Ask your members of Congress to repeal two unjust Social Security provisions that harm thousands of Texas public school employees.

Dear [ Decision Maker ] ,

I ask for your help in repealing two unjust Social Security provisions that do serious financial harm to more than a million teachers, school support personnel, police officers, firefighters, and other public servants. These offsets reduce or eliminate Social Security benefits for retirees who receive pensions for non-Social Security-covered employment. They apply only to public servants--recipients of private pensions are not subject to such penalties.

While these Social Security benefit reductions originally may have been intended to curtail payments of windfall benefits to highly paid individuals, in practice they have had devastating consequences for low- and middle-income public employees.

These provisions are the Government Pension Offset (GPO) and the Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP). Each of these provisions can reduce monthly Social Security benefits drastically.

The GPO reduces a Social Security survivor's benefit by two-thirds of his or her public pension that is not covered by Social Security--wiping out the survivor's benefit entirely for many workers. The WEP currently can take away up to $340 a month of Social Security benefits earned by a state or local public employee who has contributed to Social Security for as many as 20 years, and the WEP does not phase out completely until a worker has 30 years of covered Social Security employment.

Besides being unfair to those who have paid into Social Security but are being denied their duly earned benefits, these provisions have perverse effects. By targeting pensions of teachers and other school employees, these Social Security benefit cuts discourage qualified individuals from entering the classroom--at exactly the time when our nation faces a severe shortage of qualified educators.

Bipartisan legislation introduced in the current session of Congress would repeal these two provisions. The House version of the bill, H.R. 82, by Rep. Howard Berman, Democrat of California, already has 290 co-sponsors. I urge you to co-sponsor H.R. 82, if you have not already done so, and then to press for early action on this long-overdue legislation.

You can anticipate hearing from opponents who say that the Fairness Act will be too costly to implement. But the total estimated cost of the Fairness Act is only a small fraction--less than a fifth--of the annual amount of unpaid taxes owed to the Internal Revenue Service, which could be collected if Congress closed the "tax gap" resulting from failure to enforce current tax laws. That's just one example of the loophole-closing measures that could cover the full cost of Social Security fairness for educators and other public servants.

Sincerely,

Campaign Launched:
January 10, 2007