Family Values?
One of the governmental perks for married people are social security benefits to the surviving widow or widower. According to IWPR, almost 13% of social security benefits go to survivors of deceased workers. The percentage of women receiving these benefits as surviving spouse has declined from 57% in 1960 to 28% in 2008. This decline is largely due to women’s increased labor force participation and the shrinking wage gap (from 60 cents per dollar to 77 cents over the same time period). As a single by choice, my social security benefits will go back into the general pot. I cannot assign them to anyone else. Is that right? Should I, as a single person, be allowed to designate my beneficiary? To me, the social security survivor benefit is tied up with two things: Sexism and matrimania. It originated from the assumption that women do not work and are fully dependent on the male earner who is their husband. We did not want to have starving widows. These assumptions are outdated: Most women earn our own income and an increasing percentage of women are not married. So, I think, social security benefits should go back into the pot for everybody, no beneficiaries period. This is also a good example for the approach to rethinking laws advocated by Nancy Polikoff. If our real goal is to prevent that people over 60, say, do not have enough money to live on, we need to address that. (And remembering the poor women I worked with way back when I was a full-time volunteer in an adult day care center, it is a total joke to presume that the welfare system here in the US keeps anybody out of poverty.) Maybe a better way to address that is to ensure a basic level of income for everybody, independent of their marital status, maybe even independent of age.
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