Controversial WEP & GPO Bill Has Decent Chance of Passage - AMAC & The Hill
The Windfall Elimination Provision (WEP) and Government Offset Provision (GPO) are reviled by public employees, whose Social Security benefits are cut as a result of having only worked sparingly in jobs that paid into Social Security. But not all agree the provisions are unfair, and outright repeal of both would be costly, thus hastening insolvency. Aris Folley of The Hill provides excellent analysis here of the issue. She quotes Social Security expert Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute, who notes that WEP and GPO “were devised at a time when the government didn’t have kind of all the data it could get today, so they had to have these sort of crude rules to do it. And so, on average, it’s about correct, meaning, on average, people are being treated more or less fairly. But it doesn’t necessarily work fairly in every case. There have been some reforms that propose new data and new formula to try to get much closer to accurate every case, but if you have some people who are being treated unfairly, just law of averages means you’ve got other people who are getting a better deal than they should be getting.”
The bill dubbed The Social Security Fairness Act is slated for a House vote in the lame duck session (after the election), having received over the 218 vote threshold in a discharge petition to force a floor vote. Senate passage is uncertain. Full piece here.