The Daily Gamecock

Issue date: 2/25/08 Section: Viewpoints

Paul Bowers, first-year print journalism student

Welcome to the welfare state. Leave your savings at the door.

The woman generally regarded as the nation's first baby boomer received her first Social Security check on Feb. 12, and economists from coast to coast joined in a collective grimace.

Kathleen Casey-Kirschling, born one second after midnight on Jan. 1, 1946, was photographed in USA Today on her private yacht - dubbed "First Boomer" - which she uses to pop back and forth between her two homes in Maryland and Florida. And guess what? You're paying for her retirement.

It's a well-publicized fact that Social Security has begun its downward spiral. By 2017, it is projected that the system's payouts will overtake the amount of tax money collected to fund it. By 2041, its reserves will probably be shot.

As Social Security continues to hemorrhage funds, politicians from both sides of the aisle will frantically propose treatments for fiscal hemophilia. The real issue, though, lies at the very heart and intent of the program. The problem is the modern American sense of entitlement.

Yes, entitlement, that same nasty word that lead Frenchmen to riot in the streets when their prime minister had the audacity to suggest that companies should be allowed to link salaries to productivity.

Our government always owes us something, doesn't it? Whether it's a new park, an arts endowment or a farm subsidy, we expect and demand it immediately. Congress is like the cool uncle who buys us all the toys mom and dad know better than to get for us.

And we complain about high taxes.

The Social Security Act was initially passed in a panicky attempt to combat poverty among senior citizens during the Great Depression. Nowadays, we expect it to help pay for everyone's retirement. This is absurd on two levels.

For one, we are operating under the assumption that the federal government is a good steward of our money. Fun fact: The federal government can't balance its own checkbook. The national debt is over $9 trillion and skyrocketing. In the Iraq war alone, Congress is estimated to have accrued at least $10 billion in wasted and undocumented expenses. We trust these knuckleheads?

More important, though, is what Social Security says about our dependency. It's not just that we can't count on Uncle Sam to pay up - it's that we shouldn't. Integral to the American economic system is the individual citizen's right to dispose of his property as he so chooses. The greater the percentage of income that goes to taxes, the less each American is master of his own financial destiny.

Something I would love to see in my lifetime is a renaissance of personal responsibility. As Social Security falls to shambles, we need to understand the fallacy of its name - the burden of financial security rests on the individual's shoulders, not on some bloated government bureaucracy.

Every security blanket must be abandoned at some point. And with a blanket as misguided and mismanaged as this one, the sooner the better.

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