With Social Security’s Disability Insurance Trust Fund projected to run out of money in late 2016, liberals are calling for a simple reallocation of funds from the Social Security retirement fund to keep the disability system fully-funded. But that reform plan will attract staunch opposition from conservative seniors who influence the Republican majorities in Congress, according to Daniel Weber, founder and CEO of the Association of Mature American Citizens.
“Our members are against this band-aid of temporarily moving money from the old age fund into the disability fund,” Weber told the Washington Examiner. “All that’s doing is kicking the can down the road.”
AMAC bills itself as the conservative alternative to the AARP. With 1.25 million active members compared to AARP’s 37 million, AMAC has a ways to go until it can match AARP’s lobbying clout. But AARP has a half-century head start on AMAC, and the conservative group should expect to grow as its membership benefits expand and it stakes itself as the go-to organization for conservative Americans age 50 and over.
“The biggest benefit is advocacy,” Weber said. “The reason we formed AMAC was because we felt senior Americans weren’t getting the representation that they needed.” He said most members join for the conservative advocacy, but discounts on health costs and travel help too.
With the clock running out on disability insurance, AMAC has a lot of work ahead to ensure its desired reforms are on the table. Weber highlighted the oversimplified nature of disability insurance eligibility, where a worker is either disabled or able, with no in-between.
AMAC says the system should have three categories of disabilities, each with different durations and benefits: temporary but total disability (recipient is completely unable to work but will eventually recover), partial and permanent disability (recipient is unable to keep working his current job but could be retrained for another), and total and permanent disability (recipient is permanently unable to work in any job).
Multiple categories of disabilities would bring flexibility to a system that has suffered without it. “Instead of one choice, which is very costly and inefficient and encourages people not to go back to work, we’ll have three choices, two of which encourage people to go back to work,” Weber said.
Social Security’s retirement trust fund is projected to expire in 2034. That seems far off, but a 48-year old worker today wouldn’t receive her full benefits upon retirement at age 67 if the system is left unreformed. Many see the coming depletion of the Disability Insurance Trust Fund to be an important opportunity for comprehensive reform of Social Security’s retirement fund too.
The cornerstone of AMAC’s Social Security reform plan is a guarantee that retirees with low earnings will have the same level of benefits, or higher. Furthermore, every beneficiary would see their benefits increase yearly once the plan is implemented.
To account for the costs of this, the plan trims benefit payments for the wealthy. “We’re shaving the benefits off of the upper-income folks,” as Weber described it. It would also raise the early retirement age to 64, from the current 62, and raise the normal retirement age to 69, from the current 66 to 67.
Notably, AMAC’s Social Security reform plan also finds a way to encourage workers to save more for retirement in their working years. It does this by establishing voluntary Early Retirement Accounts, which workers would be allowed to access at age 62. Workers could contribute anywhere from $5 to $100 a week, adjusted for inflation, to the account. People would also be able to access their accounts in the event of total disability or death, in which case their family could have the funds. These accounts would not be meant to replace Social Security benefits, merely supplement them so retirees are not dependent on just one source of income.
When asked how he responds to criticism that his plan pushes grandma off a cliff, Weber said, “We guarantee Social Security, and we give the poor grandmas more money.” With more than one million members, it won’t be hard for AMAC to find all the grandmas it needs to defend its plan.
