Currently, Federal employees, including members of Congress, are enrolled in the Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS). It is much better funded, and pays much higher benefits, than Social Security. I propose that FERS be merged with and rolled into the Social Security program. This will provide a couple of immediate benefits.
First, Federal employees and members of Congress should not be receiving benefits at the expense of the taxpayer, working in the private sector, to which the taxpayer is not also entitled. Ending this largess would no doubt represent a significant reduction in government spending.
Second, Congress is in the habit of appropriating money from the Social Security fund to pay for pet projects, and leaving an I.O.U. in its place. This is one of the reasons that Social Security is constantly threatened with insolvency. While Congress members are entitled to Social Security, the lion’s share of their generous pensions comes from FERS. Rolling it all into Social Security would disincentivize Congress from raiding the Social Security fund, while incentivizing them to properly fund Social Security and fix its other shortcomings.
I disagree. I believe you are confusing the civil Service retirement system CSRS with FERS. FERS significantly reduced civil servant, retirement amounts and were designed to provide a retirement income based on collection of both FERS and Social Security benefits. It would be unfair to those civil servants enrolled under FERS To change the terms of their employment without compensation.
If you believe FERS to be too generous, you should lobby for the establishment of another system, but you will need a detailed approach that provides a retirement system, capable of supporting an enterprise as large as the federal government and providing enough incentive to offset the decreased benefits of wages that the commercial sector has over civil service pay.
You’re half right. It involves both CSRS and FERS (Congressional pension - Wikipedia - Probably not the best source, but it appears accurate). I never said it would be simple. It’s an over-complicated mess, which is how the grifters in government like it. the point is, they’re getting much better benefits from a program that is much better managed than Social Security - all of it paid for by the guy who works his whole life for that inadequate SS check, while his private retirement savings has been eaten by government-caused inflation. So, if Congress was able to put together FERS, why haven’t they been able to fix Social Security? the only way Congress will be induced to do that, is by making sure that they have the same skin in the game as their constituents do.
CSRS employees were never under social security it was a completely separate retirement system like the railroad engineers had and they are not allowed to draw Social Security. FERS Employees paid out of pocket into both social security and FERS.
All true, and none of that matters. The important part is “including Congress.” Why does Congress have no incentive to fix the Social Security program? Granted, it was intended as nothing more than a hidden tax from the very beginning anyway, but that could be corrected. They’re happy to leave Social Security as a train wreck, and use it as as slush fund, because they created FERS. While they can largely ignore us most of the time (we’ve all seen how elections can be spun, folded, spindled and mutilated to favor the ‘favored’), Congress still has to satisfy The Blob. Members who don’t play that game, find their bills getting misfiled, the programs they support being hamstrung through departmental rule making, themselves being ‘investigated’ by the bureaucracy they’ve offended - all sorts of trouble. Make congress’ and The Blob’s retirement dependent on Social Security, like ours has mostly become, and within one Congressional session, Social Security will be revamped into a better managed, better funded, and better paying program than FERS ever could have been. “It is not necessary to replace Congress. It is only necessary to make it politically profitable for them to do the right thing.” Milton Friedman.