I just discovered that a member of the Heritage Foundation wrote a piece about six years ago that pointed out the disparity in SS benefits that blacks receive verses whites.
Here is the response I sent them which sums up a lot of what I was trying to relay to you and other FReepers. Please let me know what you think:
While I admire the push by the Heritage Foundation to help enact change with the Social Security system, using race as a method to do so seems to me be inappropriate at best.
Since Social Security is a government program, it seems to me that if one looks at disparities in that program based on race then it is necessary to view government programs and the impact of federal laws in their entirety based on race. No cherry picking should be allowed.
If it is true that blacks on the whole pay more into Social Security than they receive in benefits, then it probably follows that whites receive more in benefits than they have paid into the system. Does this formula hold true for other programs such as Medicare and Medicaid? Given that whites live longer and healthier lives, do they use more funds from Medicare and Medicaid than blacks who use the system for a shorter period of time, but may require more services during that time?
Other programs that are funded by taxes not directly earmarked for those programs should also be fair game. Based on taxes paid, which group receives the most benefits from government welfare programs, blacks or whites? What about educational grants and scholarships?
What about the cost of securing our transportation system post 9-11? Do the more affluent whites travel by air more frequently than blacks? The taxes on the tickets purchased probably do not cover all the security costs associated with a person's air travel. In this case, whites probably receive more out of the system than they put in as compared to blacks.
Then there is the life insurance business. Federal laws prohibit rates to be based on location and race. It is okay to discriminate based on sex and smoking habits, but there are statistics that clearly show that there is not just a disparity between the life expectancy of men versus women, smoker versus non-smoker, but also of black versus white, District of Columbia verses Cheyenne, Wyoming. It is acceptable to charge different rates for car insurance based on location but not on life insurance.
Life insurance is able take into account family history. However, death by murder at age 45 merits a valid life insurance claim the same as death by heart attack at age 45, but deaths by other than natural causes are not used for calculating insurance premiums. Federal laws prohibiting disparities in insurance premiums in essence equates to one group receiving a disproportion share of benefits as compared to the actual cost of those benefits.
The ends (Social Security reform) does not justify the means (selectively using statistics based on race). Is it our goal as conservatives to ensure that every outcome in society is equal when defined in terms of race? Is race going to be the standard by which the success of every program or every law is to be judged?
To achieve this desired outcome based on race, it appears we will need a new government bureaucracy - The Department of Racial Disparity.