Greenspan’s Idea to Trim Social Security Is Not the Way to Reduce Nation’s Budget

Alan Greenspan’s “solution” to the federal budget deficit problem of cutting Social Security is misleading with regard to both facts and figures.

Social Security payments do not come out of general funds but from a separate fund that has been growing larger . In fact, this fund has reduced government costs by providing a source from which the government has borrowed at favorable interest rates.

Greenspan fails to mention that this is an insurance program, prepaid by recipients and employers. Beneficiaries earn their retirement as much as one who invests in individual retirement accounts. Social Security payments are the principal income for the majority of recipients; cutting them off would impoverish them and increase government expense through the much-higher administrative cost of relief.

No, Mr. Greenspan, there is a better way to balance the budget. Pare those obscenely huge expenditures for what is euphemistically called “defense”--an ineffectual ploy to bring the Soviet Union to its knees by forcing it to bear the cost of matching our armaments.

I will believe in Greenspan’s integrity when he offers to forgo his own pension before robbing those who have earned Social Security benefits.

MARTIN VANDERVEEN

Los Angeles