@Crash - not sure what you want translated. What are you looking for from a discussion of GPO/WEP? GPO is the most controversial, in my opinion, of the two since the entitlement of a widow who was a stay-at-home spouse is straight forward and not adjusted down. Not so for a working but not paying-in spouse who gets adjusted down based on an amount of other funding derived or partially derived from the money denied the SS system. But this question will probably never be addressed since a non-working widow still needs money. So, anything I say past "the winner is the non-working widow" will ignore this. Besides, it is becoming mute as most women must work today. Also, I am sure SS experts would take issue with any attempt a novice like me made to explain the calculations. I think, whatever the explanation, you must remember that this was instituted when the Greenspan Commission was trying to get SS through the Boomer years so anything saving money that also seemed equitable (like GPO/WEP) was a winner. My GPO conclusion I shared with an Actuary friend of mine (cut paste from my email) in 2007 was "I cannot see that widows that held government jobs that didn't pay into social security are treated any differently as widows who paid into social security. They both end up with the higher of their own or their spouse's social security benefit whether their own is earned from social security or non-social security plans." And the pay-in person would be offended by my conclusion since it feels like a penalty for working based on need.
That said, when Bush was pushing privatization schemes, I downloaded the AnyPIA program from SSA. It calculates entitled benefits. I only calculated benefits for a rather rudimentary design of varying pay-in patterns. Looking at dates on my emails to an actuary friend the time frame of these calculations was between 2003 and 2008. Most my GPO/WEP calculations were done, not from a point of view of the after-reduction amounts but were a what-if there was no reduction point of view. So it was, bottom-line, sufficient for my purposes but not exhaustive. That is why I recommend reading experts on the subject. I thought the two publications I selected were a good broad brush of the "why" story.
What I found was the salaries and salary patterns played a huge impact. For example, imagine the difference in pay-in of A and B, both working early in life at minimum wage paying SS taxes for the same 10 years, then, engineering degree in hand, B working for a utility company for 3
5 years and A working for a non-SS state government for 3
5 at the same identical salary each year as B. In the SS calculation A becomes a low wage worker with a return on investment based on minimum wage for 10 years. B becomes a high wage worker with a return on investment based on a high wage for 3
5 years. A is in the highest return on investment bend point for the SS calculation and B's position on the bend points would put him at a lower return on investment. This appeared to be the major source of the windfall that is spoken of. So, you end up with a Greenspan Commitee recommendation to bring "fairness" to the paid-in worker, which, when handed to the math geeks, ended up with WEP which, I think, has more built-in protection for the low wage worker.
Whereas I am clueless about fixing GPO inequity, it seems to me that, in today's information age that, if an equitable result was sought for WEP, it would be easy to generate an algorithm that took actual wage and wage pattern and combined it with a record of years paid in and years not paid in and come up with equal return on investment numbers for A and B.
Edit: I had to edit this because, after defining A and B, I proceeded to profile them backwards, so I just edited to make B the pay-in and A the non-pay-in.
