From Rekha Basu's column in the Des Moines Register:
How do you calculate the value of a life?
The Social Security Administration has. It arrived at $255. That's the death benefit every eligible survivor gets if the deceased family member had worked long enough to be covered.
It doesn't matter if he or she worked five years or 50, earned $20,000 or $200,000. It doesn't matter whether the survivor has any other means.
I learned this recently when my husband died, after working 41 years...
...until the 1980s, Social Security benefits from a deceased parent could put a surviving child through college. But President Reagan ended that by setting a ceiling of 18 years old to receive benefits...
...I'm hoping not to have to depend on Social Security in retirement, but many people have no other choice. Now President Bush would rather do away with the program than fix it.
It's sad to see Rekha Basu writing columns like this, as if she's been somehow left indigent rather than widowed.
She lives in a $300,000 house and probably earns a good salary working for the Gannettoids. There haven't been any columns complaining about the Gannett health insurance plan.
There's no talk about what kind of life insurance Rob Borsellino had. Any working parent with children in high school or college should carry at least a plain vanilla term policy worth a few hundred thousand dollars. Most large companies allow employees to buy extra term insurance every year without being subjected to existing conditions or the need of a physical. If I knew I had an incurable disease, I'd max that out at the next open enrollment period.
Rekha will also get whatever Rob's invested in the company's 401K over the years. I hope he had the smarts to contribute as much as possible and
to move Gannett's matching portion away from the company stock.
And Amhurst College, where her oldest son is attending,
costs over $41,000 a year for tuition, room, and board. That's almost as much as
the median household income for the average Iowa family. Yet, somehow, it's Ronald Reagan's fault that these expenses are not covered by Social Security.
Update: A rather long and authoritative history on so-called
Student Benefits from the Social Security Administration web site:
Under the 1939 law, a minor child of an eligible Social Security beneficiary could receive a Social Security payment until he/she attained age 18. Benefits stopped at this point because the child was no longer presumed to be dependent on the beneficiary once they reached this age--that is to say, they were no longer considered to be a "child."
...In the 1965 Social Security Amendments the definition of a "child" was broadened. In addition to presuming that a child under age 18 was dependent on its parents, the Social Security program began to recognize the reality that children who are full-time students after age 18 are often still in fact dependent on their parents for their support. Consequently, the existing Child's Benefit was extended in its duration to include children of the Social Security beneficiary who were full time students, and under the age of 22. The age of 22 was selected because this would be the usual time period for a student to complete a four-year college education.
Thus, the "student" benefits added to Social Security in 1965 were not really student benefits--they were an extension of Child's Benefits. Although there was concern about the children of Social Security beneficiaries being unable to pursue an education, the basic rationale for these payments had to do with the presumed dependency of the full-time student on his/her parents. That is to say, it was predicated on the same rationale as the long-standing Child's Benefit. Technically, they were in fact Child's Benefits....
Although properly speaking, Social Security student benefits were in fact Child's Benefits, they quickly came to be viewed as a form of "student aid," paid, in effect, to help students pursue their education. This popular conception was difficult to displace by any more precise understanding of the social insurance principles underlying the benefit. In any case, the benefits were quite popular. In the peak year of 1977, almost 900,000 students were receiving this type of benefit. In the peak pay-out year of 1981, almost $2.4 billion was paid in the form of student benefits.
(Huge chart detailing how many "children" participated and how much of your money was paid out.)
Although these benefits were popular with the students and their parents, there were at least three problems with student benefits.
The first problem was the relatively large volume of overpayments experienced in the program. Since receipt of the benefit depended upon the child being a full-time student, in any period in which they were not a full-time student, they would be ineligible for the payment. So if the student dropped-out, or scaled-back their attendance to that of a part-time student, their benefits were supposed to stop. The Social Security Administration (SSA) depended almost entirely on self-reporting by the students or their parents to learn about such changes in status. Often these reports were not made. By the late 1970s this had become a cause for concern. An internal SSA study in late 1978 estimated that as much as $150 million a year was being overpaid in this manner. A study by the General Accounting Office in early 1979 put the figure at $300 million. (The recovery rate on the overpayments was about 75%--which means that the government would eventually recoup most, but not all, of the money.)
The second problem with student benefits was their cost, in a period when the Social Security program was facing budget pressures. At more than $2 billion a year, student benefits were small enough not to be a major component of the Social Security program, and yet were large enough to yield significant potential savings from scaling-back or eliminating these expenditures. Starting in the mid-1970s, the Social Security program experienced several years of adverse economic conditions, which had the effect of producing concerns about its solvency. Policymakers were looking for ways to reduce the costs of the Social Security program as part of an initiative to address its solvency, and students benefits would turn-out to be an attractive option.
The third problem has to do with the conceptual basis of these benefits. If they were rationalized on traditional social insurance grounds, then the argument used in 1965 would still be valid: full-time students under age 22 are presumed to be the dependent children of the Social Security beneficiary and the family therefore needs a higher portion of its lost earnings replaced by Social Security benefits. But as the popular conception of these benefits verged from this foundation, their rationale came into question. Once this type of Child's Benefit came to be seen as a form of student-aid, its continuing support became dependent on considerations other than social insurance principles. Indeed, the argument for eliminating the benefit became that there were in existence abundant and available forms of student aid, rendering this type of benefit unnecessary...
In its 1977 and 1978 budgets, the Ford Administration proposed a phase-out of student benefits; in its 1979 budget the Carter Administration made a similar proposal. When the Reagan Administration took office in early 1981, it offered a comprehensive budget and tax proposal designed to achieve its economic objectives. Within this budget blueprint, was a large set of Social Security proposals, primarily aimed at reducing the cost of the Social Security program.
As part of its Fiscal Year 1982 budget proposals, the Administration offered several sets of Social Security proposals...
...The Conference completed its work on July 29th and the Conference Report was adopted on a voice vote in the House on July 31, 1981 and later that same day it passed the Senate on a vote of 80-14. The bill, as Public Law 97-35, was signed into law by President Reagan on August 13, 1981.
Ah, the
97th Congress. For those of you who were born during the 98th Congress or sooner, this was back in the day when Tip O'Neill and the Democrats ruled the House.
What can you say? Historical context sure makes Rekha's sad column look even more bitchy and bitter than it initially appears to be.
