I still haven't seen anything that addresses the working poor, with no other insurance. Will they be told they have to get better jobs?

a person I was recently unfriended by for being mean to "our wonderful president who is being harassed by the fake news and delusional people" like me is collecting Medicaid for her family we say that this is not right. She is married to "a wonderful, successful attorney who has been working for 8 years with a journalist to expose the truth about the corrupt Dem party" and who was on her local school board for years in Red, rural Northern CA. It turns out, I just learned after she unfriended me 6 weeks ago, that she had neo-Nazi literature under her bed which was discovered 30 years ago by my sister's Jewish roommate, has been home schooling her children for their entire lives, and is perfectly healthy as is her husband who did NOT even pass the bar exam. She is a fine artist who can't make a living with her artwork. They filed for bankruptcy so they can collect Medicaid in 2000. I was misled and lied to for 30 years. I was her Art School friend, I went back to college and got my second degree in education and became a teacher and union rep so that I could survive. I paid for it all by myself. She never divulged that she is a lying hypocrite...home schooling her kids when she could have retrained as I did. Her husband was on the school board but his kids never attended public school. She bitched about Dems for years but I had no idea about any of the real truths behind her lies and hypocrisy.

Does this make me un-Democratic for feeling that people like she and her husband who can work, or at the very least NOT be hypocrites for taking Medicaid, not receive it? Shouldn't they have to work like I did when I was able to? I paid into S Security and won't even receive 90% of it since I live in CA and our state has S Security offset which means that even if you worked and paid into S Security and have earned your credits that you forfeit that money if you decide to become a teacher. It disappears...poof...GONE! AM I un-Democratic?

The offset is a FEDERAL offset, and applies to anyone (in any state) who is drawing a state or federal pension that was funded as an alternative to paying into social security.

The formula is relatively complicated - and 90% is the maximum for one portion of your SS (not all of it), and it is capped. You've mentioned this before - so you should probably sit down with someone who can walk through it with your actual numbers so you know what the true impact will be.

who also worked with both my master teacher and another teacher who did taxes for people 3 months of the school year and had over 20 years experience as teachers in CA. The two teachers were unaware of it until I told them. They also spoke to the financial management person and found out that S Security Offset is in CA and is one of 13 states that does it. He has many teachers as clients and knows his stuff. I spoke with Social Security several times on my own to verify it and they did. It seems unbelievable but it is true.

The reason is that in those 13 states, public employees pay into the state retirement systems INSTEAD OF social security, not in addition to social security. At retirement it is the federal government (social security) that is offsetting its payment to you - NOT the state of California.

The 90% is maximum for a portion of the social security. Not for all of your social security benefit, and the offset is capped at half of your state retirement system. So the chances that you will lose 90% of your social security is pretty small.

The part that is unfair that they reduce SS payments in two ways to counter the perception of a windfall First, the income on which SS is calculated is already reduced to take into account the years you weren't paying into SS. I've got 15 years of zero income as part of my base income - so I'm already being penalized for not paying into the SS System. Then, after reducing my SS by reducing the base income, it is reduced a second time under the Windfall Elimination Provisions.

As a state employee in one of the states in which state employees do not pay social security taxes, I am intimately familiar with the Federal Windfall Elimination Provision. It is obnoxious, but it isn't the state that is imposing it, and it almost certainly won't amount to 90%.

get their full amount in addition to their states pension when some don't? I was told that it is the states' choice to do this and some have stopped doing it while others haven't by the people at S Security. Who decides to change it? If it is only certain states then how does the Fed. govt decide which states to impose it on? I have teacher friends in other states and they get their pension from the years they were teaching and the social security amount from the money they paid into it from their years during their non-teaching jobs too?

for their teaching job, and you were not.

In California, teachers (and other government employees) paid into CalPERS (or some other alphabet soup variation) INSTEAD OF social security. In many state, teachers (and other government employeees) pay BOTH. Back in the 70s (ish) the federal government was trying to force everyone into social security. After arm-twisting, lobbying, etc. States were finally permitted to choose to maintain their own public retirement systems. States with robust public service retirement plans generally opted to do so. So in that sense it is the state's choice - but the choice California had was whether to maintain a separate public retirement system (and, if it did, whether to require teachers to pay into both - or just the state system. If your teacher's union was anything like mine, it put a lot of money into saving the state TRS AND into ensuring I didn't have to pay BOTH SS and TRS). Once it made that choice, the Federal Government steps in to reduce the resulting windfall you receive because a large chunk of your income is invisible to the social security system.

