Social Security and You by Tom Margenau

It's time for me introduce you to my friends, Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice.

I'm pretty sure that behind closed doors they don't lead lives as exciting and titillating as their namesakes depicted in the 1969 movie of the same name starring Robert Culp, Natalie Wood, Elliott Gould, and Dyan Cannon.

But my less glamorous and less flirtatious friends will help me explain a provision of Social Security law that confuses and often infuriates many public employees — usually teachers in those states where educators do not pay into the Social Security system.

And because my column was recently picked up by several newspapers in Texas — one of about a dozen states where teachers do not have Social Security taxes withheld from their salary, but instead pay into their own retirement system — my inbox has been overflowing with angry e-mails from teachers in the Lone Star State. (And I promise my other readers this will be the last column for a while addressing this esoteric issue.)

The missives from the upset Texas educators echo the concerns of other teachers who are sure they're being cheated by the government. They think a provision of Social Security law called the government pension offset denies them benefits they mistakenly believe everyone else is getting.

In a nutshell, the GPO law says that any spousal benefits they might be due on a husband's or wife's Social Security record must be offset by an amount equal to two-thirds of their teacher's retirement pension. Teachers have been lobbying Congress for years to get this law changed. What they don't understand is that everyone's potential spousal benefit has always been offset by any Social Security retirement benefit he or she might be getting.

To help explain the law, let's meet Bob and Carol — and their neighbors, Ted and Alice. These two couples live in a nice Dallas suburb.

Bob and Carol both worked all their lives.

Neighbor Ted also worked at a job covered by Social Security. But his wife, Alice, was a teacher in Dallas. As I mentioned earlier, teachers in Texas pay into their own retirement plan, but they do not pay into Social Security.

Bob retired and is getting $1,800 per month in Social Security retirement benefits. Carol actually made a little more than Bob most of her life so she's getting a Social Security retirement pension of about $2,000 per month. Carol can't get — and frankly, doesn't expect — any wife's benefits, nor any future widow's benefits, on Bob's record because her own Social Security benefit precludes any spousal payments. In other words, Carol's own retirement benefit offsets any benefits she might be due on her husband's record. And, for that matter, Bob can't get a husband's benefit on Carol's record because his own retirement benefit would offset it.

Across the street, Ted is getting roughly the same Social Security benefit as Bob, about $1,800 per month. Alice is getting a $3,000 monthly Texas teacher's pension. Before the pension-offset law was in place, Alice would have received a $900 dependent wife's benefit — and someday, perhaps, an $1,800 widow's benefit — from Social Security in addition to her comfortable teacher's pension.

No other pensioners getting their own retirement benefits qualify for this boondoggle from the government. The government pension offset law simply closed this loophole. Yet Alice is mysteriously upset because she can't get any spousal benefit on Ted's Social Security record. Alice thinks she and other teachers are being singled out for Social Security penalties. What she doesn't understand is the GPO law treats her the same way her neighbor Carol has always been treated. Again, it says that neither woman will get a dependent spouse's benefit from Social Security because each is getting her own retirement pension.

To find out more about Tom Margenau and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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