‘Entitlement Ogre: Funding for Everyone’

Feulner article should be examined carefully. Social Security was born in the Great Depression, an experience that no one who didn’t live through will ever understand. No matter how thrifty, industrious, cautious, or clever one was, the system failed. You could not secure your own future.

Social Security was for the security of the wage earner. It was deliberately designed like an annuity. The more you paid into it, the more you would receive in payments, with a guarantee that they would last until death. This basic form has lasted to today. It was not designed as an insurance policy, paying off only if disaster struck. Social Security started having problems when it began to be used for covering welfare problems. Feulner proposes carrying this trend to its final end, paying only upon a means test.

At this point, Social Security will have deteriorated into a tax on a selected group of people, the wage earners, to pay for welfare responsibilities belonging to everyone. We should take the welfare out of Social Security and place it under funds that are collected from everyone, not just wage earners.

EMEL A. SMITH

Beverly Hills