How to Fix Social Security Without a Commission
(Bloomberg Opinion) — The annual report of the Social Security board of trustees, issued last month, has prompted Congress to return to one of its favorite pastimes: creating bipartisan Social Security commissions. More precisely, there are currently at least two bills in Congress to empower a commission to come up with a proposal to “save” Social Security, which it would then bring to lawmakers, who would, potentially, vote on it.
This is a waste of time. Bipartisan reform isn’t hard to design. I can do it in 500 words.
But before you start counting — I’ll tell you when! — it’s worth explaining some background. The annual report, like every such report going back to 1985, notes that the Social Security trust fund will be depleted unless Congress takes action, and that if it doesn’t, there will be automatic benefit cuts to balance the program’s finances. What’s different about this year’s report is that it moves up the date the trust fund will run out of money, to the fourth quarter of 2032.
That means Social Security is, as they say, officially on the ballot. The current class of Senate hopefuls, as well as the next president, will be in office when the program is either saved or cut.
Hence the proposal for a commission, which brings back memories from the last major reform effort. When Ronald Reagan became president in 1981, the Social Security trust fund was racing toward depletion. Reagan’s initial legislative effort was made up largely of cuts, and it largely failed in Congress. The Greenspan Commission, named after its chair (and later Fed Chair) Alan Greenspan, was created to hammer out a plan for reform.
Spoiler alert: It didn’t work. By almost all accounts, the commission was a failure, ending in a stalemate.
During this stalemate, however, a few of its members met in secret to negotiate a deal they thought Reagan and House Speaker Tip O’Neill would accept, and they were successful. Their negotiations were presented as the official commission report in 1983, which Congress adopted.
Former Social Security Commissioner Bob Ball, a leader of the splinter negotiation group, wrote extensively about these events in his book The Greenspan Commission: What Really Happened. (For what it’s worth, it’s not as boring as the title might indicate.) Ball and others have stressed that it wasn’t a commission or bipartisan spirit that saved Social Security. It was a ticking clock. By the time Congress finally passed reform legislation, Social Security had weeks left before automatic benefit cuts kicked in.
The lesson here is that, commissions notwithstanding, what’s lacking in the Social Security debate isn’t ideas for reform. It’s political courage.
And there are ways to design reform to take advantage of politics. For example (and feel free to start that word-counting now):
Far and away the most popular proposal related to Social Security is to eliminate the tax cap. Currently about $185,000, the cap functions as a hated delineator: All Americans pay the same share into Social Security, except for the 6% who earn above that amount. Scrapping the cap is popular among both Republicans (65%) and Democrats (73%), and it would cover at least half the shortfall.
So scrap it. It would be a win for the left, and meaningful to Americans for Congress to acknowledge that, when the time came to fix Social Security, the first thing it did was to make the richest pay the same share as the poorest.
It would be tempting to look for a win for the right through some kind of benefit cut. But Republican voters — like most Americans — don’t want to see benefits cut. Besides, the classic, longstanding conservative argument against Social Security is not that benefits are too generous, but that they are a waste of savings given what workers could gain from investing in the market.
It’s a stretch to believe that 170 million workers would prefer to navigate the stock market, with all its risks, instead of accepting a lifetime, inflation-adjusted guaranteed income — and it’s an even bigger stretch to think that most would be successful at it. But conservatives are absolutely correct: Social Security is insulated from the wealth gains the stock market offers.
So invest it. But rather than forcing individuals to invest and take on the risk of failure, invest the trust fund. When Social Security takes in more revenue than it pays in benefits (as it did from 1983 to 2010), the excess is held in Treasury bills that can be redeemed at any time. If the tax cap is eliminated, the $2 trillion currently in the fund will start to grow again. Invest part of it. Treat the trust fund like a sovereign wealth fund. If managed well, it would raise more revenue, reducing the need for further tax increases, possibly even garnering tax cuts in the future. (Fans of bipartisan technocrat policy commissions, and I know you’re out there, might remember this was a recommendation of the 1994 Social Security Advisory Council.)
These two actions would align with Americans’ strong preferences to avoid benefit cuts and raise revenue in ways that gives political wins to both liberals and conservatives. No commission necessary.
I didn’t even need 500 words. In fact, I can do it in six: Scrap the cap, invest the rest.
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To contact the author of this story:
Kathryn Anne Edwards at [email protected]
