Bankrate follows a strict editorial policy, so you can trust that we’re putting your interests first. Our award-winning editors and reporters create honest and accurate content to help you make the right financial decisions.
Key Principles
We value your trust. Our mission is to provide readers with accurate and unbiased information, and we have editorial standards in place to ensure that happens. Our editors and reporters thoroughly fact-check editorial content to ensure the information you’re reading is accurate. We maintain a firewall between our advertisers and our editorial team. Our editorial team does not receive direct compensation from our advertisers.
Editorial Independence
Bankrate’s editorial team writes on behalf of YOU – the reader. Our goal is to give you the best advice to help you make smart personal finance decisions. We follow strict guidelines to ensure that our editorial content is not influenced by advertisers. Our editorial team receives no direct compensation from advertisers, and our content is thoroughly fact-checked to ensure accuracy. So, whether you’re reading an article or a review, you can trust that you’re getting credible and dependable information.
You have money questions. Bankrate has answers. Our experts have been helping you master your money for over four decades. We continually strive to provide consumers with the expert advice and tools needed to succeed throughout life’s financial journey.
Bankrate follows a strict editorial policy, so you can trust that our content is honest and accurate. Our award-winning editors and reporters create honest and accurate content to help you make the right financial decisions. The content created by our editorial staff is objective, factual, and not influenced by our advertisers.
We’re transparent about how we are able to bring quality content, competitive rates, and useful tools to you by explaining how we make money.
Bankrate.com is an independent, advertising-supported publisher and comparison service. We are compensated in exchange for placement of sponsored products and, services, or by you clicking on certain links posted on our site. Therefore, this compensation may impact how, where and in what order products appear within listing categories. Other factors, such as our own proprietary website rules and whether a product is offered in your area or at your self-selected credit score range can also impact how and where products appear on this site. While we strive to provide a wide range offers, Bankrate does not include information about every financial or credit product or service.
The “Notch Babies” aren’t giving up.
Notch Babies are the approximately 4 million people born between 1917 and 1921 — ages 85 to 90. In 1972, Congress linked Social Security to the Consumer Price Index to protect it from inflation. Someone made an error in the formula, so benefits were too high. The error was corrected in 1977.
Seniors born between 1910 and 1916 got a windfall — they got to keep the Social Security increase that resulted from the error. To be fair, Congress gave people living in retirement born between 1917 and 1921 a break, too. Instead of reducing benefits all at once after the calculation was changed, the decrease was prorated over five years. But the people who became known as the Notch Babies weren’t happy. They wanted the whole windfall, too.
In 1994, Congress investigated the issue and concluded that Notch Babies didn’t get a raw deal and weren’t owed anything, but activists won’t let the issue die. Currently, legislation proposed by U.S. Rep. Mike McIntyre, D-N.C., and supported by the nonpartisan advocacy group, The Senior Citizens League, proposes compensating every notch baby and those up to five years younger than the original Notch Babies — born between 1921 and 1926 — by paying each of them a flat $5,000.
The cost would be about $45 billion.
At a time when we’re worried about cutting a huge national deficit and trying to figure out how to keep Social Security solvent for the long haul, this seems like retirement planning folly. Spending that kind of money to compensate people for something that many argue that they didn’t deserve to begin with is a cost we can’t afford.
Notch Babies, quit your whining.
Share