Dozens of Mainers rallied Monday at the Bangor office of 2nd District U.S. Rep. Bruce Poliquin to voice support for his efforts to repeal two provisions of the Social Security formula.
Poliquin and others say both are preventing retired public servants — such as firefighters, teachers and police officers — from receiving their full Social Security benefits.
Two 30-year-old benefit reduction rules originally intended to prevent double-dipping by workers with public- and private-sector experience could be shelved by Congress next year. Poliquin is among the bipartisan group of lawmakers calling for changes to protect more than 2 million Americans who face huge cuts in their Social Security benefits simply because they worked in government jobs that come with a pension.
“How unfair it has been to them, to work very diligently in serving our communities and also during their working years, working in the private sector and paying in to the Social Security system and doing this diligently and paying the taxes they’re supposed to pay and all of a sudden, when they retire, they realize sometimes for the first time, that they won’t get their full Social Security benefits,” Poliquin says. “This is absolutely unfair and it’s got to be fixed.”
The two rules creating most of the heartburn for workers with a mix of private and public sector experience are the windfall elimination provision and the government pension offset. Bob Alexander, an employee of the Bangor Housing Authority, says that under the rules, he is one year shy of receiving his full benefits.
“I’m one of those people who worked most of my career under Social Security,” Alexander says. “I have 29 years of what they call substantial earnings and the way the rules are, if you have 30 countable years, you don’t lose any of your Social Security, but somehow I have 29, so because of that 29 instead of 30, it costs me over $200 a month for the rest of my life.”
Many of the workers affected by the rules who attended Poliquin’s rally were police officers, firefighters and teachers.