Well, it's the last day, and I want to congratulate the panel for being more responsive than we ever anticipated. Thank you for spending so much time providing thoughtful responses to the many questions from the public. You are the reason this Roundtable has been so successful in getting thousands of hits daily on the website (10,000 on the prior Thursday alone). I also want to thank Information Renaissance, Americans Discuss Social Security, and their sponsors for setting this up and getting the word out. Also, thanks to the public for helping us create such a thorough exchange of ideas.
I will close with a question: Can we come up with some common ground on Social Security reform? I noticed in my side-by-side chart, that all of the proposals:
(1) maintain the progressivity of the system and/or have progressive contributions to Individual Accounts,
(2) invest in equities (in their individual accounts),
(3) use General Revenues,
(4) eliminate the earnings test, and
(5) they probably all would agree to locking up the Social Security surplus.
These "less painful" reforms don't fully solve all of Social Security's current financial problems, so I looked further. About half the proposals:
(1) Raise the retirement age a little and then index it,
(2) Increase the benefit computation period a little,
(3) Raise the wage base somewhat,
(4) Perfect the COLA, and
(5) Require future fixes of the system to be automatically put on a fast track for Congressional approval.
This second group of (well do I have to say somewhat painful) reforms could get us the rest of the way, but of course would be more difficult to enact. Do you think we can do it? This year? We'll be interested in your thoughts. Again, thanks for participating.
Ron Gebhardtsbauer
Senior Pension Fellow
American Academy of Actuaries
