A front-page story in today's Houston Chronicle reports on the supposed scandal that teachers in Texas took unfair advantage of a "questionable loophole" to claim undeserved Social Security benefits.
About 22,000 Texas teachers took advantage of the questionable loophole that allowed them to get Social Security benefits and a state pension after working a one-day job, potentially costing the national program $2.2 billion, according to a government report.Texas was the only state where teachers systematically took advantage of the loophole, which was closed by Congress in 2004, Social Security Inspector General Patrick O'Carroll Jr. said in the recent report.
The Sweeny Independent School District in Brazoria County was one of seven Texas districts where the teachers, in organized fashion, spent a day at the end of their careers in janitorial, clerical or other nonprofessional jobs to qualify for Social Security payments based on their spouse's earnings.
Many of the teachers each paid a fee of up to several hundred dollars to small school districts to ensure that their last day of employment was outside the Texas teachers' pension program....
Lifetime teachers who retired without the day of noninstructional work were eligible for benefits from the Teacher Retirement System of Texas but not for Social Security payments based on their spouse's earnings [emphasis added].
Left unaddressed in the article and the report by the Social Security IG is any discussion of the inherent unfairness of a system that deprives participants in plans like the Texas Teacher Retirement System of the benefits received by others around the nation: those for surviving spouses based on the lifetimes of earnings and Social Security tax payments by their now-deceased spouses.
Congress, in its ongoing desire to steal from Peter to pay Paul, ruled that even when teachers' spouses have paid into Social Security their whole private-sector lives, their spousal survivors cannot collect any benefits if the poor survivor was herself covered by a private pension system like TRS. It's not about TRS participants collecting double benefits based on their own careers, but about screwing them out of the spousal benefits everyone else gets, and then re-directing the stolen funds into the federal Treasury.
Why should the families of those who contributed to Social Security all their lives get nothing when those workers then die?
Don't be fooled. These Texas teachers may have exploited a "loophole" but they were just obtaining their fair benefits the only way they could before Congress completely closed the door. It's also yet more evidence that Social Security is just an elaborate shell game.
Posted by Alan at March 3, 2007 11:03 AM