In her op-ed piece (BDN, March 24), Stephanie Seguino, chair of the University of Vermont Department of Economics, opines that Social Security is not in a crisis, but it is wise to be “prudent” about the future. Her idea of prudence is to eliminate the cap on Social Security taxes – in effect, to raise the cap infinitely.

My opinion is different. My opinion is that Social Security has already had a problem for a number of years, and that the cap has already been raised too much.

My case is based on my personal experience.

I am a retired old geezer. I retired in 1999 at the age of 65. I went down to the federal building in Bangor and submitted my DD 214 and whatever other papers the SS folks wanted. A couple of weeks later I got a phone call from a Social Security person. This person was friendly and clearly competent, and she did what the SS folks do when you retire: she took me through the history of my Social Security contributions (FDR must be turning in his grave to hear them called taxes), year by year, in order to determine my benefits. Because the idea has always been that your benefits should have some relationship to your contributions.

Other factors are at work. For example, benefits are adjusted for wage increases. The SS actuaries doubtless work up new tables every year for SS calculations. Benefits are nevertheless mainly related to contributions, which was the point of the phone call.

It turned out that I had started contributing to Social Security 50 years earlier, in 1949, when I was 15 years old. I didn’t contribute much that first year, but in succeeding years I was contributing the maximum or near it. I think the cap was $1,000 then. I could earn $400 or $500 during the summer and about that much working part-time during the school year. This continued through high school, college and then graduate school.

I finally got a full-time job in 1962. I was making $6,000. The cap was $2,000.

Through about the first half of my working life I was making more than the cap. (Except when I was in the Army. When they drafted you in those days, they also docked your SS.) But then they kept raising the cap until it got to be more than I was making. When I retired in 1999, the cap was $65,000.

That meant that when the good SS lady was calculating my benefits, I would not get the maximum for those years.

I remember being a little miffed at this. After all, I had contributed to SS for 50 years, and I and my employers had always paid what the government told us to pay.

I inquired what the guy making $65,000 would get. He would get about $1,400 a month. I would get about $1,100.

I am not complaining. I have a comfortable retirement.

But let us consider the implications of this history.

In the early ’50s, a kid working summers and part-time could make the SS maximum. Any working person could make it. Today the cap is $90,000. How many kids working summers and part-time make $90,000? The kids have fallen off the SS radar screen. They are working for an SS pittance. As far as Social Security is concerned, they might as well not be working at all.

And what about the adults who are making $20,000 or $30,000 or even $40,000 a year?

See history above.

In my retirement I watch a lot of TV news, even though my old boss said that TV news is a contradiction in terms. Anyway these days there are a lot of politicians on TV who think that the SS cap is too low and should be raised to, say, $140,000. Soak the rich. Most of these politicians are Democrats, but some are Republicans and the idea was apparently originally a Republican’s. (Stupidity is bipartisan.)

OK, soak the rich. But who is being soaked? What happens to the benefits of a $30,000 guy? And even the poor sap who is making only $90,000 will get hit when it comes to benefits.

Some politicians have suggested that the cap should be higher than $140,000, but one said that since an SS principle is that you should have some chance of getting out what you put in, $140,000 is about the limit for now. (We have to be concerned about those upper-income people.)

But Seguino wants to go further. She says that a person making $180,000 is paying in only 3.1 percent instead of 6.2 percent. So she wants to remove the cap altogether.

Well, OK, there are folks making $10 million – major league baseball players (Barry Bonds will make $40 million in the next two years, if he plays), rock stars, CEOs of large corporations, etc. I don’t know what 6.2 percent of $10 million is, but I assume that it is a lot, and will keep SS solvent. But of course if the principle is that what you get out is related to what you put in, then they will get some pretty good benefits too.

But then what happens to the poor sap who is making only $140,000? Or the poor sap who is making only $90,000? It seems to me that the poor sap who is making only $65,000 will be almost off the radar screen.

And the $30,000 guy? If he won’t disappear, like the kids, he’ll get the short end of the stick. He’ll be lucky to get even a piece of the stick.

Someone suggested that, well, there are adjustments that could be made. I guess I would like to see those adjustments.

Seguino and a number of politicians think the SS cap is too low. In case you missed my point, I think it is already well above what most people make, and is too high.

Of course, I could be wrong. I am not a Social Security actuary.

But I am from Missouri. If I am wrong, let Seguino or someone show me.

Bob Diebold is a retired newspaper editor who lives in Orono.