Social Security Millionaires

We keep hearing about how Social Security is going bankrupt and how Medicare is draining the federal budget, but here's an interesting perspective on the government's two biggest entitlement programs from John Cogan, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor of public policy at Stanford University.

From an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal:

Typical retired couples will collect $1 million or more in Social Security and Medicare. This is more than they paid in, and the cost will fall on today's workers.

The existence of so many million-dollar couples is not the result of elected officials carefully weighing the needs of senior citizens against the financial ability of younger workers to meet these needs. Rather, it is the result of decades of separate legislative actions by both political parties to liberalize retirement and health-care benefits, the sum total of which no one has bothered to calculate.

Social Security and Medicare were the result of natural human impulses to create safety-net programs to prevent poverty in old age and to help needy senior citizens with their medical bills. But the programs are flawed.

Read the full article at the newspaper's website.