Well let’s start at the beginning. Today at work was our first day on the phones (our training group.) Our trainer told us that he pulled some strings and that we will be getting our first raise in two weeks!

The company I work for does a raise based on evaluations and shows us clearly what our raises will be. So every three month our wage can change. If you get 100% on your evaluation (Which isn’t too hard) you will get the top wage. But if in the next three months you get 99% on your evaluations, your wage will go down. So you have to keep on working hard. Normally they require us to work half of the three month period… but we got lucky!

That means that in two weeks I could be making $5.18 more per hour! So I’m getting quite pumped for that, studying the procedure manual tonight.

Also, I got some good news from SAIT (Southern Alberta Institute of Technology) I knew that they would start accepting students on March 1st, but I hadn’t received anything from them and I was starting to get nervous, so I called up customer service. I guess they just sent out an acceptance letter yesterday! They had only accepted 20 out of 25 spots, and 17 people were on a wait list, and I was in the acceptance! I was quite happy and I’m sure the operator on the phone could tell (As she seemed pretty happy for me too.) So I paid the deposit right away….. That takes one worry off my back.

Tyler

Bill Cavanaugh, a high-school teacher in Fallbrook, California, wrote this commentary on fixing Social Security.

It seems absurd to paraphrase Ronald Reagan in the process of criticizing George Bush, but “Here he goes again.” The recent assault on Social Security by the Bush administration is following the same strategy as the invasion of Iraq: Identify an issue to be dealt with as a “crisis” by supplying the public with tons of false or misleading information, and then push through a solution that has nothing to do with the original problem, all the while patting yourself on the back for saving the American people from a potential disaster. Never mind that in the process, an even greater problem has been created.

One of the points the president made in his State of the Union address is that by 2042, the Social Security Trust Fund will be broke and will already be spending $300 billion more than it will be receiving in payments. The irony that the federal government is currently spending more than $400 billion more than it is taking in apparently eluded the president. Bush’s contention was that “the only solutions would be drastically higher taxes, massive new borrowing, or sudden and severe cuts in Social Security benefits or other government programs.” What I have not seen mentioned in the last few months is that the problem could be addressed through higher incomes for the lower and middle classes.

In short, the problem is really with the minimum wage. In the past 40 years, almost everything has gone up anywhere from 700 to 1,200 percent or more — except the minimum wage. In 1965, the average Social Security payment was $82 per month. By 2002, that average had risen to $895 per month. In 1964, a gallon of gas was 30 cents, a first-class stamp was a nickel, a house cost on average $20,000, and the minimum wage was $1.25 an hour. Today, gas is more than two bucks a gallon (and on its way to three), a stamp (for those of us who bother to use the Postal Service) will set you back 37 cents, and a house, at least in Southern California, well… if you have to ask, you can’t afford it. Meanwhile, the federal minimum wage crept up to $5.15 an hour in 1997, where it remains today, and there has yet to be a whisper about raising it from the Republican-controlled Congress. In other words, while Social Security payments have increased almost 1,100 percent in the past 40 years, the minimum wage has gone up a little more than 400 percent in the same amount of time.

To put it into perspective, if the minimum wage had kept pace with Social Security payments, then our lowest-paid workers would be earning about 13 or 14 dollars an hour. At this point, many of those jobs that the president has said “Americans will not take” become quite a bit more attractive. Not only that, but raising the minimum wage has the effect of putting upward pressure on all other wages, as well (except for the wages of CEOs, which have already climbed astronomically compared with the lowest-paid workers in their companies.) What would all of this mean for Social Security? By doubling or tripling the wages of most Americans, you would also double or triple the amount of money going into the Social Security Trust Fund, since the six percent paid by the employee and the six percent paid by the employer are on all wages earned up to $90,000.

Of course, the immediate complaint about this solution is that any sudden rise in the minimum wage would be inflationary, which it certainly would be. Since we have several decades before the real crisis is supposed to hit, we certainly have ample time to phase in a program of increasing the minimum wage to where it ought to be. Not only that, but the real culprit as far as being inflationary is Social Security, with tens of millions of recipients who add nothing to national productivity, generally increasing demand without increasing supply, and whose retirees receive automatic cost-of-living adjustments. While it is difficult to begrudge senior citizens their monthly checks, does it make sense that the average Social Security recipient is receiving more each month than a minimum wage earner working 40 hours a week? Under the president’s proposal for individual retirement investment accounts, how much money will these workers actually have to invest?

All of this is probably little more than shouting at the wind. The pro-Bush and pro-business media juggernaut has cranked up the campaign to accomplish the gutting of Social Security with the same steamroller effect as invading Iraq, and few Republicans in Congress seem ready to take on the president. This will be a necessity if the driving of the last nail into the coffin of the New Deal is to be prevented. It would be nice if the Democrats had an alternative to the Bush proposal, but they seem to be willing to stand pat with a losing hand. Perhaps with new leadership the Democrats are ready to take some new ideas to the people. What if they made a proposal calling for an increase in the minimum wage over the next twenty years, combined with a modified form of individual investment accounts? Leave the current Social Security tax structure as it is, while lifting the current ceiling of $90,000. For income over that level, allow workers to invest their six percent in individual retirement accounts, while the employer continues to pay six percent into Social Security. At $200,000 (or some other imaginary number), all 12 percent would go into the individual’s account. Some smart actuarial will probably figure out that the threshold for qualifying to start paying into your own account could be lowered to $70,000 or so without endangering the solvency of Social Security, provided the incomes of the lowest-wage earners are boosted.

Change for the sake of change is almost as foolish as change because someone has scared the living daylights out of you. With Social Security, the Bush Administration is trying to accomplish the former by using the latter. If the president really wants to fix something, he should spend some of his political capital on improving the minimum wage and helping millions of hard working Americans. It is well to remember that Social Security was designed as a safety net for the least secure, least advantaged in our society. So was the minimum wage. It is unwise to try fixing the safety net by tearing larger holes in it.