Your Opinion: Social Security complex, but not in crisis

Dear Editor:

Complex public issues are seldom discussed clearly by the media. Politicians obscure these issues to get votes from misinformed voters.

Don Fleener wants to conduct a discussion about Social Security in the letters section. Four hundred words per letter is a handicap. Social Security is a complex system and Fleener knows only bits and pieces.

Fleener has been focusing on the immediate problem of funding the SSA disability program. The 2015 SSA Commissioners' report discusses the possibility of reduced disability benefits in 2016 or 2017 of up to 20 percent. There are separate trust funds for disability and retirement. Over the last three decades balancing these trust funds have required money to be borrowed from each other as needed with the approval of congress. This happened four times during Reagan's presidency. There is not a crisis unless politicians want to create one.

Republican radicals have made the formerly routine act of raising the debt ceiling a near economic disaster. They have tried to hold the federal government hostage to their whims not legislation. A routine balancing of the SSA trust funds could be made into a crisis. Politicians can be more dangerous to us than foreign extremists.

Fleener thinks that an increase in disability claims is now causing the current imbalance. He does not acknowledge how routine this issue is. Could the increase be from the natural growth in America's population? At .007 percent a year that is over 2 million new citizens every year.

In 2008 capitalism suffered a major breakdown for which you and I paid dearly. Before 2008 in a full employment economy many disabled citizens worked. They were among the first to lose their jobs. Back on the disability roles they went.

Completely ignored by Fleener is the SSI disability program (not SSA) which is financed by general revenue and NOT Social Security taxes. Critics of a public safety net like to lash out at "crazy checks" for SSI children. These critics blame Social Security. SSI and SSDI are administered under the same rules but different funding. Children potentially scamming SSI is not the issue and is unproven.

These are complicated issues Mr. Fleener but there is no crisis unless politicians want to cause one. America is not poor. If SSA retirement and SSA disability are in trouble, it's because radical politicians want them eliminated! These are politicians that want bombs over butter or public concerns.