Sometimes I will write what I think is the most harmless and innocuous column about a Social Security issue — and then all hell breaks loose! It happened again recently. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a column in which I explained that a workingwoman will generally be paid her own Social Security benefit first. Only after that will they will look to her husband's record to see if she can get any additional benefits. Well, that triggered a whole host of emails, some of them quite angry. Here is an example.

Q: I can't believe how Social Security discriminates against women like me who were forced to work in order to maintain a certain standard of living. It's a travesty that these lazy women who never worked a day in their lives and who got to stay home and let their husbands take care of them get essentially the same benefits that I do. I know a lady from our church who never worked a day in her life, and she gets Social Security from her husband — and I get squat! What's wrong with this picture?

A: Wow! There is some anger there — on a whole lot of levels. I'm not even going to touch your sentiments about stay-at-home wives and mothers. I'll let someone more versed in women's issues deal with that. But I will discuss your concerns about Social Security. And I think the best way I can do that is to once again share this story about my mom and the lady who lived next door to us.

I grew up in a small town where you could find rich folks in big houses living very near to poor folks occupying much more modest dwellings. And that was true of our neighborhood. My dad was a janitor struggling to make ends meet. My mother had to work to help pay the rent and keep enough groceries on the table to feed me and my three siblings.

Just behind our house and across the alley was a big home owned by the vice president of a local bank. His wife, even though she had a degree in journalism, never worked outside the home once the first of an eventual brood of six children came along.

My brothers and sister and I got along famously with the children of the banker and his wife. We were always playing games, shooting baskets or just hanging out. On the other hand, our parents rarely spoke. I guess the economic and educational gulf between them was just too great to foster any kind of meaningful relationship.

And that gulf only widened later in life between my mom and the neighbor lady after both of their husbands died. Sadly, most of the friction and resentment came from my mom's side of the alley. And much of it had to do with Social Security.

Because my mom had worked most of her life, she received her own Social Security retirement benefit. The widows rate she was due on my dad's Social Security account was only slightly higher than her own, so she did get a small bump in her monthly checks from my dad's side of the Social Security ledger.

Across the alley, the neighbor lady received no benefits on her own Social Security account, but she did get a rather substantial widows benefit from her deceased banker husband. It was more than my mother received from her combined accounts.

And this peeved my mother to no end. Sadly, she lived the rest of her life bearing deep resentment — partly to her neighbor and partly to the Social Security system that allowed what she perceived to be this injustice to happen. I can still hear her griping: "THAT WOMAN never worked a day in her life. And there she is in that big house, getting more money each month from the government than me, a woman who worked hard all her life just trying to make ends meet!"

After I started working for the Social Security Administration, my mom carried on with her rants about the supposedly broken system and asked me "to do something about it."

Of course, there was absolutely nothing that a brand new SSA employee could do about this situation. Besides, the laws that govern the payment of Social Security benefits are written by Congress, not by bureaucrats. Still, I tried to mollify my mom by discussing the rationale behind the rules with her. I explained that Social Security was not set up to work like regular pension programs. It always was (and still is today) a social insurance program intended to accomplish larger goals for society.

I used to ask my mom: "If you think things are unfair, what do you think we should do about it? Should we take widows benefits away from our neighbor because you don't think she deserves them?" My mother might get a nasty little gleam in her eye with that thought. But she always eventually admitted that the neighbor was due her widows benefits.

My mom would counter with this: "I think I should get my own full Social Security benefit AND my own full widows benefit. After all, I worked and paid for my Social Security, and Dad worked and paid for his Social Security!" On the surface, it seems like a valid point. In fact, I've heard thousands of workingwomen make the same argument to me over the years.

But here is the flip side of that coin: If working women can get their own retirement benefits and full spousal benefits, shouldn't working men be offered the same? In other words, every single working person in this country would get his or her own Social Security benefit, and at the same time, everyone would also get a spousal benefit from his or her husband or wife.

Let's be realistic. The system was never set up to do that. And it never could do that. Where in the world would the money come from to essentially pay double benefits to everyone in the country?

The truth is Social Security spousal and survivor benefits have always been classified as "dependents" benefits. They are meant to be paid to a lower-earning (or nonearning) spouse who was financially dependent on the higher-income spouse. They were never meant to be paid to everyone as some kind of add-on marital bonus to their own Social Security account.

If you have a Social Security question, Tom Margenau has the answer. Contact him at thomas.margenau@comcast.net. To find out more about Tom Margenau and to read past columns and see features from other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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