President Clinton wants to "save Social Security". So does Congress. Everybody agrees there’s an impending crisis. It’s been discussed repeatedly over the years, but each time anyone offers a concrete proposal, it turns out to be political hemlock for the proposer. Social Security reform can never be dealt with in an election year, but then, there’s never a non-election year. The day after an election, everyone’s bracing for the next one. Meanwhile, the perceived crisis keeps impending, harder and harder. Awareness grows, what was at first bitterly controverted becomes an unthinking cliche: if we don’t do something, Social Security will go broke. The trouble is, nobody trusts the "something" that anyone else might contrive. So it stays unfixed.
Social Security reform has been that kind of issue for twenty years or more. I first tuned in during the brouhaha of 1990, when Senator Patrick Moynihan proposed to cut the Social Security payroll tax. It seemed to me that everybody was focusing on side-issues. I started to write an article offering ¾ ahem! ¾ enlightenment as to the real issue. Then Moynihan’s proposal fizzled, and Social Security reform was off the agenda for another couple of years.
That was just as well, for it gave me time to research the details. There were plenty of details. Just understanding the sense in which Social Security was "off budget", and its actual relationship to the national debt, required the deciphering of an intricate government accounting system. One could get lost for a long time in U.S. Treasury monthly statements.
From time to time, meanwhile, the issue heated up again in national politics. Moynihan’s tax proposal had avoided any challenge to the workings of Social Security itself, but libertarian and conservative schools of thought brought a more radical approach into the fray: privatization. Less venturesome reformers discussed later retirement, taxing of well-off seniors’ benefits, reduced cost-of-living allowances, and other unpleasantries of that nature. To judge among these proposals, let alone to suggest anything better, it was necessary to examine the whole vast system which is Social Security.
There was time, though. Always the issue returned to the back burner. This article grew in increments.
1999 brought a wake-up call. All of a sudden, it appeared that Social Security was really on the country’s agenda. As the impeachment proceedings slogged toward a conclusion, it became commonplace to speak of Social Security reform as the very epitome of "work that Congress should be getting on with". President Clinton’s sketch of the Administration’s preferred solution was a long way from what reformers had in mind, but its proposal to direct a small amount of the Trust Fund into private securities sounded like an overture to Republicans. Some analysts touted it as a historic concession, opening the way to serious negotiations.
Ready or not, it is time to publish. I still think much of the public discussion is misdirected. There are thoughts which cry out to be heard. Even if the issue returns to the back burner, it is a hot back burner: one of these days something will be done, under the influence of whatever ideas have been simmering there.
The later sections of this article carry the argument from background into constructive proposals. They would be more persuasive if developed in more detail ¾ but they won’t be heard at all if injected after the discussion is over. As presently formulated, they contain only an idea, a paradigm shift. It will have to stand on its own merit. An army of graduate students and government experts can supply details sooner than I can, if they are struck by the force of the idea. Meanwhile, the public is settling into a consensus which is simply off track.
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I. The Specter of the Gray Glut. |
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