Policy is very essential for a society, as well as the well-being of individuals. Policies are created by different branches of government at different levels in order to protect human rights, assure the delivery of benefits, and create opportunities (McNutt & Hoefer, 2016). There are three different types of policies. Public policy is considered the decisions that the government makes and the laws, regulations, and other artifacts that result from these decisions, social policy is composed of decisions that affects the well-being of an individual, and social welfare policy is composed of the aspects of social policy that involve mutual aid or people helping people (McNutt & Hoefer, 2016). Throughout history, there have been numerous …show more content…
However, Social Security was not intended to be the only source of income although there are other means of income such as assets, private pensions, earnings, and government employee pensions (McNutt & Hoefer, 2016). There has been an evolution with the Social Security system we are familiar with in comparison to the one created in 1935 with in regards to coverage, benefits, and financing. In 1935, coverage was very limited, benefits were paid only to retirees and only to the individual worker, and financing was an issue (DeWitt, 2010). In today’s society, coverage is universal, dependent family members can also receive benefits, and ongoing policy contention and legislative enactments are occurring to work on the financing aspect (DeWitt, …show more content…
There are pros and cons to each one depending on which side one views the issue from. According to the American Association of Retired Persons (2015), they summarized 12 options that were discussed to be prospective proposals in order for Social Security to be updated for the 21st century and future generations, as well as included views from each side of the issue. These proposals include raising the full retirement age, beginning longevity indexing, recalculating the cost-of-living adjustment (COLA), increasing the payroll tax cap, eliminating the payroll tax cap, reducing benefits for higher earners, increasing the payroll tax rate, taxing all salary reduction plans, covering all newly hired state and local government workers, benefit improvements, increasing the number of years used to calculate initial benefits, and beginning means-testing for social security