Thursday, April 26, 2012

Here's what's really unfair about Social Security

Today Representative Linda Sanchez is introducing the Social Security Equality Act of 2012.  It's the same proposal I critiqued here two years ago.  Yes, it's true; same-sex couples do not get to take advantage of Social Security's provision of "special rights" to married couples who have one primary wage earner.  Those couples put less in to the Social Security system and get more out of it than anyone else --- single people, unmarried couples, and couples who are married but have two more-or-less equal wage earners.  All same-sex couples who have two close-to-equal wage earners will not benefit at all from this "equality" proposal.

As I have said before, African-American married heterosexual couples are among those disadvantaged by the current system because they are much more likely than White couples to be equal earners.  We have a true LGBT rights champion, Ben Jealous, as the head of the NAACP.  What the LGBT rights movement should be doing is beginning a coalition with him and getting a diverse group of advocates together to lobby for reform that will stop privileging one-primary-earner couples.

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