WHO IS AFFECTED BY THE WEP?
About 2% of retired American workers earned both a Social Security benefit and a benefit from a Social Security substitute, like a state or local employee pension. These workers are firefighters, police officers, teachers, and other public servants who spend part of their work years in a retirement system that doesn’t contribute to the Social Security system. HOW ARE BENEFITS CURRENTLY FIGURED? • Social Security is designed to help keep people out of poverty. To accomplish this, it replaces more earnings for lower-wage workers. For example, Social Security replaces about 56 percent of average earnings for low wage workers, compared with 42 percent and 35 percent for average and high wage workers respectively. • If a worker has a job not subject to Social Security taxes, the benefit formula records “zero” earnings for that job. • If a person has multiple years of “zero” earnings included in his or her average earnings, he or she may appear to have had low wages when that was not the cas
