Social Security: What Every Taxpayer Should Know

In a comprehensive reference work, former Social Security Administration actuary Robertson clarifies with graphs, charts, tables and a remarkably lucid text the immensely complex functions of our federal retirement, health-care, disability and survivors-benefit insurance programs. He explains that retirement benefits are not derived from the recipient's past tax contributions but from the mandatory payments of the current working generation and warns that tax rates will have to rise drastically to assure projected future benefits. Robertson stresses that the system's nearly $500 billion annual retirement and Medicare disbursements cover an extremely wide-ranging and little-understood schedule of benefits in a program impossible to duplicate privately. Persons approaching retirement in an anomalous status (e.g., widowed ex-worker with dependent child about to remarry) will find invaluable a chapter dealing with every conceivable such situation. (Sept.)