Thanks for your participation

[Bob Carlitz <bob@giotto.info-ren.org>]

Today marks the end of the Investing in Stocks Roundtable of
the National Dialogue on Social Security.  I would like to
thank our panelists, Robert Reischauer and Carolyn Weaver,
for their wit, intelligence, spontaneity, thoroughness and
thoughtfulness in conducting this debate over the last two
weeks.  The insights that they have provided have helped us
all to learn more about the complex subject of Social Security
reform while demonstrating how people can disagree on the
details of a topic while agreeing to discuss that topic and
engage each other and their audience in the process.  In this
sense, Bob and Carolyn are not only a model for the discussion
of Social Security but a model for intelligent discourse in
general.  It has been a pleasure and a privilege to be able
to participate in this event.

I would like to thank our audience for their participation
as well.  A rule of thumb on the National Dialogue Website
is that for every person who posts to the discussion there
are ten others who are registered for the discussion and 100
others who are listening in on the debate.  These numbers
are confirmed by the thousands of page hits which the site
receives daily.  The material provided by our panelists will
make this discussion archive a useful resource in the
upcoming weeks and months as Congress considers exactly
how to deal with the reform of Social Security.

I would like to close, if I may, with two final questions for
our panelists:

    1. On Tuesday, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly
       approved a lockbox mechanism to prevent Congress from spending
       the Social Security surpluses.  Do you both think such a
       mechanism would work, or is this just political gamesmanship?
       Can you put more teeth into such a mechanism?  Does this
       step undo the unified budget surplus rules?

    2. Both of you have discussed using general fund revenues to
       support fixes to Social Security.  How do we assess the
       impact of such proposals on the overall federal budget
       deficit?  

Thanks to all of you.  And thanks to our writers, Ashley Schannauer
and Barbara Brandon, for helping to summarize the content of this
discussion.

Bob Carlitz, moderator
Information Renaissance