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Billionaire heiress Teresa Heinz Kerry oozes platitudes for the poor working woman on Mothers Day -- "family values" and "mothers? virtues" and "vital sustenance" -- to argue that Social Security benefits be increased for women. Not a word about how these benefits are to be paid for, or by whom. Not a word. Ms. Heinz is surely a woman who is not in the habit of wondering how things are to be paid for (at least not anymore -- having married her money, she once knew exactly how, but those years are behind her now).

Okay, now let's look at the facts. The reality is that women already do far better than men under existing Social Security rules. Look at this table of internal rates of return from Social Security from the Social Security Actuary. You'll see that regardless of age or income level, women systematically already get higher internal rates of return from Social Security than men do. For example, a medium-earner single male born in 1955 gets a 1.9% "return" from his FICA tax "investment" in Social Security. But an otherwise identical woman gets a 2.38% "return."

A single-earner couple does even better -- a 4.29% "return." And since in most single-earner couples it's the man who earns, that means the non-working woman is the lucky lottery winner in Social Security. It's not true, as Heinz claims -- in breathtaking ignorance of the facts -- that "Fairness to women is not a hallmark of our current system."

There is one sense in which the system is unfair to women -- but it has nothing to do with anything that Heinz is talking about. When a stay-at-home mom goes to work and that single-earner couple becomes a two-earner couple, the "return" drop to 2.31%. That's a very high tax to pay for a woman who returns to the workforce.

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