To: Shawn Donahue who wrote (98735 ) 2/5/2005 1:26:46 AM From: KLP Respond to Thanks Shawn....That March 1999 article should be a Must Read for all here! I bookmarked it...Maybe LB will link it to the header..."More than l million state and local government employees in the United States have been exempted from Social Security," says Daniel J. Mitchell, McKenna Senior Fellow in Political Economy at the Heritage Foundation, "and are now enjoying higher levels of retirement income through private pension plans." In December 1998, federal lawmakers suggested making the Social Security program mandatory for some five million teachers, state and local government employees, and law enforcement officials around the country who are now exempt. The response? In a letter to President Clinton in December, Robert Scully, executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations, said that "a proposal of mandatory Social Security taxes for public safety officers is one of the greatest and most detrimental attacks on public safety organizations and their respective members." The 40,000-member United Teachers of Los Angeles called the plan "a bailout of the Social Security trust fund on the backs of school teachers and other state and local workers who didn’t create the problem." In Ohio, the heads of five government retirement associations warned of "the anger among millions of working adults and retirees and subsequent political backlash that will likely follow if mandatory coverage is imposed."<<<<<<< Re: Miracle in Chile : Do you know if the situation in Chile is still the same as it was in 1999?Put simply, we have arrived at a crossroads. With privatization, we go in the direction of more individual responsibility and the creation of a larger and richer economy, exactly what is required to meet the nation’s obligations to its future retirees. On the other path, we go in the direction of more dependency on the government, fewer choices, and increased generational inequity as each new birth of Social Security participants receives a worse deal than the last.
