What's your position on Social Security? [View All]

[DaedelusNemo]

I wonder if there's any agreement on it here, and i also wonder if any of ya'll have a good plan. I'm assuming you're mostly opposed to Bush's proposal, or what is known of it.

Are you entirely against any form of privatization?

(It seems to me to violate the entire point of SS in the first place: the guarantee of some minimum retirement. And the notion of the government, or a government-selected few, investing that much money in the market gives me the centralized economy willies.)

What about benefit cutting? Does the current scheme extrapolate to more than is appropriate for SS?

( I thought the argument that benefit should be compared to prices, not average wage, was a good one; but it was pointed out to me that standard of living rises faster than prices. But does it rise as fast as average wage? Do we want SS to be pitched to standard of living? Is it a political mistake to take anything but the hard line: no benefit cut whatsoever?)

What about increasing pay-in, and how?

(Lifting the wage cap seems reasonable to me, and feasible politically. If not, setting the wage cap to include 90% of income, as was the idea in the first place when the fund was set up by Greenspan, is surely politically feasible. They've been letting that cap go up with average wage instead of with the 90% inclusion point - and high-end wages have been increasing more than low end. So now we are at considerably less that that point - putting us back to it would set the cap at 110,000 and solve roughly 40% of the projected shortfall. On the other hand, lifting the cap entirely would reportedly require us to lower the tax rate all around, which is probably a political winner.)

What social security plan do you think the democrats ought to put forward as an alternate vision to Bush's?

(You've seen most of mine already; shift to a standard of living - based benefit, set the cap back to 90% and have it increase with that point hereafter, or else eliminate it entirely. That pretty much does it, as far as i've been able to tell. It also seems like some good ways to encourage individual retirement savings would be a good thing to include in the proposal.

Here's a couple more notions that i would like correction or confirmation of: raising the minimum wage would diminish or reverse that shortfall, and help with Medicare too. And what about auctioning off rights to invest some portion of the fund money in exchange for some guaranteed return to us, so long as it is more than bonds? If nobody wants to do it, that would certainly kill the arguments about low return. That may be a nutty idea, or it may be already done all the time, i'd appreciate any info.)