Owing to both the stresses and hedonism of university life, we college students are rightly notorious for being shortsighted. Except perhaps when planning next quarter's classes, our thoughts about the future seldom seem to extend past preemptively buying a few cases of Natural Light for the coming weekend. So this may seem odd, but try to think forward to the year 2053, when most of today's OU freshmen will be around 67. With luck they'll have lived gratifying and profitable lives and, under revised statutes in place by then, will be eligible to retire. How will they finance their leisure after taking leave of work?
Some retirees will use money they've accrued through arrangements with their employers, invested over their careers in plans such as 401(k) accounts -in which they devote a percentage of their wages to a fund that appreciates over time with the stock market.
Some retirees will inherit their families' wealth as older relatives die. Some simply will have put away money in a mattress, or whatever its futuristic counterpart looks like. Not everybody will be this fortunate, though. Today, most workers do not leave their jobs with a nest egg big enough to cover all their retirement costs. In 48 years, they may have to.
That's because today's retirees -who just a few years from now will include many OU students' parents -are confident they'll get Social Security payments to shore up their other savings. In 2005 more than 90 percent of American retirees get Social Security retirement benefits and of those, a full third say the benefits make up almost all their income. These retirees' benefits come from the payroll taxes paid by every American worker (this year we all pay about 12 percent) that go into a big pile of money controlled by the Social Security Administration. The federal government invests it in stable but slow-growing U.S. Treasury bonds and, since it was established under President Roosevelt during the mid-1930s, it has been there as a financial safety net for millions of older Americans. The program as we know it may not be there, however, for today's OU freshmen when they retire.
This is because Social Security is in double peril: actual fiscal trouble and political trouble. The program is taking on more and more retirees and paying out more and more benefits, which means it will start to use its Trust Fund in 2018 and, according to most projections, will use it up by 2042 and have to start cutting benefits. That's the fiscal trouble. The political trouble is that President Bush doesn't like old-style social entitlement programs, of which Social Security is the granddaddy. So he wants to dismantle the current system and set up an expensive, risky, controversial replacement. Bush is right to want to tackle Social Security now, long before it's the program's crunch time, but his is a bad idea
Tomorrow and Thursday we'll talk more about the problems Social Security faces, President Bush's proposed solutions, and why people starting their careers now are in the best position to decide the future of Social Security.
Blackwell's wrong... but, in this case, he's also right
Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell has been admonished by Ohio courts for overstepping the authority of his office. Blackwell is responsible for elections in Ohio and, therefore, what machines counties will use to carry out those elections. A directive from his office declared the state's preferred system to be optical scan, not touch screen or punch card. He had imposed a deadline of Feb. 8 for counties to choose a vendor, causing uproar from several counties, which contended the deadline was arbitrarily set and put unnecessary pressure on county officials.
However, Blackwell, for all his missteps as Ohio's top election official, was right in choosing optical scan machines for Ohio's elections, albeit a bit too over-zealous in setting the deadline. The 2000 presidential election and the ensuing rigmarole necessitated a better system for tabulating votes. Touch screen machines were floated as an alternative, but the General Assembly mandated last April that any voting system needed to be voter-verifiable. This means voters must be able to look at their ballot and tell for whom they voted. This is all well and good, but the new requirement from Columbus made the touch screen machines too expensive, raising the price $80 million.
Instead of punch cards -which Athens County used in elections last fall -counties will now have to use optical scan ballots in order to receive funding for their machines. Voters fill in ovals indicating their preferred candidates and the ballot is then scanned through a machine. The system is somewhat similar to a Scantron test.
Not only are the optical scan machines easier to use than touch screens would be, they are cheaper. For a state facing millions of dollars of red ink, choosing the less expensive machines only makes more sense.
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The Post Editorial
America's Social Security question
