Thank you for expressing your thoughts about the Social Security "notch" issue.
I appreciate you sharing the support of many North Dakotans for legislation in Congress to provide long overdue relief for "notch" babies. As you know, Congress made changes to the Social Security rules in 1977 to correct an unintended benefit received by some Social Security recipients. However, these changes also created an inequity. Two people working in virtually the same jobs, getting the same wages over the same number of years would get vastly different benefits as a result of the 1977 changes.
I believe there should be something done to fix this inequity for "notch" babies, and have worked on it for a good number of years. However, there are some in Congress who disagree and don't want to give any relief to the "notch" babies. That's why it's been difficult to find a solution to this matter.
Senator Harry Reid from Nevada and I jointly offered a "notch baby" relief proposal as an amendment to the major tax bill debated on the Senate floor in a previous session of Congress. This proposal would have provided "notch" babies with two options for receiving their additional benefits. First, they could choose to have benefit increases that would be dependent on the year that the individual became eligible for Social Security benefits. The percentage of the benefit increase would range between 55 percent for those eligible in 1979 and 5 percent for those eligible in 1988. The second option for Anotch@ babies would be to receive a lump sum of $5,000, spread out over four years ($1,250 for each of those four years).
Unfortunately, our amendment fell 5 votes short of passage on a procedural motion. I hope that the Senate will have the opportunity to revisit this issue and I will, once again, be supporting efforts to address this problem for "notch" babies in a reasonable way. I'm disappointed that we did not have the votes to get this done in the past, but I will keep trying.
Thanks again for contacting me about this issue.
Senator Byron Dorgan
