A tough issue

One of the toughest questions confronting our society today is that of retirement benefits and how they are provided. For many years men and women worked for years and accumulated pension benefits through the companies for which they worked. With Social Security alongside, workers could look forward to a relatively secure life beyond their working years. That picture is dramatically changing, and with it some of the basic social foundations of our country. We have to address the question now that so many of my generation are approaching traditional retirement age.

In recent months large corporations have ended their pension plans, or drastically altered them. While the already retired are usually not affected, those working now are having their future plans changed unpredicatably, and in some cases, without much notice. Fewer and fewer people in the workforce are participating in a qualified benefit pension plan. Now we are hearing that Social Security itself is under threat, primarily because of rising health care costs. This is more than a political or economic issue. A social contract is at stake. What kind of society are we going to be?

I don't pretend to have any answer to how we fix Social Security or to how we get more people involved in retirement planning. I do know that the quality of a society is determined by how its most vulnerable persons are treated. It has been a bedrock of our strength as a free country that a system of retirement security was developed and expanded so that older people could have a life of dignity beyond their active working life. Is that system in danger of breaking? It seems that it is. If it breaks, we will find ourselves facing a very different kind of national security problem.

Our political leadership needs to find a way to have a non-partisan discussion of how we can preserve this vital component of our national life. Sooner rather than later!