Dear Editor: I want to comment on the letter in the June 16, 2018 Tablet by Frederick Bedell, “Social Security’s Future.” Mr. Bedell wants the government to do something about the coming collapse of Social Security and Medicare.

We hear that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are ‘entitlements’. I think this means that we’re entitled to them. I wasn’t around when Social Security was voted into law. But I know that not all Americans wanted it. I do remember that a woman in, I believe, New Hampshire, who owned a factory, refused to collect the Social Security taxes on her employees. Although the government tried to force her to do this, for years they didn’t succeed. I do remember how the government decided we would have Medicare. And Medicaid. Before that, people made their own arrangements. At the time, I think it cost about $20 a day to be in the hospital.

When the government voted in Social Security and the other ‘entitlements’, the idea was that the people who were in their working years would pay for those who were retired. According to the Social Security Administration, in 1940 there were 149 workers supporting each person receiving benefits. In 2010, that had fallen to 2.9 workers supporting each beneficiary.

Social Security was created in the 1930s, in a pre-birth control and pre-abortion society. They never realized that in the future we would be killing off the potential workers who they counted on to pay the taxes.

To me, it looks like an entire society practicing contraception and abortion on a massive scale cannot have anything like Social Security or Medicare or Medicaid. There will eventually be too few left to pay for them.

FRANK DROLLINGER

Woodhaven