Sometimes people will write to me complaining that the government, specifically the Social Security Administration, has messed them up and cheated them out of benefits they might have been due. But many times, the fault (to trivialize a famous line from Shakespeare’s play, “Julius Caesar”) is not in our government, but in ourselves. Here are
Just last week, I wrote a column in which I passed along my ideas for a holiday gift for senior citizens. One is a booklet published by the Social Security Administration called “Fast Facts and Figures.” It’s a short booklet (about 40 pages) crammed with fun and interesting tidbits about the Social Security program. Just
Photo: President Joe Biden walks with Bob Parant, Medicare beneficiary with Type 1 diabetes, as they arrive to speak at an event on health care costs, in the Rose Garden of the White House For the first time in a decade, Americans will pay less next year on monthly premiums for Medicare’s Part B plan,
Well, Tom, you see, I’m a farmer. I got me about 100 acres of beans, and I really only work two months a year. I plant those beans in April and I harvest them in October. The rest of the time, I’m pretty much sitting on my butt. Oh, I mend a fence or two
I’ll tell you this: Sometimes, you just can’t win. I’ve learned over the years that you have to have a pretty thick skin to be a Social Security columnist. And that’s because people will frequently misread something I write, or they will take something I said the wrong way, and then they let me have
Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay My wife and I and a group of our neighbors were chatting the other day, and it dawned on us that there are eight houses in a row on our block in which each of the couples has been married for more than 50 years! Well, not quite. My