More than a decade ago, President George W. Bush set out to fix what he called a broken Social Security system. In 2001, intermediate projections had shown the retirement trust fund would be exhausted in 2040. By 2005, finances had improved and the projected exhaustion date was 2043. But today, exhaustion looms closer, only two decades away in 2035.
Bush wanted to modernize Social Security and ensure its fiscal integrity, but without raising taxes cutting benefits for current or near-retirees, or investing Social Security funds directly in the stock market. To achieve this goal, Bush convened a bipartisan Commission to Strengthen Social Security.
The commission recommended three different reform plans, each of which established a system of voluntary personal accounts. “Personal accounts improve retirement security by facilitating wealth creation and providing participants with assets that they own and that can be inherited, rather than providing only claims to benefits that remain subject to political negotiation,” the commission’s final report said. “By allowing investment choice, individuals would be free to pursue higher expected rates of return on their Social Security contributions.”
None of the reform plans went anywhere in Congress. But what if they had?
Current retirees and those near retirement today would have seen little change, if any. “Current retirees would not have been affected,” Thomas Saving, a member of the commission and a Social Security public trustee at the time, told the Washington Examiner. “Nobody wants to affect current retired people or people who are about to be retired.” Even if reforms had been passed in 2002, changes for people retiring in 2015 would have been minimal.
Despite the Great Recession, advocates of the Bush reform say the system would have survived well.
Andrew Biggs, now a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, worked on the staff of the commission. “There were a couple of provisions in the Bush plan that would have shielded you from most of the downside of the recent stock market declines,” Biggs told the Examiner. “People who were retiring today would have been mostly in bonds during those years so they would not have been subject to the big stock market declines.”
Given the proposed gradual implementation of the Bush reforms, the system’s finances would mostly be the same as they are today. However, its projections would be much better had the reforms passed in Bush’s presidency. “When we look at the 75 year projections of how solvent the system is, or when the trust fund will run out, those numbers would have looked substantially better,” Biggs said.
While Congress considers how to protect Social Security’s future, a fight looms over whether to expand or shrink the program. “Most of the Democrats in the Senate now favor expanding Social Security without figuring out how to pay for it,” Biggs said. Republicans haven’t signaled what they want to do about Social Security, but they recognize some kind of long-term reform is necessary.
Jared Bernstein, a senior fellow at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, predicts a compromise of higher taxes combined with trimmed benefits. “We must close the solvency gap,” Bernstein told the Examiner. “There’s a large menu of ideas to do that, and they all come down to raising taxes or lowering benefits. You can cut it anyway you like, but I think in a world where there’s considerable political division you’re surely going to have to do both of those.”
Raising taxes could mean raising, or eliminating, the $118,500 salary cap on income subject to payroll taxes. Trimming benefits could mean some form of means-testing through adjustment of the benefits formula. “Most of the benefits go to middle and low income people, and we don’t want to cut their benefits,” Bernstein said.
Today, it seems as if the time has passed for the idea of voluntary personal accounts in Social Security. Bernstein says any kind of privatization would be “ill-advised,” because it would be “a very stark departure from the best aspects of Social Security,” referring to the certainty of fixed benefits that don’t depend on the stock market.
Biggs said he supports the general principles of the Bush proposals, and that many people still think the reforms are a good idea. Still, he wouldn’t propose the exact same provisions today.
Saving believes the reforms would still be beneficial today, but it was a missed opportunity to not have passed the Bush reforms in the 2000s.
“This is a very different world, because you have 10,000 baby boomers retiring every day,” Saving said. “We were looking at this at a time when these guys were all at the peak of their earning.”
A voluntary private accounts system would be “much superior in the long run than what we have, because it’s not a generation transfer system, so it no longer has all these uncertainties,” Saving added. There will always be economic risks, but a voluntary private accounts system wouldn’t have the demographic risks of the current Social Security model.
Either way, some kind of reform is necessary, as soon as possible.
“Social Security is in kind of a depressing period now because we’ve delayed and delayed and delayed on fixing the system, the program’s finances have gotten worse, the disability program is about to go broke, and most of the folks on the progressive side basically just want to paper over the problem. … This is not a particularly happy time in terms of Social Security reform,” Biggs said.
