Higher SS caps would level field

To the editor;

Even though George W. Bush has presented plans for Social Security only in general terms, various specific plans are surfacing in the public discourse. Those centering on private accounts, in their complexity, bring to mind the image of voodoo economics used by George H.W. Bush in his primary struggle with Ronald Reagan in 1980.

On other approach, more understandable and straightforward, by Robert Ball, former Social Security commissioner, and economists Peter Diamond and Peter Orszag of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Brookings Institute leaves the current system intact but lifts the cap for Social Security payroll deductions to include higher-income wage earners. This would level the playing field and is projected to stabilize the system to the late part of the century. This would perhaps raise the hackles of high-income and business interests.

However, to put this in moral, personal-responsibility or even biblical context, try Luke 12:48: "To whom much has been given, of him will much be required."

GILBERT DEGENHARDT, Cape Girardeau