Christian Sanchez
Professor Galvan
English I
April 22nd, 2019
Social Security
Social Security is a system that all Americans who pay taxes pay into until they are old
enough to start claiming it. It was a system that was created in 1935 and has the purpose of
providing for the elderly once they can no longer work. It was a good system back in the 1900s,
but it has become an outdated system that must be changed in order to meet the needs of all
people. There are multiple things that can be done in order to improve the current system that we
have set today. Something must be done about social security and it should no longer be put off
by people of power.
Social security isn’t a very complicated system and was actually a pretty good idea at
first. Nowadays this has changed because of many different factors. Social security works
something like this; the working class pays toward social security and the money that they are
currently paying for goes to the people who are retired and collecting social security. This means
that if you have a job you are paying for the lives of people who are retired. This is called a pay-
as-you-go system. This used to be a pretty good system because the working class highly
outweighed the people who were retired. In 1945, there were 41.9 workers paying the benefits
for one retiree, but in the most recent year in which data was collected, only 2.8 workers were
paying the benefits for one retiree(Leventhal). As one can see the number has immensely
dropped. The number is only continuing to go down and is only going to get worse the more and
more nothing is done.
The sad part about all of this is that this topic does not get very much media coverage.
There is one main reason for this. It is as simple of the fact that most of the people who vote tend
to be older people. Elderly people have over a 70% voter turnout when it comes to voting every
four years. Candidates who run for office do not dare say anything bad about social security
because they know that older people would not like the idea of their benefits going away. They
are trying to get as many votes as they possibly can so they stay away from the topic. It is a way
of skewing what people in the office are allowed to talk about.
Social security also didn’t account for the rise of life expectancy. In 1945, the average
life expectancy for people who lived in the USA was 65.7 years old(Berkeley). This is not a very
long time and people couldn’t even receive the full benefits of social security until they turned 65
years old. This means that most people would collect social security for about a year or so and
then they would no longer be able to collect it anymore because of the simple fact that they are
dead. Nowadays, the average life expectancy is much higher with people in the U.S. living to an
average of 78.7 years(Donnelly). The age in which people could collect social security is higher
but not by much. It has risen by two years since 1935. It is currently at 66 and will go up to 67 by
the year 2027(Matthew). This means that people are now collecting social security for about 12 –
13 years. That is 12 – 13 times more than it used to be.
Another issue that the social security has is the trust fund that it has been given. The
government often borrows money from the trust fund in order to pay for some of the other
expenses that they have. This makes it so that they do not have a guaranteed amount of money
that goes specifically to social security. On top of that the trust fund is estimated to completely
be diminished in the year 2036(Matthews). This means that the government will no longer have a
way to pay people who are retired. This will cause one of two things: either the government will
continue to pay social security and put themselves into an even higher amount of debt or social
security benefits will stop entirely and all the money that people put into it will be altered
useless.
The people who are mainly affected by social security being the way that it is are people
who were born in the year 1970 or later. These people are going to realize that they have put a lot
of the money that they earned into social security only to never be able to benefit from it. One
would think that any person in this age group would be covering the topic frequently but
surprisingly there is not much talk about it in any age group specifically at this time. I personally
believe that it should be a larger topic between all people, especially those who were born in
1970 or later.
There aren’t many people who are against changing the way social security works. It is
