dependent spouses. But it gums up lots of other things in addition to being expensive. (I think I read 17 percent of the outlay.) We get unintended consequences. For example, we have elderly couples "living in sin" because they would lose their survivor benefits if they remarried. I wonder what the family values folks think about that. The context of the current iteration of this discussion is the cost of SS survivor benefits for all those same-sex spouses, a valid concern. But the dependent spouses are not the majority of recipients of that. We have independent spouses receiving those benefits, too. And we have spouses who have married for the benefits, a partial or a complete scam. Just as we have some old folks living in sin so they don't lose their benefits we have others who marry just so they can get benefits when their elderly "spouse" dies. The status quo supports arrangements where a young person can marry an elderly person strictly as an arrangement--the young one looks after the elderly one until his death in exchange for a lifetime of survivor benefits. What a deal! I do not know what the costs are. It doesn't matter to me, personally, since I don't pay into SS nor will I get benefits. But a lot of folks think that the payroll tax is too high. We should reconsider whether we want to tax people so that we can provide these unnecessary or even sham benefits. Just as there is an effort to privatize pension savings, why not privatize survivor benefits. Survivor benefits are just life insurance. We have a whole industry for that. Why not use it? I am not arguing for that particular approach. What I'm arguing for is a revisiting of why we have the benefits we have and whether or not they still make sense. If we did privatize survivor benefits, we could take provide for dependent widows as originally intended without the overhead and without the abuse. And we could permit same-sex marriages if we wanted to without the current unfairness and without incurring further stress on the pot of SS money. I'm just arguing for some analysis of the options and for some open-minded dialogue. In the process do we take away benefits from dink's (double-income no kids)? I think there's too much talk about taking from one to give to another. If we were creating SS now from whole cloth knowing what we know now, would we institute survivor benefits just as they exist now? I don't think so. No one ever planned on folks living this long nor women being self-sufficient in the marketplace. We should look at that.