This is an idea I had 16 years ago, before the Internet came to my neck of the woods. It's still a valid idea, and could conceivably pay off the National Deficit in about six years considering our current deficit of roughly two trillion dollars.

This is a two part idea, the first part deals with payments of Social Security to the independently wealthy. After a certain age, your income does not matter anymore when Social Security tests to see if you are able to receive Social Security benefits. They will give it to you now matter how much you are making.

There are many independently wealthy people who draw checks in the range of $3000 a month due to the large amount of taxes they have payed into the system. These people do not need Social Security. It was originally conceived as a way to help people who had no retirement plan, and who worked in lower paying jobs so they could retire with at least some income. It was never intended to make the rich even richer.

There are approximately one hundred million workers in the U. S. work force. It you take the premise that one percent of them become independently wealthy by the age of retirement, that yields one million rich people drawing Social Security.

One million retired rich times $3000 times 12 months equals $360 billion dollars a year payed to people who do not even need the payments. The is roughly 75% of the current federal budget allocated to Social Security. If congress were to pass a bill to keep these payments from being made to people who had resources of over $40,000 a year in income from any source, including interest on a simple saving account, then this would make it possible to pay off the National Deficit in about five and a half years.

Instead of borrowing from the Social Security budget as President Obama's administration has done, simply take the money away from those that do not need it in the first place, who were never intended to be put on Social Security anyway.

This second part of paying off the National Deficit can be realized by lowering wages for Federal Employees by a very small amount. In 1988, according to my 1991 Information Please Almanac, there were 17,588,000 Federal Employees. If you reduced each one of these employee's wages by one cent per hour, the yearly savings to the budget of the United States would be $365,830,000.

A three cent per hour decrease would yield roughly 1.1 billion dollars. As you can see this would help pay off the National Deficit quite readily, and put this country back on a much healthier economic base. It is not as large an amount as the saving from cutting the rich off from Social Security, but it would give them the impression that they were not paying the National Deficit off all on their own.

Here is a chart that shows the affects of wage reduction for Federal Employees at different rates.

	Per hour reduction    Yearly Savings     Yearly Wage 
                                                 Loss Per Employee
	1 cent                  $365,830,400     $20.80
        2 cents                 $731,660,800     $41.60
        10 cents              $3,658,304,000    $208.00

Ok, I think that chart should begin to give you an idea of how much it would save, and how little it would hurt an already well payed Federal Employee. To make it more equitable, the higher payed Federal Employees could be reduced at a higher rate than lower grade employees.

I am sorry that I do not have more current figures, or an exact number of the wealthy retired people, but that information seems to be hidden, as I have done hours of research on the Internet attempting to discover just how many rich retirees there are. The figures should be comparable today, and I did use the current figure of approximately 2 trillion for the National Deficit, not the 4.6 trillion it was in 1988.