SOCIAL SECURITY DEBATE

Here is a terrific article from The Boston Globe about the issue of Social Security reform. I have been waiting for someone in the MSM to do an article on the wide disparity between defenders of the status quo and those pushing for reforms. Charles Stein writes...

In the growing national debate over Social Security, it is sometimes hard to believe the two sides are arguing about the same program. President Bush has made Social Security reform the centerpiece of his second-term agenda and will unveil details of his plan for private investment accounts within the next month. The president's proposal may clarify the debate, but it won't end the squabbling. Defenders of the current system and proponents of private accounts disagree over just about everything, from the role government should play in guaranteeing that Americans have at least a modest income after they retire to the risks of allowing people to invest Social Security funds in the stock market. The split extends to the most basic questions: How serious are Social Security's financial woes? Does the system need an injection of $3.7 trillion? Or $10.4 trillion? Will a crisis develop in 2018, 2042, or never? Everyone agrees that the aging of the baby boom generation eventually will strain the system's finances. After that, the consensus breaks down. Those who want to preserve Social Security, a group that includes most Democrats, say that any shortfall can easily be made up with fairly modest tax hikes and benefit cuts and that the day of reckoning is decades away. "This doesn't strike me as a difficult problem to solve," said Alicia Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. The other side, a group that includes supporters of private accounts and those who want to keep the government from going into deep debt to meet its obligations to future retirees, says Social Security is in big trouble. By 2018, they say, Social Security taxes will fail to cover the cost of paying benefits. "This is a serious problem that will only get worse," said David John, a research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington.

Read the whole article. It spells out in easy to understand terms the way the program works and the different assumptions that underlie the debate.