WEP Is One of the Reasons I Will NEVER Be Able To Retire

Lots of luck getting this idiot Congress to EVER repeal those ruinous offsets.

It does not matter how small your state pension is if you are in a state or work for an agency that does not pay into Social Security:

Most people rely on the statements that the Social Security Administration publishes every year estimating your future retirement benefits. DO NOT DO THAT. If you get a public pension, no matter how small, your Social Security benefit earned from other work can be reduced by an amount up to half the amount of your public pension! This has a huge effect on multi-career people! Most people lose $400 or more a month, but the amount can be much more.

I will lose up to $150 a month in Social Security because I was covered a mere five years in Nevada PERS. I won't have much more than 1K in SS and PERS combined when I am forced to take SS at age 62 in about a year and a half because I am not working full time. I will get less SS than my sister does who got her first husband's benefit, and I had to work all my life and cannot get a spousal benefit. The offset will be likely around $100 if I calculated my SS benefit right because I have more than 20 years in "substantial earnings." That "substantial earnings" is what kills people who are in education. I am working now, but because it is part time, SS doesn't recognize it. Even if I were a full-time classified employee for the duration of the school year, it STILL doesn't count because the yearly income is under 21K.

Those offsets are designed to screw over lower-paid public employees in general and education personnel in particular.

An online petition, one of those that is always ignored by elected officials, is here. Note the number of signers.

Even if there were a million signatures, the idiots in Congress would ignore it.

WEP/GPO: Get Rid of Them--NOW!!!!

There has been talk for years and years to repeal that horrendous WEP/GPO Social Security offsets for government employees who work in jobs not paying into Social Security, but not a damned thing has been done about it.

There is a bipartisan attempt this Congress to finally DO something about this legalized theft, but again it doesn't appear it will get out of committee in the near future.

Many of us are hurting now, and many more of us will be hurting in the near future if these onerous offsets aren't repealed.

Yours truly gets a whopping $300.40 from Nevada PERS, yet will get something like 50 to 60 a month stolen from the small Social Security that will have to be taken at 62 as long as there is no full-time work on the horizon.

Here are the stats of the current odds of the latest attempt:

3% chance of getting past committee.
2% chance of being enacted.

Only 11% of House bills made it past committee and only 3% were enacted in 2011–2013. [show factors | methodology]

The following factors helped this bill:

The sponsor is in the majority party and at least one third of the bill's cosponsors are from the minority party.

There is at least one cosponsor from the majority party and one cosponsor outside of the majority party.

A cosponsor in the majority party has a high leadership score.

The bill's companion S. 896 was sponsored by a member of the other party.

The following factors hurt this bill:

3-5 cosponsors serve on a committee to which the bill has been referred.

The following factors hurt this bill in getting past committee but help it on the floor:

The bill was referred to House Ways and Means.

Here is the actual House bill.

Four senators, two Democratic, two Republican, have introduced a Senate version of this bill:

We are very pleased to announce that a bi-partisan group of four Senators have introduced the Social Security Fairness Act of 2013 (S. 896) — Mark Begich of AK, Susan Collins of ME, Dean Heller of NV, and Elizabeth Warren of MA. This follows the introduction of HR 1795 in the House by Congressman Rodney Davis (IL) and Adam Schiff (CA). (A list of Members of Congress who have already signed on to co-sponsor this bill is at the foot of this email.) This is the work of lobbyists from our different employee associations, unions and retirement groups. We thank them!!