ROCK HILL A Winthrop University business professor suggests that Americans of various ethnicity and gender benefit unequally from Social Security retirement benefits. Dr. David Letourneau, in a paper delivered in October to Allied Academies Inc. in Hawaii, demonstrated that devoting 2 percent of the 12.4 percent now paid into Social Security s retirement program to privatization could more than double a person s retirement income and reduce the inequities of Social Security across racial and gender groups. Seven percent would be a conservative estimate of the return on the invested funds, as compared to about 2 percent currently. Significantly, the worker would have property rights over the investment. At anytime that the worker died, before or after age 65, the balance of that portfolio would fall to the heirs.
Workers have no property rights to their contributions.
The life expectancy in 1995 of people who were 65 years old was 15.7 years for white males, but only 13.6 years for black males. This means that black men are more likely than any other ethnic group to die before collecting a dime of Social Security, the professor said. As the retirement age is raised, the inequity becomes more pronounced. Any program to redress the situation will be expensive, but necessary because a majority of workers rely exclusively on their Social Security benefits once they retire, Letourneau s research found. Letourneau's paper will be published in December or next June in the Journal of Allied Academies.