After years of floating ideas, President Bush has finally released details on his plan to privatize Social Security and slash benefits for most Americans. Bush will rush these changes through Congress unless working families fight to strengthen rather than privatize Social Security.

In a bid to make his plan less offensive to his most vocal opponents -- retirees -- President Bush’s latest proposal involves slashing Social Security benefits for family members of workers who die before retirement. Calling it the “cruelest cut,” Economists William Spriggs and David Ratner of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a Washington-based research group, report that the president’s benefit cut would mean a 9.4 percent reduction, or a loss of $3,009 (in today’s dollars), in annual benefits for the family of a typical worker who is now 25, but will die at age 45.

“Slashing the benefits to survivors and the disabled would have significant effects. Men in their twenties have a 3-in-10 chance of becoming disabled before reaching retirement. Roughly one of those three disabled men will die before reaching retirement. An additional 10 percent of men between the ages of 20 and 29 will die before reaching retirement. All of these workers and their families will see benefit cuts as a result of the proposed Social Security changes. Perhaps even more troubling is the fact that such changes are completely unnecessary: the Social Security Trustees project that the Social Security system will be able to meet all scheduled benefits through 2041,” Spriggs and Ratner report.

The president’s cut, the economists state, strikes at the heart of the Social Security program as envisioned by President Roosevelt. Social Security, or Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance -- as it is formally named -- is a comprehensive insurance program that protects American workers and the family members who depend on that worker’s earnings, should they be unable to perform a regular job because of old age, death or disability.

Today, about 55 percent of Social Security recipients -- over half of the beneficiaries -- are disabled workers or family members of disabled, retired, or deceased workers and retirees. In December 2003, 6.8 million of the 47 million Americans receiving Social Security benefits received survivor benefits; 1.9 million of these beneficiaries were children. The average widowed parent with two surviving minor children currently receives an annual benefit of $22,572, according to the EPI.