Key Vote Alert – House – NO on H.R. 82, The Social Security Fairness Act

The Club for Growth urges all Representatives to vote NO on H.R. 82, the Social Security Fairness Act under suspension of the rules, unusual for a bill with such a large deficit impact. The results of this vote will be included in the Club for Growth Foundation’s 2024 congressional scorecard.

The bill would repeal both the Government Pension Offset (GPO) and the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP). These two provisions are meant to preserve the integrity of the Social Security system that so many seniors depend on by ensuring that individuals and their spouses who worked in jobs that did not contribute to the Old Age and Survivor’s Insurance (OASI) Trust Fund and receive pensions from those jobs do not threaten the solvency of Social Security.

The Social Security benefit formula is progressive, with lower earnings being replaced at a larger rate than higher earnings – with these earnings adjusted for average wage growth. This is meant to ensure that low wage workers who are consistently paying into the OASI trust fund receive a greater portion of the wage-growth adjusted earnings than higher wage workers.

This bill is fiscally reckless. At a time of $2 trillion inflation inducing deficits, this bill would increase outlays by  years while . Accelerating the insolvency of the Social Security program and hastening theand cruel.

The progressive benefit structure of OASI benefits means that higher wage workers who have worked in both covered employment (jobs that pay into the OASI Trust Fund) and noncovered employment (jobs that do not pay into the OASI trust fund) while also receiving separate pensions would, without appropriate adjustment, be entitled to the same lifetime benefits as low-wage workers who consistently pay into OASI throughout their careers. The result is that higher-wage workers receive proportional lifetime Social Security benefits above what they contributed in taxes while already receiving pension benefits from their non covered job – in effect crowding out benefits available to long-term low wage workers.when describing the WEP: “Under the old law, workers who were employed for only a portion of their careers in jobs  covered by Social Security—even highly paid ones—also received the advantage of the weighted formula, because their few years of covered earnings were averaged over their entire working career to determine the average covered earnings on which their Social Security benefits were based.”

While imperfect, the WEP and GPO attempt to remedy this unfairness. The WEP and GPO apply to roughly 4% of workers, and more than  theFull repeals would in effect provide retirees already receiving benefits greater than the average Social Security recipient with benefits financed by the payroll taxes of others. Congress should instead look to.

Club for Growth Foundation’s Congressional Scorecard for the 118th Congress provides a comprehensive rating of how well or how poorly each member of Congress supports pro-growth, free-market policies and will be distributed to the public.