Essentially, the reasoning for the Windfall Elimination is that the SS system is structured so that low income people get a higher rate of return on their contributions than higher income people. In other words, the SS payout Gods favor people who are likely to have fewer means.

Using my age and projected retirement benefits & today's salary:

Me, in South Carolina (a state that did not opt out of Social Security for public employees)
Only working as a teacher $40,000 - Monthly SS Benefit - $1218 (3.045% of my income)
But - to make ends meet - I work a second $10,000 job at Sears - bringing my income to $50,000 and my SS benefit to $1394 (2.788%)

My SS income, due to the $10,000 side job, increased $176/month (from $1218 to $1394)

You, in California (a state that DID opt out of Social Security for public employees)
Only working as a teacher $40,000 - Monthly SS Benefit - $0 (you didn't pay in, you don't collect)
But - to make ends meet - you work a second $10,000 job at Sears - bringing your actual income to $50,000, your SS income to $10,000, and your SS benefit to $492 (4.92% of your SS income).

Your SS income, due to the $10,000 side job, increased to $492/month (from $0 to $492)

So - because the SS Gods think you were living in poverty, and I was not, I only get $176/month for my $10,000 Sears job - while you get $492 for your $10,000 Sears job - a $316 windfall compared to me - earning the exact same income in the exact same jobs. You get paid a higher rate of your return on your SS payments because your main income is hidden from SS.

The purpose of the offset/windfall elimination provision is to keep from being overly generous to you because the algorithms only know about the income you've paid into social security - and they "think" you've been living in poverty and need more help. To make life fair for me, your payments should be reduced by 54%. (My beef is with how they calculate the WEP, not the need for it. I WANT higher payments for lower income people, and I shouldn't benefit as a "fake" lower income person because I took a low income second job on top of a higher income job SS can't see. I just don't think the algorithms are sophisticated enough to address sequential job people, as opposed to dual simultaneous income)

Here's a link to the calculator so you can plug your own numbers in: https://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/benefit6.cgi (This is the pre-offset calculations - so you can maybe convince your self that there is some logic behind the offset.)

(BTW - I am not actually in SC - I'm in a PRS state , and will be hit with the WEP. That's why I know how it works. I just used SC to illustrate why the provision exists.)

Thank you for your patience and for bringing it down to a level that I can sort of understand. I'll add this to my home page bookmarks and send it to my teacher friends who are in the same boat.

I guess the whole thing is a moot point in my particular case since I won't be alive when I hit the age to be able to collect it anyhow. I have comforted myself in the past, when I thought I would live long enough, that S Security may not be around by then since the system is going to get destroyed by the GOP or collapse under its own wait from too many older people collecting and not enough younger people adding to it. My pension would have been safer than S Security I suppose. Thanks again!

It's one of the few places you can get a defined benefit pension plan.

I had to wade through it in detail 4 years ago when I had the opportunity to move back into the system (at a 2/3 pay cut). It was the benefit of doubling my average base salary (the basis for the defined benefit) that made the decision.

Best decision ever!! Money is a bit tight - but I absolutely love what I am doing. And pretty much every income penny I forfeited will come back as retirement pay - if I live as long as my parents. And far better than I would get from Social Security.

I don't think I've seen your story about why you won't be around for retirement. Sorry!

aren't like your ex-friends.

They are homeless people (anything but "chronically homeless," whatever that is), people without reliable transportation, people with lower IQ's but not considered disabled (the new paperwork requirements, which are supposed to be done online, will be one more confounding obstacle for people who haven't finished high school), etc. And there will be hardly any savings to the government because of all the monitoring that will have to set up. This is mainly punitive, I think -- so people like you won't be mad at people like your ex-friends -- who are probably in the minority of people on Medicaid.

that they get Medicaid? I am trying very hard to figure that out.

But I can hardly wait until she and her family are tossed off Medicaid and every other government program. Frankly, I hope she winds up living on the street.

That will accomplish the ultimate goal of having people just give up trying to get assistance. It's exactly what the Republicans want.