{"id":5325,"date":"2016-09-15T07:37:41","date_gmt":"2016-09-15T13:37:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=5325"},"modified":"2016-09-15T07:49:46","modified_gmt":"2016-09-15T13:49:46","slug":"a-stray-thought-on-social-security-and-mothers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2016\/09\/a-stray-thought-on-social-security-and-mothers.html","title":{"rendered":"A stray thought on Social Security and mothers"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Social_security_card.gif;<\/p>\n

So a month\u00a0ago, I asked the question, \u201cWhat should Social Security do about mothers?<\/a>\u201d in light of Clinton\u2019s proposal to provide top-up credits for women who leave the workforce to be unpaid caregivers, for\u00a0their children or elderly parents.<\/p>\n

But consider this:<\/p>\n

Social Security takes the average of one\u2019s 35 highest years of pay, on an indexed basis. \u00a0A college graduate working a full career and retiring at the (upcoming) normal retirement age of 67 will have actually worked for 45 years. \u00a0This means that workers get a \u201cpass\u201d for 10 years \u2014 regardless of what the reason is for being out of the workforce, whether it\u2019s to care for children, or due to spells of unemployment, or starting your career late due to grad school.<\/p>\n

That also means that, if you\u2019ve had a full career without any breaks, again, assuming 4 years in college, once you hit age 57, you continue paying your FICA tax with the fiction that you\u2019re earning Social Security benefits, but you\u2019re not, really, except to the extent that higher years of pay replace lower years in the average calculation \u2014 but these annual pays are indexed with general wage inflation, so it might not make that much difference, if your pays more or less increase with the national average and if wage increases stagnated as you approach retirement. \u00a0Is this \u201cfair\u201d? \u00a0That\u2019s not really an appropriate question \u2014 it\u2019s just another one of the ways in which, much as politicians like to tell us that Social Security benefits are \u201cearned,\u201d in reality there are significant redistributive components.<\/p>\n

Now, in the same way as (discussed in the above-linked post) various other countries give mothers credit for having children (sometimes filling in for years out of the workforce, sometimes simply as a bonus for having kids), there are also countries which require a longer \u201cfull career\u201d but have more exceptions to the required years. \u00a0For instance, France<\/a> fills in \u201cmissing\u201d years from a requirement for 41.5 years, for any time collecting unemployment benefits and two years per child (credited to the mother, or shared with the father, and regardless of whether you were absent from the workforce). \u00a0Ireland<\/a> credits missing years when a recipient of disability, maternity, or unemployment benefits. \u00a0And it seems to me that there are other countries where years spent as a student count, too, though none come to mind right now.<\/p>\n

So it occurs to me that, for both those who want to bump up Social Security benefits for the \u201cdeserving poor\u201d and those who want to control the increase in Social Security spending, this 35-year \u201caccrual\u201d component of Social Security is due to be addressed. \u00a0After all, there are many \u201cgood reasons\u201d for being absent from the workforce, from caregiving to unemployment to education, and individuals who have poverty-level Social Security benefits have likely had a significant number of 0s in their pay average due to absences from the workforce, so could be helped by a lower averaging period in general. \u00a0On the other hand, raising the retirement age\u00a0ought to reasonably be accompanied by changes in the years of required work history.<\/p>\n

What do you think? \u00a0If you were starting from scratch, how many working years would you require to accrue a full benefit? \u00a0Or should the benefit increase proportionately for every year that you work, with no limit?<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

image: \u00a0https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Social_security_card.gif; originally produced by the Social Security Administration and in the public domain<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So a month\u00a0ago, I asked the question, \u201cWhat should Social Security do about mothers?\u201d in light of Clinton\u2019s proposal to provide top-up credits for women who leave the workforce to be unpaid caregivers, for\u00a0their children or elderly parents. But consider this: Social Security takes the average of one\u2019s 35 highest years of pay, on an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":4410,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[450],"tags":[54],"class_list":["post-5325","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-actuarial","tag-social-security"],"yoast_head":"\nA stray thought on Social Security and mothers<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"So a month\u00a0ago, I asked the question, "What should Social Security do about mothers?" in light of Clinton's proposal to provide top-up credits for women\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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