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Editorial: Social Security's woes can be fixed
Published 12:00 am PDT Friday, March 28, 2008
Story appeared in EDITORIALS section, Page B6
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson on Tuesday repeated the Bush administration canard that Social Security is "financially unsustainable." This falsehood has been endlessly repeated to promote the administration's agenda of privatization – shifting Social Security taxes to private accounts.
This rigid adherence to ideology over pragmatism has resulted in a failure to craft real, bipartisan solutions to Social Security's problems. As a result, the Bush administration will leave legitimate issues of long-term Social Security solvency to the next president.
Social Security's short-term finances are solid. The latest report of Social Security's trustees predicts that Social Security will be able to pay 100 percent of scheduled benefits for all workers through 2041. The question is what happens after that.
Even under a "do nothing" scenario, the trustees project that Social Security will be able to cover 78 percent of scheduled benefits after 2041. But to avoid steep benefit cuts three decades from now, Congress and the president will have to do as they have traditionally done – gradually change the retirement age, benefits and payroll taxes.
A fix is achievable, as President Reagan, a Democratic-majority House and a Republican-majority Senate showed in 1983. Robert Ball, a former Social Security commissioner, says that earlier compromise showed "there is a political center in America that can govern for the benefit of the country even when there are extremely difficult problems to be faced and strongly held differences of opinion about solutions."
That is what has been missing in the Bush era and will have to be revived. The next president should be able to say, as Reagan did in signing Social Security amendments in 1983, that hard-won bipartisan agreement "will allow Social Security to age as gracefully as all of us hope to do ourselves, without becoming an overwhelming burden on generations still to come."
Despite the foot-dragging of the last eight years, That vision remains within reach for 2041 and beyond.
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