[This is a version—roughly done, and needing work—of what probably will be one of several “extras” to accompany some version of the novel The Folder Hunt, which still is on track (despite circumstances) to be somehow available for purchase within a couple months or so.]
This is more a retrospect meditation than a means to make a political point tailored to today’s issues.
This is a story I don’t think I’ve had cause to write down except (possibly) as part of one of the long autobiographical manuscripts I wrote (specifically, the one on my post–high school years, not any first-book-type or intended-high-profile work of mine); and then this episode was a minor one. But today, it might be of interest.
It involved my repaying part of my Social Security survivors’ benefits, received in 1983, and paid back in 1984. (Today, my mother responds to this story as if it’s pretty awful, though it has never struck me this way. That reflects how she forgets some of what constituted our family’s typical lot in the 1970s and early 1980s.) With today’s news stories and people’s individual stories of dealing with the various and several-year results of the 2008 financial crisis, this episode is an example (to me) of how “If the federal government suddenly is no longer the provident father you thought it was, and you feel as if it breaks with tradition and somehow shakes you down, consider this, which was no great shakes 25+ years ago, though it wasn’t much of a help, either.”
Through the late 1970s and early 1980s (starting in the earliest years of Social Security?), you could get Social Security survivors’ benefits until age 22, or whenever you finished with college. Survivors’ benefits were what you could get if a breadwinning parent died. (Funny, but I’ve met only one other coworker in my entire work life, of the many hundreds of people I’ve worked with over 30+ years, who would talk about her stake in this program.) After my father died, the way the system had it, at first my mother received all the benefits that were supposed to be for the three of us. Then, when we kids (myself and my sister) turned 18, we received our own benefits directly, and my mother got only her share.
The amount I got was not big—I recall the highest I got might have been a little over $200 a month (though maybe it wasn’t even over $200). I know for some time it was one hundred and something a month. I think, but am not sure, each of us three—when we each got ours separately—got the same amount. I do recall more distinctly that when I was in college, of the various sources of money by which I paid for college and paid for daily living expenses (sources including financial aid, money from work, Social Security, and whatever else), the Social Security was among the more piddling.
(If that $200 amount seems crazily small, my father got a monthly disability stipend from the Army after he finished his tour in it in 1956; he got it for starting to get type 1 diabetes [as an apparent result of witnessing a fellow soldier commit suicide] near the end of his tour, which was all within this country. I think he got it from 1956 to the year he died, 1970. You know what he got per month? I think my mother said $25.)
Of course, Social Security has long had a rule where, if you make more money than a certain limit, you get some portion of your benefits denied. So, if your income limit for the year was $6,000, and you made $1,000 over the limit, you would have that much deducted from your Social Security benefits. If you foresaw making that much over the limit, you told your Social Security office, and I think they could adjust the benefits accordingly. (I don’t remember if they precisely would deduct prospectively within a year.) This same general sort of set of rules is in place today, from what I’ve heard in connection with talk and other information connected to Social Security Disability. To me, there’s nothing unreasonable about this policy in general.
In the early 1980s, of course, the Reagan Administration, setting up its policies following its “…government is the problem” philosophy, started reducing how much Social Security could do for people. One target was survivors’ benefits: no longer could young people college up to age 22 or when they graduated from college. This benefit was phased out so you could only collect up through age 18. And this cutoff was phased in over a few years to about 1985, with benefit amounts reducing as you approached age 22. I remember my benefit checks getting smaller with each year of my last two or so years in college.
Another rule of the system was, if you reached the limit age, your benefits were then given to a sibling who was younger. I remember my sister, who was in college another year after I was, did not turn 22 before she graduated from college, so she would get survivors’ benefits through the end of college; but I had mine cut off before college was finished, because I turned 22 during senior year—I still had the second semester of my last year to go after my benefits were ended. But my work situation being what it was, I could absorb the cutoff well enough.
I don’t remember if my mother’s benefits were turned off for her, and the money divided between my sister and myself after we each turned 18, but it’s possible that happened. (As you can see, this was a fairly fancy system, despite what seem small amounts of money. I wish I could remember some of the details more.)
So, as long as you collected benefits until age 22 or graduating from college, the system sounds as if it was pretty generous—helping you with college expenses…. Of course, as I implied earlier, the amount of money per month was so small that it was inevitable I got a job during college; and, practically speaking, it was essential I worked almost nonstop through nearly all of college. And there were plenty of months I made more in work income than I got in Social Security, when the amount was $100+. But I never ran into a problem where I made more, for the year, in paid work than Social Security allowed me as a benefits collector.
Until, that is, 1983.
1983 was my first year living in Washington, D.C., and it’s a bit of a long story why. Two big reasons were that (1) summer work had become less of a good prospect starting in 1982, which was my worst year for working at what had been a Playboy Hotel in my hometown. Plus, (2) though I had owned a car in 1982, it had been a disaster—requiring many repairs (some of them hugely expensive), and basically being untrustworthy for transportation by about early 1983. So, I opted to spend my summer in Washington , D.C.
So I had two pretty demanding jobs in summer 1983, and that was the only summer in which I had two work weeks of the type you heard of a peer’s pulling off, which you sometimes wished you could for your own practical reasons (the type you could do when you were that young, at relatively menial jobs)—about 80 hours a week. I brought in money, no small help for college, as I never had before.
I don’t think I realized at first that this windfall of income that year put me over the limit for Social Security.
By the start of 1984, my Social Security was duly turned off permanently—I turned 22 in December 1983. Meanwhile, as I said, my sister got my benefit money—her monthly amount doubled.
I don’t recall whether I had to fill out a form stating my income for 1983 to Social Security—there probably was something like that. Anyway, by sometime in early 1984 (by the spring), I found I had gone over the limit.
Social Security notified me it would require the overage paid back.
I recall going to an office in D.C. to take care of this. I recall something like there was a longish wait to get seen; there was a meeting of some substance/length. They came up with a payment plan, for $800 I had to pay back. We settled on $100 a month, which I found a bit daunting, given my overall expenses—but I wanted to pay it off as soon as possible, in this case eight months.
$800 may not sound like much, but to me in my college years with all my money issues—in good times and not-so-good, this was substantial enough. And while repayment of my student loans was deferred about six months from the time I graduated, and I thus felt I had a respite from needing to make money to pay for college expenses or the like—and could make more hourly at my first post-college job (which was, again, at the Marvin Center)—here I had the burden to pay off $800 in federal benefits.
I knew what the system was about—I didn’t argue with the government’s logic in requiring the overage be paid back. I just felt that I couldn’t enjoy the simple fruits of my labor enough, with my working and no longer doing the demanding work of college; I had to shovel out $100 per month for most of a year. I couldn’t make any substantial new purchase (beyond everyday necessities)—and the biggest purchases I made in the two years or so after college, as small as they may seem today, were an electric guitar (a used Fender Stratocaster) in fall 1984, and an item that would prove far more useful for much longer, a new IBM Personal Typewriter in about June 1985. In late spring 1984, this sort of thing would wait; repaying Social Security had to come first.
I ended up repaying the $800 faster than the original eight-month plan. My income allowed it, and I just wanted to get the debt out of the way. I think I repaid it in five months.
That would be a super-easy debt to dispatch compared to my student loans, which wouldn’t be finally paid off until 1993 (and the nine years of this had its quite trying times, but in retrospect I had it fairly easy compared to what college grads saddled with loans today so often face).
But the way Social Security survivors’ benefits were turned off for me, with my subsequently paying back some, occasioned a lesson for me courtesy of the Reagan Administration. I didn’t become a convert to Reagan’s “trickle-down” economic policy—not by a long shot. But I did feel from then on, “Try not to rely on the government for anything.”
This didn’t mean I became a successful entrepreneur, though I would end up becoming adept at being a solo businessman as a freelancer by about 1997. But I would become so wary of looking to the government for social-program help that I would even be slow, repeatedly so and as was sensible for me, to apply for unemployment benefits, as I did several times from about 1992 on. (As it happened, in the 1990s, I didn’t always apply for unemployment every single time I was not working much or at all. The reason why I rarely applied for unemployment wasn’t simply a matter of philosophy, but often involved the facts of my situation and certain technical aspects of the system—but that discussion isn’t for here.)
But I never liked the idea of unemployment benefits. This wasn’t a reflection of being a conservative—I wasn’t that. I had so appreciated what benefits like Social Security’s were about in the 1970s, when I could and did take the Johnson Administration’s Great Society philosophy more or less for granted. I’ve considered myself a “Johnson Democrat” in the sense that it used to be you could assume, without shame, that you could accept a federal helping hand that you needed until you could help yourself, which was one way Johnson himself described what some benefit his administration set up was about.
